"The food's always there, and the food's always working"
Issue 199: A conversation with food researcher Ariana Gunderson on recreating food in pandemic literature and using vermouth to highlight how we infuse food with memory.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a food solutions newsletter. On Mondays, I send a reading guide of food system fix news, and on Thursdays, I dig deeper with an original essay or conversation you can only find here.
Check out Monday’s dispatch: Photographing the faces of American hunger. Plus, what it takes for a restaurant to be actively anti-gentrification, and how California’s new home restaurant licenses could transform their food industry.
Today I’m sharing my conversation with San Francisco-based food researcher and artist (and BU Gastronomy alum!) Ariana Gunderson, whose research is informed by her mantra of “eating is learning.” She focuses on food and memory (and a lot more), and always astounds me with the creative, clever ways she interrogates and makes visible our relationship with food.
Several months ago, she started recreating and photographing all the foods mentioned in the Decameron, a massive story collection from the time of the Black Plague in Europe, as a way to make meaning of COVID-19. She wrote about this project recently for Gastronomica.
Ariana also has hosted a dinner party series where guests brought foods for which they were nostalgic; as part of her master’s thesis on food as a response to trauma, she knit sweaters for pizza boxes and orzo to provide comfort to her own personal comfort foods; recently, she’s been writing on her website about making vermouth as an act of storytelling and memory archiving. (I followed her vermouth recipe earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic using only ingredients that I had on hand and was cooking with in other contexts, and created a vermouth that was, as she put it, a “quarantine diary.” My bottled memory lasted a few months, so I could go back to it — it seemed to me like a Polaroid, a split-second capture of a memory in a physical, analog way. A really cool project!) In fact, when we talked this week for this interview, she was in the car with a large bucket of wine.
So, as you can imagine, we had a lot to discuss — about food in pandemic literature, about comfort food as a response to personal and social upheaval, about why it can be valuable to make wine that doesn’t taste conventionally delicious:
Can you start out by talking about how the Decameron project began?
I was thinking about escapism as a survival strategy, and how the characters in the Decameron are literally fleeing the city and then also metaphorically fleeing their own panic by storytelling. That was something I could really resonate with — in the very early days of the pandemic, I was like, what the fuck is going on? And feeling trapped in our studio apartment. I’d read the Decameron in high school, or excerpts of it, for Western civilization literature class, which the idea of now makes me vomit.
I just wanted to return to it and wanted to have something that would guide me through. And so I decided to read it and document all of the times that it talks about food, and then make those foods. And it’s a lot of wine and sweets, especially when it’s talking about the storytellers. They’re always having wine and sweets, wine and sweets. And I think what’s interesting about it is that it’s almost this desperate seeking of normalcy. “Everything’s fine — look at this bubbly, joyous time that we’re having; everybody’s fine.” I saw a lot of this especially early in quarantine, when people were really feeling locked down. Alcohol consumption went way up, and that was really tied into a rise in domestic violence as well. Thinking about this idea of wine and sweets at a time when everything’s obviously not fine — turning to alcohol is one way that people cope. And I saw that even in the age of the Decameron.
For foods that are mentioned, are you having to extrapolate their social or textual function, or do the storytellers explicitly say, this person combined these ingredients to achieve this purpose or feel this way?
It’s a lot of extrapolation. I’ve been putting on my literary analysis hat. A brief synopsis of the Decameron helps answer this: It was written by a Giovanni Boccaccio between 1348 and 1353, which was when the plague was ravaging Florence. In English, it’s usually over 1,000 pages, and it’s a collection of 100 stories, so that’s where the name comes from. Over 10 days, a group of 10 friends each tell one story per day. And so there’s this larger frame narrative of the 10 friends meeting in a church and saying, like, “Wow, everyone’s dying. We should go.” And then they flee to the countryside. The heart of the text is these 100 stories, but there’s this frame narrative throughout.
At the beginning of every day, they feast and they dance and they sing chorales, and then they tell stories, and then they nap. And then they dance, and then they sing chorales and then they eat and then they go to bed. So there’s this framing around the stories, which themselves are all short stories that are usually public; we have textual evidence that they’d been published elsewhere first or were a familiar story, though some of them appear for the first time in the Decameron. I’m recreating the foods both from that frame narrative and also from the individual stories.
It really varies widely. Sometimes the food is used to express purpose. There’s actually one time when vermouth appears, when a character who is described as a man is told by his friends and a doctor that he’s pregnant. They’re like, “Wow, you look so ill. Oh, my God, you look terrible.” And they call over their doctor friend, and the doctor friend goes, “Oh, you’re pregnant. That’s why.” And the character turns to his wife and says, “I knew it. You always want to be on top. This is why.” And then the doctor prescribes vermouth and capons as the remedy, and the man is not pregnant anymore. I was fascinated by that, but I also choose to read it as a genderqueer pregnancy. So the food sometimes is used for really specific purposes, like the vermouth and the capons being explicitly in order to terminate the pregnancy, or at least convince this character that their pregnancy is terminated, depending on what perspective you’re reading it from.
And then they, you know, ate a meal and there were 20 courses of chicken. I haven’t done that one yet. I don’t know where I’m going to get all the chicken.
One dish Ariana made and photographed based on the Decameron, courtesy Gastronomica:
Do you perceive the way people are now interacting with food during COVID-19 to be similar to how Boccaccio portrays his characters as interacting with food?
I’m trying to think of the narratives of how people are using food. There’s been a lot of, you know, yuppies discovering the joy of cooking or of sourdough — of doing the work themselves. And for people who would eat out all the time, especially when there was a lot of fear around surfaces, suddenly people would not eat out, and people were cooking at home a lot more. But in the Decameron frame narrative, these 10 friends certainly don’t cook. They bring their servants with them to the countryside. The servants are preparing all their meals, so there wasn’t that turn toward doing your own cooking and hands-in-the-dough.
But to this point, something that I’ve been following in San Francisco has been the fine dining that has held on and continued. And how that feels very, in some ways, tone-deaf. Like, how could you possibly want to eat at the French Laundry? The French Laundry is opening, $850 per person, for a meal of exclusively what an Eater article described as Bond villain food, like foie gras and truffles and all these absurd luxury items. So I think it sort of reminds me of that, because these 10 friends were very wealthy, that they were able to leave Florence and go and frolic in the countryside while 60 percent of Florence died. These don’t represent the average people; they represent the people who fled to their second homes in upstate New York and left the city. The Bay Area folks who went to Tahoe, or something like that. They really represent the people who fled and who are still pursuing that luxury of not changing their relationship to food as a result of the pandemic.
I’m interested to dig into food and memory and trauma, which you’ve researched on an individual, private level. I think people have a particular narrative of comfort food, which maybe is and is not correct. How do you see people using food to respond to public upheaval, communal traumas like the pandemic?
I don’t know that I could speak to how people are responding to this pandemic, but let me start at the beginning with comfort food. I do think that people are turning to comfort foods during times of upheaval. Based on my experience with the Nostalgia Dinner Series research and the reading I’ve done on comfort food, comforting foods are often associated with a safe time in one’s life, which for some people looks like childhood. So childhood foods are ones that, for some people, are comforting and familiar. And because of the histories of processed food in the United States and class access to processed foods, for a lot of people, certainly in our generation, those highly processed foods were something that was a part of their childhood. Either because of the narrative of kid food — mac and cheese being a kids’ food, for example — or because a box of mac and cheese is a way to feed your family at a time of forced low wages and precarity and things like that.
What are the particular foods that are comforting that people turn to? They often are carb-heavy and processed and from a box. Those are also shelf-stable foods. When people don’t want to go grocery shopping often during a pandemic, it’s easier to buy mac and cheese if you don’t want to buy fresh greens that will go bad in three days. So it also logistically makes sense.
And I think that comfort food gets a very bad rap, especially for women, and women in times of romantic upheaval. It’s an individual experience, but it’s part of the diet culture and shame narrative of, “You should be emotionally strong and not have to rely on food as an emotional stabilizer” — that if you are turning to food to comfort you, that’s bad. And what I found in my thesis research was that it’s not bad. It is effective. People turn to food to cheer themselves up or to stabilize their mood or to achieve a state of regulation because it works. Food is an extremely powerful agent on the body. And if it didn’t work, people wouldn’t do it. It is effective. It is also something that can lead to disordered eating; all sorts of adaptive strategies can sometimes become maladaptive.
Based on my thesis research, there are a lot of instances where food is a positive part of healing from trauma. That’s why I would like to stand up in defense of all those people who are buying processed food because it’s cheap and they lost their job, or it’s comforting, or it’s something that will last on the shelf. There are a lot of very good reasons to be choosing the mac and cheese.
And now that you ask this question this way, it does make me think about the wine and sweets for the 10 friends in the Decameron. That was probably a comfort food for them. At a time when sugar was extremely scarce as a resource, it’s not only a luxury good and a display of wealth, but also probably something they turned to because they were fleeing distress.
Certainly when I read this high school, I did not read it in the same way that I do now for many reasons. But one of them is that, when I’m reading it now, I’m thinking about what it feels like to be trapped in your house, and to feel like outside is dangerous and that other people are dangerous, and that urge to flee from the danger. Boccaccio doesn’t describe the 10 friends when they’re out on their journey as, “underneath it all, they were all really stressed” — his narrative is part of the “everything’s fine.” And I see it now as a facade. I wonder if my high school self thought, “Oh, they fled the city and they were fine; they were having a good time; they were on vacay!” Now I think about how, even if I could travel, I would not flee away from the fear, because the pathogen is everywhere and because fear is everywhere. That fear must have travelled with them, even when they went into the countryside, and that’s something that I can only really know reading it now.
Many of these emotional connections with food are formed subliminally or subconsciously, but the way you’ve described the theory behind your vermouth project is as an intentional act of imparting food with a memory of a time in your life. How do you see vermouth as doing that?
Maybe I’m just restating what you said, but in making an intentional vermouth that is capturing a particular memory, it’s making visible or making external a process that happens all the time internally, unconsciously. All the time, anytime we eat something, we are encoding that taste memory with the context in which we’re eating it. And by very intentionally naming and documenting and writing about the process in making the vermouth, by paying attention to it and pointing it out, it’s making it visible.
The wine I have in the car is the next batch of vermouth. I’m making the wine. So I harvested the grapes last weekend, or a week and a half ago now, I guess. It was a very smoky day, and the sun was blood-orange, and the sky was just so gray, and my friend Sam and I were wearing masks when we harvested it. I let it ferment for a week, and the yeast actually died because it got so hot. There was a big heat wave and we don’t have AC in our apartment, so it was like 95 degrees inside. I went into my apartment today to go check on it, and one of the buckets is maybe not good.
But I do think that we will have some wine from this, and it’ll be very much a reminder of this time. We have chosen to put in a bunch of wild plants that grow around the edges of the field where the grapes grow, so wild blackberry, wild mint, wild anise. I’m very excited for that. I think it’s a great commentary on terroir. But I think when I drink it, I’m probably going to mostly think about the fires and the smoke and the heat and the hellscape that is this year. Even in making this vermouth, there are all these elements that I’m choosing, in sort of an illusion of control — but really, if it’s too hot, then the yeast ferments really fast, then it turns kind of sour and, OK, we’ve got a sour wine. All of these things are a mark on it, even unintentionally.
This is something we’ve talked about before in other contexts, but I think the idea of purposefully letting your food taste bad is interesting — that, in this case, the vermouth might taste a little sour, maybe a little wild. It might not be delicious in the conventional sense, but maybe that’s not the purpose.
I think tasting good, certainly in a conventional wine sense, is of almost zero importance to me, which is very unusual in winemaking. Definitely I’m more in it for the idea, the process, and learning about it. I think one reason it doesn’t interest me is that if I wanted wine that tasted good, it would be very easy to go buy it for a very reasonable price. I already buy plenty of great-tasting wine, and what I can’t buy is wine that I have made. I think it’s a good through-line to draw, that something tasting good is just not interesting to me. I will never be a chef.
How are the foods that you’re making from this Decameron project? Do they happen to be good?
I would say they’re enjoyable. There are so many — I think there are around 100 or so, so I’m only partway through. But there’s a lot of wine, and so whenever I have a glass of wine, I photograph it. Then there are some that are really specific that I have to plan around. There are a lot that are of meat and poultry, and I don’t eat very much meat, really.
It’s also just a great way for me to get a lot better at photographing food. And it’s interesting to read a book intentionally looking for the food in it. The format of reading something and cooking all the foods in it is an interesting exercise that I think could be applied to other things.
You have to read and be on alert to be ready to highlight something, and then think about, wow, what is that doing there? I keep talking about the wine and sweets; really, I cannot convey to you how often they talk about wine and sweets. It is very easy to dismiss the wine and sweets instead of thinking, wow, they sure talk about wine and sweets a lot — what could that possibly mean? Earlier, when I was talking about what the wine and sweets mean, it’s been because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, like, why is there so much wine and sweets in this? And if I had been doing this project, I never would have thought about it.
But the food’s always there, and the food’s always working. So, what is the work that it’s doing?
You can find Ariana Gunderson on Twitter and Instagram and follow her research on her website. And again, check out her Gastronomica article about the Decameron project and try making your own “boozy diary of your quarantine” via vermouth!
And watch her making vermouth here in a kitchen I’d definitely watch a cooking show in:
See you on Monday!
