Forkways #28: Oysters

The Bon Appetite podcast is one of the ways that I get exposed to new types of food and chefs. One thing that the podcast does really well is keep the level of information extremely introductory. This must be hard than it seems, because over time the podcast can't increase the entry point of understanding. At any moment someone could be listening to the podcast for the first time and they show does not want the listener to feel disadvantaged.

About a year ago, I listened to a podcast with author Stephanie Danler. Interestingly enough I didn't really like her, but aspects of her interview stuck with me through my continued research with food. I think we see the same phenomenon in cooking shows and especially cooking travel shows. And I talked about this nagging thought when I discussed my experience dining at Momofuku. Stephanie talks about how restaurant service workers are looking for the extreme aspects of life. So many people interested in food are looking for the extreme aspects of flavors.

Until you start tasting food in this exploratory way tasting food may be the byproduct of ingesting food.

Oysters

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Seamus Heaney

Oysters are one of the great loves of the culinary world I don’t understand. Like a gummy clump of semen with a hint of something dying in the sea. Thought I am determined to give them another try, I enjoy my current hate and disgust of them. Maybe I spent too much time in the ocean as a child. I swallowed enough sea water to burn the memory of it into my dna. Maybe I have reached the point when eating an oyster would be a form a cannibalism.

I love the first two stanzas of the poem. It captures both something about food and life that the first poem did not manage for me. I really love the star allusions. The poem feels heavy handed to me but captured elements of writing about food.