TTT Interviewee: Betty Fussell Session #3 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: May 20, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s May 20, 2009 and I’m with Betty Fussell doing the conclusion of our previous interview. Good morning. How are you? Fussell: Good morning, Judy. Q: We were talking about the general reaction to My Kitchen Wars and I was curious to know how your children reacted to it. Fussell: My son, who is a writer, said, “Mom, this is the best thing you ever wrote.” My daughter, who is a painter, rather than a writer, and a cartoonist, didn’t read it until a year after it had been published and went into a complete tizzy. [laughs] I had offered to each of them to send them the manuscript to see, because each had asked me in their way, “Is there any news in here for me?” I said, “No, not as such,” but, of course, the whole book is my point of view, therefore that part, in detail, is certainly new territory for each of them. I think both of them, including my son who said, “Best thing you ever wrote,” that was a distancing. I think he realized this was a profoundly disturbing thing for a family that was already fractured and gone. My daughter took it very personally, and this still puzzles me in a way, that somehow her name was associated with it all. So each had his own relationship. My son, because he had written a book, a memoir, of himself, in effect, by writing about his time in bodybuilding, he wrote a wonderful book called Muscle: Confessions of a Unlikely Bodybuilder, unlikely because he graduated from Oxford. Okay, that’s not the usual guy to go to Gold’s Gym. But I found that when I wanted to write another, a kind of sequence to this later on, I started a book, I changed its name so often I forget what I started with, but I found I really had trouble writing it because of the kids and I could feel their anxiety and censorship, so I gave up on that. I’d really written quite a bit of it. Q: What was it about? Fussell: It was about life after divorce in New York City. But actually I’ve got to do another ring on that on the next book that I write that is going to be about being, by now, a very old woman in New York. It’ll center on food again, but it will use food as the kind of going metaphor for this stage in everybody’s life that in our culture we manage to avoid ever looking at. So it takes up all the issues that I love to talk about. Q: I would think that would be a bestseller. Fussell: No, because people still don’t like to look at it. It is not a natural seller. Like Sex and the City, it is not like Sex and the City. It’s something else. There’s age and the city. Okay. That’s a downer for many, many people. Q: Age and sex in the city? Well, all right. However, other people have used the book. To me it was very, very moving as a woman’s document. Also in terms of the food I thought it was fascinating. But have academics used the book? Fussell: Yes, there’s one, Ann Snitow, S-n-i-t-o-w, who’s a professor at The New School, and I’ve known her for years and she’s specialized in literature and gender studies. So she uses it as a textbook in her course. I expected women my age to respond because we’ve been through the same periods of history, but I love it when daughters of friends—now, these are Tucky’s peers, but they’re not my daughter, therefore I got a huge and wonderful response from them because they are fascinated by their mothers. They recognize that there are enormous differences between their generation and their moms’. So I love this coming together of the generations that way. Q: I guess it would be both in how much they cooked and their personal lives, it would be very different from various generations or could be. Fussell: The way those two things go together, personal life and cooking, is, of course, very different, yes. But the next generation is the one who’s coming, that generation is coming back to food in a huge way. So you have these fascinating layers to me. Q: How do you see that? Fussell: The feminist generation would be my daughter’s. This isn’t true of mine, but of that group. They’re the ones who said, “I’m out of the kitchen. I’m in with the boys and I’m making money and I’m going to break the ceilings.” Okay. Below that one, and it’s part of the blogging, every man, every women for himself, everybody’s an entrepreneur. Everybody is selling him herself in a good way, as well as not so good. So the function of that voice is advertisements for myself. Fascinating, where it removes gender entirely. Q: Let’s get back to that in a minute, just before that, because I don’t want to let you get too deeply into it. Let’s talk about Raising Steaks, how that happened, how you got into it. I would imagine after Corn in some ways it would be a logical next step. Fussell: It was the logical next book because it was national, it was epic in size, and even though beef was imported, as opposed to corn, which was native, actually it made for me in my head a nice pairing, because it was a different part of the same kind of narrative. This was before Michael Pollan. It was not before Eric Schlosser, but certainly before Michael Pollan, who’s done so well in making all the corn connections with beef. I didn’t really know details about the industrialization of beef, not until I explored it for the book. This is actually before Pollan’s books had come out, but my research was, again, a discovery. Ah! I didn’t realize how closely the corn industry was tied to the beef industry or why, and I found the history of this utterly fascinating because it was so deeply embedded in our agribusiness and the history of that, and yet the practicing ranchers knew so little of it. Q: Had you thought through what you wanted to research before you set out to do it? Fussell: Only in the general way of landscape, because I always wanted to write about the West in which I grew up, because I love the West and I love the ideas about the West, which are so American romantic, hilariously, just hilariously. So having lived all my life in the East, my adult life, I wanted to bring together East and West. This I knew, but other than that, I didn’t think about the relation of East and West to Spanish and British. I didn’t think about the relation of the ecologies historically and politically, how that worked and how it still works. I mean, there’s still so many dynamics there that just personally fascinate me because they define our country, and that’s the relation of huge empty spaces to very compact but huge vertically, vertical cities. So the urban and the rural is another of our continuing dynamic where Europe doesn’t apply and China doesn’t apply. We don’t have anything to compare ourselves to. That’s my big point always, you know. Q: When you were doing this research, was it a gradual realization that the agribusiness was as important a part of it as it is, or did you start out with a pretty good knowledge of that? Fussell: No, I really learned the agribusiness on the ground talking to people and the Internet. Ah! So in a way that’s a blessing that you could find out fairly quickly about corporate structures that would take you a lot of time to find out if you’re such an outsider as I am. Q: You mean the Internet made that possible? Fussell: The Internet. The information on the Internet for that kind of thing is terrific. Q: Did you find it surprising, shocking, the relationship of the agribusiness to this industry? Fussell: No, because I know—I mean anybody who cares about food and has the general pictures, the general ideas that things are, ah, we’ve been bombarded for decades now by all the organizations that, again, pick up speed on something like the Internet because they can confer with each other. All these consumers’ unions and all the guys who have been on the fringe and constitute, in effect, the grassroots movements that have a lot of energy and restructuring because they can communicate all the time. It’s a huge motor. Q: In advance, how did you plan the research for such an enormous subject? Fussell: The research remained out of control because I had a lot of trouble finding a right structure that would carry throughout the book, and I really started it by regions, so in my head it was southern cattle in the deep South are entirely different from western cattle up there, let’s say in the deserts of Oregon. So I had in my head a regional map. It in fact, that’s not where the book was; the book was on issues much more. So I kept having to restructure it and restructure it in my head. It remained an unwieldy structure. I never quite got it as orderly I would like it, so it’s not as easy for the reader as I wish it were. Q: What were the main points you were trying to communicate? Fussell: I was trying to communicate the dynamic. We set up a long time ago a theatrical dynamic by the nature of Native Indians and colonists. So that’s very basic to our country. Q: Play that out a little bit in terms of the beef industry. Fussell: In the beef industry that’s the way in which the very different ecology, East and West, affects everything and the way in which the colonizers, their ideas of land, their use of land, all of this, their ideas of the wild, the ideas of property, everything gets tied in with their traditions of agriculture, which are completely different. Spanish ranching is completely different from English sustainable farms. No, but because the East planted their structures on the West, it’s the eastern ideas that were laid like a blueprint on land totally unsuitable. Q: Like what eastern ideas, that is? Fussell: The eastern ideas of small units. It’s the yeoman plot. That’s the Jeffersonian ideal. Okay. Every man can have his little plot of land. He will own that, he will till that. Impossible in the deserts and highlands of the West. This was made very clear by John Wesley Powell when he went off and surveyed. He said, “This ain’t gonna work.” But the bureaucracy has built one way, but it affects everything. The Bureau of Land Management, it affected now the national preserves, the national forests. So all the thinking about how you use land, to whom does it belong and why and what is its purpose and how do you use it, what’s the relation of state government to federal governments on this, those issues are live and well. It has to do now with ranchers and what they’re allowed to do. In the West you have to use public lands, you can’t raise any cattle because it’ scrub. They don’t get enough feed. Oh, okay. Q: We talked a little bit about James Beard before. I must say in reading some of your things and James Beard things, it struck me that your western origins really informed so much of the way you went about things. Fussell: They informed also M.F.K. Fisher’s and Julia Child’s. Okay. Yeah, where you come from matters. It’s the biographical terroir. Q: Is there any way you could characterize how that western vision is different from eastern vision or the central vision or just plain how the western vision is different? Fussell: From my point of view, but of course it’s the point of view of a westerner, so from my point of view, it is much freer and more informal, much less structured by—for me, the East has always seemed much closer to its European roots; the West is not. The West has always had a much larger influence from the Far East; it’s always had more Asian. Okay, that’s going to affect things. Also the West is where you went to get rid of structures. So it’s that much further from Europe, yeah, it shows, it shows in daily life, it shows in manners. My daughter, who never lived in the West and is now in Arizona, okay, she notices it immediately, you have to make your own community. You don’t have a community of any kind that you can just drop into, and everybody’s in the same boat. Okay, that makes a difference. Q: Did the experience of working on the book change the way you buy meat, eat meat, cook meat? Fussell: Yes, all of those. I certainly do not buy hamburger in supermarkets. I’ve always been careful about hamburger, because I really love hamburger. Okay. But now I only eat hamburgers at restaurants I trust, you know, or preferably I make them at home by grinding a cut. Since there aren’t any butchers left, so Jefferson Market is gone, okay, that was the last butcher who’d grind for you, you know, replaced by Gristede’s. Okay. In terms of steak, I’m having a fascinating time with steak, as I do buy supermarket steaks to see where they are, and also because I want to know, because they’re doing a much better job in rescuing cuts, so you’ll get things like the tri-tip, the flat iron. The processors are doing this, so to utilize more of the carcass at higher prices. Okay. Now, that’s kind of fascinating, because with marination you can tenderize anything. All right. We’re moving closer to Spanish methods and Far Eastern methods of using thinner strips of beef from tougher cuts. So we don’t have always to have the best of—we never get prime in a store; you only get that in restaurants. But the best beef you can buy in a store will be choice. Okay. All of this remains—it’s in continual flux and fascinating. Q: Do you eat meat often? Fussell: Yeah. I was thinking of this the other day. I really eat few carbos. I always think of them as fillers, and I have a need, either biological or psychological, for protein and vegetables and fruits. Q: I can’t resist asking you if you cook meat to the very high temperatures that the safety regulations urge people to. Fussell: Oh, of course not. I mean, this is why I don’t eat hamburgers anymore, because ah, ah, ah, unless it’s a place that I know will cook it rare for me. Okay. I mean, for me anything over rare is overdone, absolutely overdone. I’m sorry, American ranchers, but so many of them, they have these beautiful steaks and they kill them. Q: Is that because the flavor of the meat gets lost as it’s cooked, overcooked? Fussell: It’s tradition. It’s their mother’s cooking. It’s part of the conservatism of the Midwest and as part of the tradition of the West. Q: Let’s go back to the book you said you were working on now, or maybe you’re working on more than one at the same time. Fussell: Well, I keep shifting the one I’m working on now. I was starting to do How to Cook a Coyote to pick up on the same thing of survival. I’m really interested in how you survive as a person whose energy is constantly diminishing, how you survive in a place that is built on electrical energy charges that are at a certain level. Walking on the streets is the most interesting exercise I know, because you’re constantly being run down by hoards of people. Everybody is under forty is for me twelve. Hoards of twelve-year-olds. And we do not have a culture that in any way respects in any way anybody who’s old. Just push them. Run them over. Q: What is the structure of the book? Fussell: Working on it. Working on it, but it will be through food and so that will be the— Q: Examining what through food? Fussell: Your food patterns change. What you want from food is different. You look at food differently because you’re now part of the food chain or part of the organic world that is drying up and dying and rotting, you know. Okay. No, absolutely, you attach yourself to the cycle and you’re more and more aware of the cycle because you’re not on the upward path; you’re on the downward. Okay. That affects everything you do. It certainly affects meals. I’m aware that I can’t eat nearly as much. I eat much—not lighter, but intensely, but much less, much less in quantity and my taste has changed from—I can’t tolerate sour, as in pickle. I have never had a sweet tooth, but it has gone more towards sweet. Okay. These are interesting things to observe to me. So it affects what you eat daily. And also I have no patience with anything that is complicated. I improvise everything out of the fridge, which I love because it remains constantly a source of new discovery, improv, wonderful for me. Q: What’s the coyote reference? Fussell: The coyote reference is the symbol of survival in Native American, and because it’s completely American, a North American breed, because mythically they’re the trickster. They’re not about force; they’re about cleverness and deception. Q: They’re very scary. Fussell: And they’re everywhere. They’re the predator, the most common predator in the United States today, which I love. They’re in the streets of Boston. They’re everywhere. They’ve invaded the East. I love it. I absolutely love it. Q: I didn’t know that. I really thought it was a western— Fussell: No, no, we got rid of wolves, so who thrives? Who thrives? The coyote. There are constant sightings in Boston. I mean, that’s so funny to me, because Boston is my symbol for the East and that was what I experienced early. Q: Have you ever been able to cook coyote meat? Fussell: I don’t know that anybody, by choice, eats coyote, because they are tough and stringy because they’re small. But if you can eat a dog, you can eat a coyote. Well, many do, you know. Okay. Okay. So if you’re surviving, my point is you’ll eat anything. But it also allows me a way to work. I mean this idea was a way to work in my going hunting with my son in October, starting hunting when I’m blind, near blind, and I’ve never shot a rifle. Okay, that has its own challenges, but there are all those who hunt seriously. My son lives on all the food, all the jerky, the deer jerky and the meat jerky. Bear, he got bear last year. Okay. So he’ll live on that through the winter. Okay. Well, I better find out what that is. I mean, I’d like to find out what that is. That’s the coyote world. Q: You seem to have been able to embrace where you are in life at this point. Fussell: I’ve always embraced the age, except adolescence, high school. That was not a good period. I did not like it. I didn’t rejoice in being young then because I didn’t know I was young. I just thought, “I got to get out of here.” Q: Along those lines, how did it happen that you were chosen for the Vogue issue on what, however they called it, decades, women of— Fussell: Because they needed someone for the eighties. Q: But there are lots of people. Fussell: There are lots of people in their eighties and, right, it’s a proper question. But I had met one of the editors and she liked what I had written and she liked Kitchen Wars, and, I only learned much later, she grew up in Oakland, she’s a westerner, but she’s lived here. She’s a very eastern girl now. So I think she saw subliminally, maybe, something of her own exile or transposition to another place. Q: Of course, you wouldn’t have been chosen had you not looked great. I mean that is another aspect of it. Fussell: Well, anybody can look great with the kind of cameramen that they get. Ah. You know, photographers can do absolutely anything they want to. Q: Well, you’re being modest. You are working on another book, as well, aren’t you? Was it the Eating in Bed or is that part of— Fussell: No, I’ve changed that one, because Deborah Madison and her husband have a book called exactly that, and it’s a wonderful and I gave them a big blurb. Whoops, no, stop. I can’t do that that soon, so, no. But it was the same—this is a thread of living alone and finding the ways in which food really enhance that kind of life, the solitary life. Q: The opposite of age is this digital world and the world of blogging, and your website seems to be, if not embracing it, certainly taken to that with enthusiasm. Fussell: Embracing it would imply a degree of knowledge I do not yet have, but I’m finally getting it only because I’ve met all these wonderful young bloggers. I mean, to say that they’re young bloggers is a redundancy. Q: How did you meet this group of people? Fussell: Because they’re foodies. They just had the first international food bloggers conference in Seattle. Q: That is extraordinary. Fussell: I mean, they’re already meeting face-to-face in cities. Q: Did you go? Fussell: No. No, no. No, no. Not that I wouldn’t have if somebody had paid me to go. I mean, the whole thing about blogging, now, “Who’s paying?” I keep asking them. So I think we’re at a moment where, “Ah! I’ll do the blog because it’s so easy and it will put my foot in the food door.” Okay. So there are all these—they have to get advertisers, and they’re going to find that’s increasingly difficult as they sort themselves out, because they’re all competitors. At the moment they’re all palsies and they all link each other. So this is this huge, huge net that is daily heightened by things like Facebook, and before that, YouTube, but that seems more related to imagery. Facebook is just one form of—it’s a form of Twitter, or can be. But it started for me with a food person who said, “Hey, this is a great way to extend your relationship to the food community.” “Okay.” I don’t know if it’s doing that or not. Q: When was that? Fussell: This last year I’ve started Facebook. I like hearing from people I haven’t heard from for thirty years, but there aren’t too many of those. It’s more people I’ve never heard of who say, “Please confirm me as friend.” You know, you have to do that or punch “ignore.” Well, that doesn’t seem right. So I don’t know what its function is. I do see what the function of blogging is, but it’s going to change. It’s going to change. As the magazines and newspapers go under and the bloggers will increase, they’re going to find they’re following some of the same competitive paths, and some are going to drop out, because they can’t do that forever unless they’re a trust-fund baby, and there are a lot of those doing that. Q: What do you see as the function of it now? Fussell: It is a new form of community-making. The fact that it’s a global community is very unwieldy and completely at the moment horizontal in the way that every man’s—there are no more experts, there are no authorities. Every man speaks with an equal voice. It’s a kind of hilarious extension of the American idea of equality, but it’s off the charts. We don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t think. It has all of these different layers to it, which is like Google. It’s like the information you’re getting. When you can know everything, it makes all information equal, and therefore none of it valuable. Q: On the website you mentioned it as a resurgence of community-building, but as you say that community is now horizontal. It’s not a traditional community. Fussell: It is certainly not a traditional community, but as human beings we do traditional things with a new form of holding hands, let’s say, showing pictures, making connections. Q: All in all, do you think it’s good, useful, these food blogs? Not restaurant blogs, but food ones. Fussell: I think they’re fascinating. To what uses they’re going to be put, I don’t know. For the moment, sure, I find out about fermented garlic from a food blogger I met. She happens to advertise for Earthy Delights, which sells fermented garlic. Otherwise, it’s not something you can get in any specialty store that I’ve seen, unless you know some Korean specialty markets. Stuff like this I would not know about. I would never sample. I love that aspect. Oh, okay, I learned that its use has been traditional in Korean cuisine. I know nothing about that. Wonderful. On the other hand, that’s just one little blitz, one little blitzy moment. What does it fit into as a frame? I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s too new and it’s too growing. It’s growing so fast and all the kids spend all their time there too. Okay. Then you don’t have time to do other things. That’s interesting and that’s going to have consequences. Q: Like what? Fussell: Well, if all your time is on the screen, all right, it’s a whole different way of relating. So you make one connection, but you lose another. You lose intimacy, you gain spread. Okay. And you certainly lose depth. Q: I know you feel very strongly about food being a very personal thing. Do you think that demonstrates itself in these blogs or just— Fussell: Yes, I do. Q: How does that work? Fussell: Because everybody’s personal taste, it’s your own voice and it’s your own taste and that’s what you put out there. So this is the way I do something. Is that the best way? Well, who knows? No. But it doesn’t matter, this is the way I do it, and you think somebody’s going to be interested in that. That’s new. Why should they be interested? Because I’m a blog and look, it’s got this great design, and because I can say funny things sometimes, and of course you’re going to be interested. Q: Do you read them? Fussell: When I meet bloggers, then that’s for me the only way. Otherwise, I’m not going through and looking for blogs. But when I meet somebody, then I want to know more about them, if I’m interested. I’m going to have drinks next week with somebody who has been—now she would be in her thirties, mid-thirties, she’s been trained as a journalist, but magazines are going out, so she’s looking for different connections. But I really liked her, so we’re going to have a drink together. All I know about her is that she does a food blog. Q: Who’s paying, I mean at this point? Fussell: Who’s paying for the drink? Q: Yes. [laughter] Fussell: Well, we were just taken. We met at a dinner, which was a woman who—what’s the name of her company? It’s a book connection. She stages book events. Okay. But she’s also paid by Microsoft. So she’s got a job, so she’s already made the bridge. She’s a very smart, entrepreneurial girl, as they all are entrepreneurial. Microsoft paid for our dinner at Tabla. Okay. But that’s right. It is always the question and always relevant. Q: What do you think the future of food writing is, or is it too hard to tell? Fussell: Well, we’re all going to be talking about food, and therefore, as its writing is taking place most significantly on the screen, not on print, not in print— Q: You really think that— Fussell: Oh, it’s moving very rapidly. In terms of informal, do I think books online will replace—will Kindle replace the artifact? No. Q: Not that so much. It’s really more the short format of this kind of writing makes it so impossible to go into depth about things. Fussell: Well, at the moment, when the blog is successful, these bloggers are thinking about, “Now, when I write my book about this subject.” So this is a moment when both these things are going on at once. It’s an entrée to getting a book contract, but you don’t count on getting known first through books or even through the freelance magazine articles that then would lead to a book. No. So it’s replacing those magazine articles very fast. Q: But the goal still is having a more solid identity? Fussell: The goal is to get known so you can do what you want to do, but we’ll see what is, you know. Is food history going to disappear? No. Q: Did you feel, however, in creating your own website that you absolutely had to include this world? Fussell: No, I didn’t know anything about it. Somebody said, “Do you want to blog?” I said, “I don’t know what that is.” So I’ve been learning by doing. I love the idea that I can get an idea and sit down and turn out seventy-five words—a few paragraphs is a long blog. But the fact that you could do it that quickly has great advantages for somebody who’s been writing now for so many years, because you know you’ve got the craft of shaping, and then it becomes fun. It’s like doing piano scales. Oh, I’ll do a little variation here. It’s a variation and that is fun. Q: You just started to talk before about how you’re cooking now and how that’s a little different. Fussell: I think the cooking is the same. It’s the short attention span. [laughs] It does fit the world of blogging perfectly. Q: But in your life. Fussell: In my life, but that’s because I’m not cooking for a family. But none of these kids, none of the blogger kids that I’m meeting have families. Q: They wouldn’t have time to blog. [laughs] Fussell: No, that’s right. That’s right. They see themselves as the norm. They don’t see being married with a couple of kids or more. They don’t see that as the norm for them. Q: The website is also full of your upcoming events and speeches. It must give you a feeling of relevance to keep being included in all these things. Fussell: I’m delighted. I’m delighted that, (a), they remember I still exist. You know, that’s always a question. And, (b), that I’m not yet so senile that they are afraid to put me on a platform. These are all concerns, because we’ve all seen examples of all of this. Q: Are you going to cook today at all? Fussell: Oh yeah. No, I cook every day. I really don’t like to go out to lunch because I don’t want to take the time. Q: So what’s on the menu today? Fussell: Ah, now, that’s the kind of thing I think about when I get up in the morning, “What am I going to have for lunch?” (A), I don’t want to go out, I never want to go out and shop; I want everything just to be at hand. I remember I hadn’t eaten up the leftover Chinese duck last night. So, okay, so what am I going to have? I still have some unopened bacon from Flying Pig at Union Square Market from last time I was there. Oh, goody, I can eat that with some jalapeno cheese bread, which I picked up last time I was at the Market. So this is the way the thought goes. Okay, I’m taken care of; I don’t have to worry. Q: And tonight, do you know what’s— Fussell: And tonight, let’s see. Okay, if I have bacon from—actually, I’m going out to dinner, but if I weren’t, I’d say, “Okay, I’ve got some really great eggs from the Union Square.” Ah, you know, as long as there are eggs in the fridge, I never think about food. There’s always some pasta, there’s always some rice, there’s always garlic, olive oil. [End of interview] Fussell – 3 - PAGE 1