Don’t Write Alone | Columns

Writers Who Eat: Ross Gay Conversation with Bix Gabriel

“I’m writing about my relationship with the land, and I need to get from sorrow to debt to gratitude.”

Writers Who Eat is a series of conversations between Bix Gabriel and authors of color about how eating, drinking, and cooking have shaped them—as humans and writers.

When I am stressed (uh, often), I cook. Chicken thighs roasted with lemon chunks, zucchini-rice-cheese gratin, the chicken curry I grew up on, apple cake. These are my go-to dishes that I can make while internally ranting about whatever is stressing me out.

When I am relaxed, I cook. I pore over cookbooks, select and discard recipes depending on whether I have the ingredients or the inclination. My favorite cookbooks aren’t ones by chefs though. Instead, I love the recipes, stories, and memories that writers share—small glimpses into their lives—in books like Maya Angelou’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes, or, more recently, Eat Joy, or the Tables of Contents Community Cookbook.

But enjoyable as these essays and anecdotes are, writing—while of course a source of self-examination—is also editorialization, sometimes even censorship. What emerges in a conversation about food and writing? What doesn’t make the internal cut? And why?

I’m especially curious because so often food in literature by immigrants and writers of color is viewed solely as representative of the character or even the writer’s culture, rather than a literary device—food as pun, plot, metaphor, character trait, structural element, etc. (As illustration: Soniah Kamal’s essay on her dilemma about including an icon of South Asian identity, the mango, in one of her books.) For me, exploring with writers of color what, if any, relationships exist between food and writing is one way to challenge ideas of “who gets to write (think, and talk, critically and frivolously, about) what.”

Writers Who Eat is, in essence, a way to satisfy my appetite for that which gives me joy and wonder: food, and its mysterious, or mundane, role in the lives of writers.

The first writer I spoke with was National Book Award-nominated poet Ross Gay. A brilliant thinker and essayist and author of several books, the most recent of which is Be Holding, he is also a gardener and salt-of-the-earth (pun intended, obviously) person, whose smile makes you feel like you can conquer the world.

We spoke this February about doubles—which we once made in his kitchen for an end-semester party—chickpeas, sweet potatoes, french fries, sweet potato fries, fruit crisps, hummus, Ross’s love for fruit, his (and my) feelings about gardening, the un-alienation (Ross’s term) from the land it can provide, how paying attention is where we begin and continue as writers, and how gardening, cooking, and writing are all practices to which one has to be attentive.

It matters not at all if you neither cook nor garden nor write; what I hope you leave with after this interview is that you can practice paying attention to that which gives you joy—perhaps french fries.

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Bix Gabriel: I feel like I’ve talked to you about this project for at least two years. (Laughter.) You know what I am talking about? When we made doubles in your house, that is kind of when it got started for me. That’s partly why I wanted to talk to you. And the other thing, Ross, I’ve been rereading your work, and it’s such a pleasure, it really is.

Ross Gay: Thank you, thank you.

BG: I noticed in reading your poems that when you talk about the land, and trees, and nature—fruit especially—you have so much joy bubbling through. There’s this one poem which I love so so much, “Spoon,” which is so painful. It’s joy and sorrow and loss and all of that. And I’m wondering whether you are consciously thinking about the land, and food, and fruit as your entry points of joy into talking about some of the more painful stuff.

RG: Wow, neat question. I don’t know if I do. That’s such a great question because when you said especially fruit—it’s so true—because you know I’m bananas for fruit! (Laughter.) It’s just how it is, and you know not everyone is, but even as a little kid, the wild raspberries on the edge of the highway were my thing! I was just like, “Oh my god!” Or like the pear tree over in the other neighborhood where I used to skateboard, you’d go by and there was this pear tree ’cause they planted pear trees in Levittown, and evidently, people really didn’t know what these pear trees were all about, and on and on and on. So you’re right, you’re absolutely right to point out, or notice, that kind of thing. It’s true.

I don’t know if I’m consciously using the land as a writerly thing to access joy, or to access other things. But some of my clearest thinking around joy is around thinking about land, thinking about relationships. You know, I talk about the mycelium and the healthy forest, the networks of communication, and the shuttling of nutrients as being a kind of—among other things—communication of the dead. So I think that one of the ways I understand joy is by studying that. Maybe that offers some kind of insight into your question.

BG: Maybe that’s a place where you are more comfortable inhabiting pleasure—you seem to derive so much pleasure from it.

RG: Yeah, and maybe it’s un . . . unadulter . . . what’s that word? Let’s say, plain. Just plain. It’s so fun!

BG: Another thing: I don’t ever really think about food in its natural state except when I’m planting, in the garden. That’s the only time I think about not only planting, and the land, but also that this—the tomatoes or basil—is going to end up being a meal. And I’m wondering, do you see a difference between planting food and making or cooking food?

RG: That’s a neat observation. You’re sort of showing me a point of pleasure that I know I have but I don’t know the depth to which I have it. Because I love cooked food, and I cook all the time. What you’re noting is that it is different. Both are sources of great pleasure, deep and abiding pleasure. I don’t know what it is, but I’m just going to wonder if it’s the . . . the communion with the earth, it’s immediate, unadulterated, and unmediated. It’s a point of profound un-alienation.

Eating something from . . . the co-op here in Bloomington, [it] has the grape arbor, outside. Do you remember? The grapes are so good. You can buy from the co-op, there might be local fruit from less than fifty miles away, ideally, and you buy it, and have an exchange, and it’s all these things. And you can go right out to that arbor, duck—make sure those yellow jackets don’t get you, and then you share with the fucking yellow jackets, and it’s this experience of actually being the earth.

BG: The way you seem to experience it, it is like a communion, and I think that comes through in the writing; you talk about the joys of food, cafés, coffee . . . but when you’re talking about eating the figs, there’s a different plane. I think you just said it—it’s your connection. When we cook the food in our homes, layers have already separated us from that moment.

RG: Yes, maybe. I love the café, and I love the meal, and I love the tending and nurturing that comes from all of these kinds of things. But now that you raise the question, I wonder if there’s some lesson—something I’m listening to—this is who you are. By which I mean, you are tangled up with the tree. Having someone make you a cup of coffee, you’re tangled up with the cup of coffee, and all these other things, the person who made it, and all of our gathering that’s now changed—and it’s special and moving. If we were hanging around and we made our doubles, baked bread, made the whole thing for each other and for our friends who are studying together, that’s another kind of un-alienating experience.

But there is something. It’s so nice, Bix, that you’re bringing this up—because I’m writing about my relationship with the land, and in my head, I have a post, I wrote it down: I need to get from sorrow to debt to gratitude. The way that you’re asking this question is making me think, my “Aahhaah” of fruit—that’s how I feel, about picking the fruit, “Hey it’s here! It’s here!” Part of that is gratitude; that joy, that gratitude, is to the earth.

BG: What you’re revealing for me—this is going to sound hokey—there’s a kind of magic, in that the earth, the land gives us these things which we can enjoy in the moment and savor, and you take that and cook, and you share it, and you make something with it. For so many of us, cooking is an act of love, an act of caring, connection—it’s all these things, memory. And that is coming from the land, and in a way all of the things we care so much about—people and relationships, nurturing people, and pain. Some of the most difficult meals are with people you love so much. They’ve hurt you or you’ve hurt them. Or you’re angry with them.

RG: Or there are meals around sorrow. I was talking with a buddy whose father-in-law just died, we were talking about the ritual—he’s a midwesterner and they would always bring casseroles over, they would meet in the basement of the church, and . . . you eat through your sorrow.

BG: And connecting that back to the earth and the land—that we are all part of, but we forget that. It’s blowing my mind a little bit. Because there is that connection that the industrialization of food has completely disrupted. But then, we’re still making spinach, still using the same plants that are rooted in the earth that we’re on.

RG: In a way—this is so obvious in a certain kind of way—it’s a practice, it requires a certain kind of practice . . . for myself. There is the wonderful thing when someone cooks for you, the feeling [that] someone [has] taken care of you. But what feels like more of a challenge is to actually notice that the first and last thing that takes care of you is the earth.

BG: That’s something that really kept striking me while reading your book, The Book of Delights: how much it is about practice for you, practicing delight. In a way that is what gardening is about: You can leave it, but you also have to pay attention and nurture it.

But what feels like more of a challenge is to actually notice that the first and last thing that takes care of you is the earth.

RG: Yeah, you can have a certain kind of relationship to gardening that is really impositional and the same old dumb shit, but the relationship to gardening that we’re talking about—it’s actually mysterious and it is being really curious—to practice the thing of: What beautiful thing are you going to show me today? Or how many pollinating creatures can one mint plant hold? It’s just too much.

But I feel like—and maybe this is evidence of alienation from the land—for some of us it requires a certain kind of practice to just be watching the land. Because how many people are really fucking giving a shit about the rain?

My grandparents were farmers and they weren’t farming anymore, but my grandfather checked the rain gauge every single day. Every single day. Enough that I knew as a little kid—I don’t know if he was recording, he may have been, but I definitely knew he was checking it.

He had his own alienations from the earth because they were using DDT and these other chemicals, but he was close to it in a certain kind of way. Having that kind of closeness—even though we walk on the earth every day, or traverse the earth, we often do not be like, “Oh, we’re with the earth today.”

BG: When you talked about closeness now, it made me think of a different aspect about food and cooking, which is sharing a vernacular around food, having some kind of commonality. Of course it’s very nurturing and amazing, but I’ve also noticed it can work differently. As someone who is an immigrant from India, people are always fucking asking me how to make chicken tikka or whatever. Which is not a problem in and of itself, but it becomes a shorthand—a code—and have you experienced that?

RG: I don’t know if I often have that [experience], which makes me think the question is probably gendered too, to some extent. But that’s such a good question. Have people made assumptions about me like that? I don’t know if they have. They make other assumptions . . . (laughter). Assumptions about me are like, “Do you play basketball?” which is also gendered. (Laughs.) I was just thinking what assumptions am I confirming or disconfirming in that “Spoon” poem with that description of my garden and my sweet potato biscuits and organic coconut oil . . . (laughter).

BG: That’s one of the great things about that particular poem for me: that you are actually confronting a lot of those things. I don’t know how much of it you were really thinking about—obviously you were—about race, masculinity, and while making your sweet potato biscuits.

RG: I don’t know how much I was . . . because Don, Don was like, “Can you put some baking soda in mine?” (Laughter.) I love a poem that tells you how to do something. People have said, “You know I’ve made those sweet potato biscuits,” and there’s not a whole recipe in there, but it’s like ok, sweet potato, baking soda, coconut oil, bunch of flour, and you gotta fry it, and I think I said maple syrup.

BG: You said maple syrup, yes. I was like, “Ok I don’t know how to make biscuits, but I want to know how to make biscuits.”

RG: I think I may have converted that recipe to just a cookie, it’s either a fried cookie or a baked cookie.

BG: You know, I’ve never heard of a fried cookie before.

RG: Fried cookie I call a biscuit. Someone’s gonna get rich doing that.

BG: So what do you like to cook now, Ross?

RG: Oh, I love that question. I love to cook. What am I cooking a lot now? My mother bought us a tagine, so I’m making a lot of things in the tagine. I make a lot of soup; I love a lentil soup. Lentil and green mushrooms, chickpea stew with mini sweet potatoes, garlicky and spicy, and I like spicy food. I make a very good hummus these days.

BG: Tell me your recipe for hummus.

RG: I do chickpeas—I don’t measure anything. Do you measure when you cook?

BG: I do.

RG: So I just do some tahini, a lot of olive oil, a bunch of chopped-up garlic, so maybe per can I might do like five cloves, and then I like to do cumin and maybe a little paprika. Every once in a while I throw in some hot stuff too, if I have Thai peppers or hot peppers. If Steph is eating it, I might throw in just a little bit of heat, but if it’s just mine I might throw in a bunch of peppers.

BG: That sounds amazing. I am curious: Do you use lemon in yours?

RG: Oh yeah, lemons. Also I love french fries. I just fucking love french fries.

BG: Oh my god! Do you make them at home? Do you have a fryer?

RG: I have a kind of thing: If it’s a big potato, I cut it in half and then cut the halves in four. And then I’ll just oil the pan. Mainly I use olive oil, or sometimes I’ll use coconut oil . . . but I make sure the pan’s covered, which I usually do with a potato (laughter). Then I just lay it out and I bake it at 400, 425, and it probably takes about twenty to twenty-five minutes, and I’ll flip ’em midway.

My mom is kind of a serious . . . she likes her food, she has strong opinions about what she likes, and when I was out there, she was just loving these. Like, Ross, you want to make those fries again?

BG: I really, really wish we could cook together.

RG: We will.

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Ross’s Hummus Recipe (As Interpreted by Bix)

Ingredients:
chickpeas – 1 can
tahini – a quarter of a cup or so
garlic, chopped – 5 cloves
cumin – a hefty dash
lemon juice – about 1 lemon, depending on the size and juiciness
paprika – a dash, to your taste (or other peppers of your choosing; Ross sometimes does Thai peppers!)
salt – a dash
olive oil – a lot, maybe a quarter cup

Method:

Throw everything except the olive oil into a blender. Turn the blender on, and slowly add the olive oil using the drip hole or in whatever way you can. If the hummus is too dry or thick, add a bit of water. Keep going until the chickpeas are pureed and you have a smooth spread. Enjoy.