By Lydia Wilhelm
Long before she turned out to be a plate of fried eggs, Sarah was a bagel. A toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and tomato. That’s still my standard order. I’ve gotten it in Baltimore, DC, and now Norfolk. And it’s not only the bagel itself, still warm from the toaster and wrapped in waxed paper, but the process too. The walk to the counter, the glance at the bins, the order that’s simple and confident. Through the whole process, she’s beside me, within, rolling her eyes at my jokes, holding my hand.
“Fried Eggs,” by Seth Sawyers (River Teeth 5.1, Fall 2003)
Whenever we write about emotions, people (teachers, other writers) will tell us to ground our more abstract conversation on emotions in something more tangible; what one of my professors always called “vivid and specific detail.” This physical entry point into a cerebral realm can look like lots of things, but one you may not have tried is food.
Food writing is its own subgenre within nonfiction, with whole memoirs dedicated to culinary experiences and memories of childhood meals (Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter is one of my personal favorites), but we can also use food in more snack-sized chunks to bring texture to our writing. When we look at Seth Sawyers’ “Fried Eggs,” which is an essay about the way people continue to affect us even after they leave our lives, we can see how he uses food as a way to ground the memories he’s recreating and also bring us details that comfort us in the midst of tough conversations about change and grief.
The frequent inclusion of food in this essay is not an attempt to run away from uncomfortable subject matter. Sawyers takes us into incredibly intimate moments where he really believed his “life was there on the floor of this girl’s bedroom in the space between where [Sarah] and I met and nowhere else” (3). He is laying everything bare, showing us how these women who have passed through his life have deeply impacted him, and food becomes a vehicle for us to get closer to that reality. How do we know that Sarah has impacted the narrator? Because he brings that impact into the physical realm with food; when he makes himself a plate of eggs, “they’re always over-easy now, ever since Sarah” (5). She has changed his taste and normal routine, leaving a physical reminder behind.
Additionally, while the food becomes a vehicle to enter into places of intimacy and make them more concrete, the mentions of food are also acting as cushion, softening the blow and giving us something to chew on other than bittersweet memories. Food writing is so rich because food is a universal experience. Whether we’re foodies or picky eaters, we all have visceral connections to the act of eating. We all have favorite foods. Thus, when we read about food, we respond emotionally. Here’s a particularly delectable passage:
We got coffee and toasted every-thing bagels with cream cheese and tomato from Sam’s in Catonsville. We’d take them back to the town house I shared with three other guys and eat in the living room. When the cream cheese squeezed out between the two halves of her sandwich, Sarah licked it like she would a melting ice cream cone. (3)
When we read this scene, it doesn’t matter if we like everything bagels with cream cheese or not. Just conjuring up flavors like the tang of cream cheese, the sweetness of tomatoes, or the onion saltiness of an everything bagel will get us thinking about our own favorite foods, and there’s something inherently comforting about that. We feel like we’re being fed by the writing itself.
Sawyers continues to feed us these little moments of comfort and tangibility as he moves on from Sarah to talk about other relationships. He weaves in mentions of the way Alexis makes coffee “strong and thick with chocolate syrup” (6) and the way Michelle ate strawberry popsicles during their whole trip out west. He makes sure to mention that after he and Michelle break up for the second time, he “watched the game at a friend’s house, drunk, staring at a plate of buffalo wings and not caring if my team won” (12). Through the highs and lows, food is always there, food is consistent. Comfort again.
The food doesn’t have to be a metaphor that neatly solves this problem of pain either. In Sawyer’s essay, we end with food, which is once more comforting and bringing us into discomfort simultaneously: “I fry up some eggs, over-easy, the way I like them now. I eat the white parts first, with the bacon. At the end I’m left with the neat little centers. It’s the part that, when you take a fork to it, opens up and bleeds all over the plate” (13). The runny yolk becomes comfort food and bleeding heart in one.
Writing Exercise:
- Make a list of 10-15 foods/drinks that you either LOVE or HATE.
- Pick one of these foods. What time in your life were you consuming this most? What were you like at that time? What might have you been feeling at that time? If you feel a memory tugging at you, pull at that thread and build it out. Write about that time in your life for 10 minutes.
- Now, return back to your food. For five minutes, write about the details and the physical experience of eating that food. Bring in colors, textures, reactions, messes, smells, whatever brings that food to life for you.
- Place the results of the last two steps next to each other. How do they affect one another? Does the food description bring you closer to an emotion you were experiencing in your memories? Or does it play more of the “comfort food” role?
Lydia Wilhelm is a CNF writer and occasional poet based in Indiana. Her work has been published in the Rabbit Room Poetry Substack, Sunday Mornings at the River, River Teeth Revisited, and Apocalypse Confidential. If she isn’t grading rhetorical analyses or writing about food, she’s probably reading aloud to her husband, Jayden. You can read more at lydiawilhelm.com.
Photo by Coffeefy Workafe on Unsplash
