Authentic Writing 9780822946700, 082294670X, 9780822988151, 0822988151

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AUTHENTIC  WRITING

PITTSBURGH SERIES IN COMPOSITION, LITERACY, AND CULTURE David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

AUTHENTIC WRITING JEFF RICE

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2021, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­f ree paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4670-0 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4670-X Cover art courtesy of the author Cover design by Joel W. Coggins

To Vered and Judah ἀ e willing eater/the picky eater My faithful iPad/iPhone-­carrying companions What should we have for lunch?

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1: Hard Core 17 2: Banality 27 3: Boredom 34 4: Children 41 5: Cognitive Mapping 52 6: Samplericity 60 7: Sandwich Aggregations 76 8: Las Vegas 89 9: Groceries 96 10: The Craft Story 101

 11: Condiments 115 12: Parental Artisans 124 13: Authentic Abroad 144 14: Junk Food 178 15: Salads 190 16: Bikram Professing 204 Works Cited 215 Index 233

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Authentic Writing was written over several years of travel and contemplation about scholarship, authenticity, disappointment, professionalism, writing, my family, and food. Authentic Writing is my attempt to make sense of my career and what it means to write as a scholar today. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities afforded me by the University of Kentucky, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Martha B. Reynolds endowed chair I hold at the University of Kentucky, all of which supported my research and work on this book. I thank my colleagues who have either invited me to give talks that eventually made their way into this book or who participated in conference panels with me on material that was worked into this book: David Grant, Brian McNely, Amy Young, Justin Eckstein, and Donovan Conley. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their thoughtful responses, encouragement, and suggestions. I t hank the University of Pittsburgh’s series editors David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr for their support of this project and strong encouragement. I thank the wonderful places I’ve eaten at in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Copenhagen, and Brooklyn, many of which made it into this book, some of which didn’t. But I didn’t forget those that didn’t. You are still there in the back of my mind. When I travel, the first thing I think of is: Where will I eat? What will I eat? My biggest thanks, then, is probably to the food I have eaten these past few years. Delicious and not-­so-­delicious meals. I will never forget the amazing crab and chicken dish on a side street in Zhuhai or the incredible naan sandwiches at Saone Rhone in Tel Aviv. Traveling with me, therefore, can be completely satisfying or completely frustrating if one does not want to wander a city looking for a street vendor I read about in an online city journal or what I think may be the best humous place ever. My scholarship is in my stomach these days. I thank my kids, Vered and Judah, for accompanying me to all of the places here, for putting up with me in restaurants, falafel stands, noodle shops, sand-

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wich places, grocery stores, humous joints, breweries, and brewpubs. I thank them for walking down street after street with me—­and for not taking buses and cabs—­while I searched out a new place to eat at or an outdoor market to visit. I thank them for riding subways in other countries and figuring out bus systems with me. I thank my kids for dealing with stifling heat and freezing cold. “One day,” I have told my daughter, “you will write a memoir that begins, ‘My dad was the kind of dad who would take two trains in the middle of the winter just to try a pie at a pie shop he read about.” When I went on sabbatical to finish this book, my wife divorced me. I opted to not go back through the manuscript and write “ex-­w ife” in place of wife. One day I will write more extensively about divorce, and I do sometimes on Facebook. But for now, the disillusionment I felt with academia that prompted this book bleeds into the personal disillusionment of failed marriage, more so than I could have imagined when I started this project. Disillusionment is all around us. Sometimes, being disillusioned is the heuristic for writing. Sometimes, our best ideas come when we are disappointed with what we felt was precious. Portions of this book were written abroad in the cities I mention. Much of it was written in Tel Aviv in rented apartments and in cafes, and the rest was written in my usual Lexington spots: West Sixth Brewing, Mirror Twin, and Ethereal.

AUTHENTIC  WRITING

INTRODUCTION

PERSONAL WRITING

This is a scholarly book. In saying that, I begin with a rather banal point. After all, what else should this book be? It is not a novel. It is not a romance story. It is not an adventure tale. Written by a scholar, with a scholarly title, dealing with what appears to be the scholarly subject of writing, should this book claim to be something else? This is a scholarly book about authenticity. Authenticity has long been a scholarly issue. This book’s title suggests or anticipates a scholarly output: by aligning writing with authenticity, writing must be a matter for scholarship. Scholarship involves the question of writing (content, method, voice), sometimes questions authenticity (what is or what is not scholarly, what is or what is not an accurate representation or position), and sometimes addresses both topics together. “This is a scholarly book,” my opening sentence, is a simple declaration, an acknowledgment, a way to announce a book’s content in an up-­front manner, but it is also a way to recognize readerly expectation regarding what will follow. Before you—­my imagined academic audience—­question what content is ahead, keep in mind that “this” is a scholarly book. At least that is what I insist.

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I begin with this meta point of self-­reflection in order to immediately draw attention to the overall focus of this book, the question of authenticity in scholarly writing, what an authentic scholarly writing might entail, what topics not currently considered scholarly could be considered as authentic scholarly subject matter, and what, overall, authenticity means within contemporary, digital culture struggling with issues of originality, appropriation, repetition, and experience. As Walter Benjamin famously noted, authenticity has long focused on essence. “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced” (“The Work of Art” 4). Authenticity involves essence. The essence of scholarly writing is often critique. Scholarly writing, or those who perform and evaluate scholarly writing, often categorizes the authenticity of such writing as critical or interpretive. To perform scholarship (at least in the humanities) is to perform critique, to interpret writings and culture, and to juxtapose the two in discursive output. An authentic scholarly writing resembles Fredric Jameson’s depiction of contemporary scholarship as “hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (Postmodernism 8). Jameson’s remarks stand, for me, as representative of what is typically assumed to be the essence of scholarly writing. Traditionally, hermeneutics dominates textual reading, reducing the “text” to forces that demand interpretation or, as Jameson alludes, the unveiling of meaning. As Roland Barthes writes, unveilings reduce discourse to enigmas, which, via the acts of reading and responding, the writer and reader struggle to decipher. All texts are enigmas. The writer must locate the secret key to unlock their mysteries. “A powerful enigma is a dense one, so that, provided certain precautions are taken, the more signs there are, the more the truth will be obscured, the harder one will try to figure it out” (S/Z 62). Scholarly writing has long been writing that tackles enigmas: cultural, ideological, philosophical, political, and rhetorical problems and complexities that demand a scholarly voice untangle them for an academic audience. The authenticity of scholarly writing depends on the writer’s ability to make the enigma clear. What we thought was X, a generic version of this process claims, is really Y. Once we discover Y, our knowledge of culture or politics or conflict or race or gender or class or anything will finally become clear. Clarity, though, represents only one vision of authenticity. As I show throughout this book’s short chapters that authenticity, particularly in its cultural and personal manifestations, often cannot be clear in specific moments or situations. “Many common ideas about authenticity are being overturned,” Scott Barry Kaufman argues.

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“Turns out, authenticity is a real mess.” Writing, too, can be a mess when subjugated to authentic claims and expectations. My purpose in this book is to explore other authentic circulations than those we expect or anticipate. By doing so, I am also proposing an alternative form of scholarly writing, in both form and in content. In rhetorical and writing studies, where I h ave worked as an academic, hermeneutics plays a significant role in shaping a definition or professional expectation of what is or what is not scholarly. Writing that defines, interprets, or explains cultural phenomenon, power relations, faulty representation, gender or race, and so on, the discipline declares, is scholarly. If there is a declaration of meaning, the discipline also argues, there must also be a declaration of what the subject is not or what it does not mean. Scholarly work deals with those subject matters outside of the self whose meaning—­whose enigmas—­ supposedly can be revealed. In this context, then, the discipline would be expected to offer the counterstatement to its definition of the scholarly, which, at its surface, suggests objectivity or an object of study outside of one’s self: in other words, writing that is personal is not scholarly. Personal writing, such a definition declares, does not offer a symptom of a vaster reality. Scholarly writing, the discipline believes, reveals that “ultimate truth”—­what a text means, what a moment means, what a geopolitical conflict means, what an election means, what an occupation of territory means, what a r epresentation means, what a c onflict means, what an economic or educational crisis means, what anything and everything in the world we inhabit means, a revelation of what Michel Foucault called “the fundamental codes of a culture” (ἀ e Order of ἀ ings xx) or what Roland Barthes offered as the belief that everything “shudders with meaning” (Roland Barthes 97). With scholarly writing, therefore, there is no disciplinary limit to our desire to reveal meaning, to smash every text into pieces so that another meaning emerges from the shards as revelation or epiphany. In such revelations, interpretation offers an authentic method for academic work. “The life of interpretation,” Foucault also notes, “is to believe that there are only interpretations” (Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology 278). Writing is done in order to interpret what is obscure, to believe that all representations or discourse should be subjected to interpretation. Scholarly writing, Wayne Booth argues, turns “every ‘text’ into a t horoughly distanced puzzle or enigma,” in which “the impassive puzzle solver or symbol hunter or signifier chaser is to some degree caught up in patterns determined by the puzzle—­t he tale as told” (ἀ e Company We Keep 142). To be scholarly, it seems, we must be concerned with puzzles and enigmas. This is not a book about enigmas. Nor is this a book about interpretation.

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Our academic tales are, at times, simply interpretations of interpretations. This book reflects my disillusionment with such thinking. The limitations regarding forcing meaning into every breath we take as academics, or for that matter, as humans, have become obvious to me over my academic career. Louis Althusser taught the concept of expressive causality in order to understand how one text’s meaning could represent another level of meaning not initially obvious. Our lives are dominated by master narratives, the theory argues, and we must uncover the master narrative as false or as an allegory of another narrative in order to establish the semblance of clarity. Althusser gave scholarly writing the allegory as a method for writing. As Jameson summarizes the effects of expressive causality, “If interpretation, in terms of expressive causality or of allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them” (ἀ e Political Unconsciousness 19). According to Jameson, our collective thinking and collective knowledge is built off of master narratives, and such narratives guide behavior, economics, ideology, belief, and so on. Capitalism. Marxism. Neoliberalism. Race. Class. Gender. Privilege. Hegemony. These are some of the master narratives scholarly writing depends on in order to inscribe specific forms of writing. Uncover the clues or solve the puzzle, often via allegory, and you can better understand ideological systems. Hermeneutics is the guiding force of this process. Unlike Jameson’s proclamation, I do not believe that we are constantly engaging with clues for some vaster reality, as if we are always on the verge of pulling back the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and revealing what we thought was X instead is really Y. Nor do I believe that the texts we engage with daily are nothing more than word search puzzles asking to be solved, whether by interpretation, critical reading, or even the digital humanist’s practice of data mining. The hermeneutical tradition, which I represent, fairly or not, in Jameson’s work, depends on a scholarly assumption that critique is the only option for writing. To write about a g iven issue or cultural moment, one must engage with critique, revealing how the issue or moment’s representation obfuscates a veiled question of power, oppression, discrimination, or hegemonic activity. Bruno Latour famously noted that critique “has run out of steam” because of its endless desire to show a supposed hidden reality or hidden truth and “to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts” (“Why Has Critique” 227). As Latour points out, within this view, scholarship must uncover. Scholarship must critique. Scholarship must not be personal. Scholarship cannot be banal. Scholarship cannot just observe. Scholarship must liberate meaning from its obfuscation. All around us, we have been led to believe, we encounter blocked meaning. Our task as scholars is to uncover,

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to reveal the natural as unnatural, to decode. As Stuart Hall argued, “The transposition into and out of the ‘message form’ (or the mode of symbolic exchange) is not a random ‘moment,’ which we take up or ignore at our convenience” (“Encoding” 92). Messages are not random, we are told. They are constructions. Whether we encounter an advertisement, a television program, a song, a political speech, a menu, a photograph, or any other form of digital, oral, and print communication, we are encountering constructions in need of deconstruction. Those who take such messages as natural or random, critics such as Hall have argued, fall victim to ideology and power. The work of decoding, it seems, is never finished in scholarly writing. For that reason, Latour identifies critique as a limited project since its constant unraveling of meaning leads it down the path not toward greater understanding but rather toward forced interpretations and, eventually, conspiracy theory and paranoia (the ultimate response, I add, to enigma). “What has become of critique when there is a w hole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia?” (“Why Has Critique” 228). Critique, Latour argues, can also lead to arrogance. “Give me the society of Berlin,” Latour writes in his metaphoric discussion of the Berlin key, “and I will tell you how the key is shaped!” (“The Berlin Key” 18). In such declarations, we are led to believe that sweeping cultural analysis (“the society of Berlin”) defines or reveals all phenomenon, from institutionalized issues to banal mechanical output. Yet, it is not always possible to explain how culture is shaped, how power comes to be, how one side is wrong and another right, or even how a key is shaped. Nor is it always desirable. Toward the end of Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Latour’s complex investigation regarding the failure of the French transportation system called Aramis, Latour does not offer a s olution to the problem. Instead, as the fictional investigator, he states: “I’m not Hercule Poirot—­I’m not going to reveal the truth, unveil the guilty party, or unmask anyone. We get the truth only in novels, and this isn’t a novel. In real life, reality sets anyone who looks for it quaking all over” (289). This metaphoric detective image is meant to draw attention away from a concrete truth (X did it; Y is guilty) and more toward the various interactions that comprise any situation, rhetorical act, or problem. Interactions among the various forces that give any moment meaning, Latour has repeatedly written, can be too varied and too complex to settle on one definition or proposed causality. Elsewhere in Aramis, Latour’s character Norbert realizes how difficult it can be to find an answer to a problem via interpretation: “The farther we go, the more crowded [this investigation] is. Every part of the system is as complicated as the systems as a whole. Every

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plate we unfold is itself made up of plates to be unfolded!” (243). These plates/ forces, or what Latour teaches as network thinking, do not settle, for Latour, on matters of critique or analysis but on description. Description, Latour notes, offers a more complete understanding of how forces interact in order to produce meaning (or how they do not). “If a description remains in need of an explanation,” Latour claims, “it means that it is a bad description” (Reassembling the Social 137). In lieu of critique, Latour argues for description. Details. Moments. Events. Interactions. And, I add, banality. Banality is a major focus of this book. As is description. Latour’s argument acts against the writerly gesture to explain, to push the world through a l ens of what Jean-­François Lyotard called “the grand narratives” of discourse, those topics that provide overarching frameworks for analysis (Marxism, education, democracy, etc.). Instead of relying on grand narratives, Latour advocates for descriptions of power to demonstrate connectivity, or what we commonly call networks. When one describes, Latour argues, one doesn’t unveil but makes visible connections that were, because we were not focusing on connections, invisible. Writing, in this case, is not interpreting but merely describing. Descriptions provide insight. “If connections are established between sites, it should be done through more descriptions, not by suddenly taking a free ride through all-­terrain entities like Society, Capitalism, Empire, Norms, Individualism, Fields, and so on. A good text should trigger in a good reader this reaction: ‘Please, more details, I want more details’” (Reassembling the Social 137). One force often missing from such discussions and from the details—­and even from Latour’s work—­is the personal. The personal, too, is a force within networks producing meaning and one that deserves details. In any given moment—­whether it is textual, political, emotional, economical, educational—­t here is the person writing about the moment and the person experiencing the moment. That person interacts with the subject matter, as well. The individual, as reader, writer, parent, beer drinker, foodie, traveler, academic, and so forth, is also an actor in a given network of interactions. The personal’s scholarly validity, though, has long been questioned in scholarly writing, at least since (according to Walter Ong), Peter Ramus invented the outline and separated the individual from the object of study. With that simple organizational gesture, the personal diminished and eventually became an object of scorn within scholarly work. Jane Tompkins, for instance, writes about her own desire for personal writing and the tension she experiences making it scholarly. “The problem is that you can’t talk about your private life in the course of doing your professional work, You have to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you’re writing about, has nothing to do with

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your life, that it’s more exalted, more important, because it (supposedly) transcends the merely personal” (“Me and My Shadow” 169). Despite the personal’s overall absence in scholarly writing, one could argue that the age of social/digital media has made the personal more important than ever before. In the late 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “as new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-­expression” (Medium Is the Massage 123). McLuhan identified the overlap of communication and technology as one of reproduction, where any idea or image may be reproduced at ease, and authentic selves yield to these reproductions, whether in work (what McLuhan called “roles”) or in textual reception. “The rising consumer-­oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity” (122). Where does self-­expression fit—­as it is understood as authentic voice—­w ithin a new media age devoted to reproduction (a supposed drift away from the unique, authentic voice and a settling with “labels” of authenticity). McLuhan isn’t arguing against self-­expression, but he is noting how self-­expression’s role in written communication is dramatically challenged by technological innovation. While critique is not necessarily a by-­product of technological innovation, the repetitive nature of critique might be traced out within the overall network of reproduction that Benjamin famously highlighted. Aura, or the supposed authenticity of the text, idea, or writer Benjamin worried about, becomes lost within the repeated critical gestures we encounter in contemporary moments. Aura, like a self, supposedly is authentic. Or is it? Even in the age of reproduction, we are more personal than ever before in our writing interactions. The ability to express one’s self easily and to share that expression across multiple platforms at once challenges the hegemony of critique, which often proposes itself as “objective” and isolates expression into a specific academic category hostile to anything that appears “not professional.” Professional, in this case, indicates a repetitive stance accepted as “natural” in scholarly writing. Social media has altered whatever we might mean by that “natural” state of writing by concentrating on the personal and on personal interest—­whether in the sharing of children’s photographs, travels, anecdotes, complaints about work, political discussion, entertainment news, or other issues. The personal is authentic online however it is shared or presented. “All media are extensions of human faculty,” McLuhan wrote (Medium Is the Message 26). Social media, I note, is an extension of the personal (as McLuhan attributed other media to different aspects of the human condition: the food, the nervous system, the eye). When I share an image of my son’s drawing of the “university of butt” on Facebook, for example, I participate in digital authentic expression as an extension of myself. I do so in order to

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FIGURE 1 My son’s self-expression

demonstrate his awareness of his parents’ careers (we work in the university) but also possibly to express my own frustrations with university practices and politics—­from the administrative to the political. I a lso share the image as some form of commentary on my supposed parenting skills. Only a p arent as cool as me, I s eem to think, could raise a s on with such understanding and usage of the word butt. This public sharing, then, is highly personal. His drawing becomes an extension of the personal. Facebook is an extension of my expression. We can doubt that expression’s authenticity (Is he joking? Is he serious? Does he think it is acceptable to share his children’s art on social media? Did he put his son up to this? How dare a department chair post such trivial nonsense!). But this is my reproduced expression. This is not a book about social media. But like many contemporary works, it assumes social media influence on contemporary expression and writing as it navigates questions of authenticity and what it means to perform scholarly writing in an age dominated by personal, shared, and social expression. A moment like “the university of butt” stands out for me, an academic trying to make sense of a social media–influenced writing and environment in which the banal and the personal are always present but often denied as authentic in academic writing. How can I a void the supposedly inauthentic personal in an age of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the university of butt? This

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book’s structure—­short chapters; movements from spaces as diverse as Philadelphia’s Chinatown, Brooklyn, and Tel Aviv; moments of academic citation mixed with popular culture; riffs on craft culture and condiments; discussions regarding salad and frozen garlic bread; personal photographs providing context; highlights of hybrid fusion contradictory moments in food and travel—­ reflects some of the fragmented spaces of personal and professional discourse that occur over different social media platforms. Each chapter builds off of its predecessor as I explore these topics as moments of self-­expression. Self-­ expression is important. Self-­expression, this book claims, is authentic writing. Jameson, like many academic writers, avoids the personal or self-­ expression, as does a major portion of the body of critical thought his work belongs within. After all, postmodernism (and, in turn, critical theory) alerted readers to “the disappearance of the individual subject” (Postmodernism 16) in favor of analysis of institutional and bodily effects. The difference between what Jameson represents (hermeneutics) and what Latour represents (networks) for scholarly writing, though, are vast despite this one common lack of interest in personal expression. My academic and scholarly disillusionment, as I show in this book, is a struggle between these two polarities, often drifting between the two vast perspectives regarding what one should write about as an academic. To rephrase my first sentence: this is a scholarly and personal book. I could also have written: this is a book about scholarly disillusionment. With these rewritten sentences, I e cho the compositionist Jim Corder, who aligns with neither Jameson nor Latour. Jim Corder always seemed disillusioned to me. Whatever topic he approached, I often read his tone as disillusioned. In the preface to his memoir Yonder, Corder writes, “I wanted the book to be a scholarly sort of work written in a personal sort of way. As deliberately as I could, I made it personal, but I don’t much think it’s ever just personal” (x). Despite this disclaimer, a great deal of Corder’s scholarship is personal. He wrote about mowing his lawn, searching through an old Sears Roebuck catalog, his army service, and depression, among other topics. When Corder writes “I don’t think it’s ever just personal,” he identifies the problems of reducing writing to one’s experiences; he understands that no matter the counterdesire for a p ersonal writing, no writing is only personal. In “Notes on a Rhetoric of Regret,” Corder problematizes the complexity of personal writing, negotiating a balance between personal and nonpersonal writing. “I have longed, and sometimes still do, for an essential, integrated self that would be present to others—­present, altogether acknowledged, and acclaimed. Significance, however, always seems to be elsewhere. In the midst of an action or event, I long for words and pictures telling the action or event, so that I might have it again and again when I come to

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words and pictures, I long for the action or event” (97). Where resides meaning? Corder asks. In a story? In an event? In an image? In a piece of writing? Alongside the self? The integrated self and the projected self speak to the dual experiences criticism concludes can be found in texts. Corder reconciles this tension in his teaching. “My teaching schedule this term complicated matters for me. I’m working in a graduate course in modern rhetoric and in a course in the personal essay. Each course has its own set of rhetorics. Sometimes I get them mixed up. I sack up the modern rhetoric rhetorics and take them to the personal essay class, or sometimes I sack up the personal essay rhetorics and take them to the modern rhetoric class. When I l ast saw my personal essay class, we were in considerable disarray, you might even say a fine mess” (“Rhetoric of Regret” 100). Which is which? Corder asks. What is rhetoric, and what is the personal? How do you differentiate between the two? Can you? Authentic Writing resembles Corder’s schizophrenic pedagogy: rhetoric and the personal. Sometimes I, too, mix them up. Is the subject of this book rhetoric, scholarly writing, authenticity, me, eating, or all of the above? Near the end of his career, literary scholar Lionel Trilling asked a similar question about his work. “In a long career of teaching,” Trilling began a 1971 talk at Purdue University, “this is the first time that I h ave been the subject of my own instruction” (ἀe Last Decade 226). Trilling traces his scholarly trajectory to the belief that teaching English “allowed one to escape for the established professions” and that teaching offered “intellectual activity, of dealing with ideas with theories—­and could there be a more appropriate place for this enterprise than the university?” (235). That intellectual activity, however, has often diminished the personal. Texts—­literary or cultural—­should not be an escape from the personal, but rather a part of the larger network they occupy with the personal. Authentic Writing follows trajectories that allow for this larger network and tease out a space for a d ifferent, and yet always present, intellectual activity. Indeed, the intellectual tradition that Trilling found himself attracted to is the one I was initially attracted to: the place of intellectual work, complicated thought, ideas. The university often is also the place that excludes the personal, which long prevented Trilling—­until that Purdue talk—­from thinking of his own life as scholarly subject matter and as complex as the texts he studied. Trilling traces this tradition to studying Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, who, for him, are the two most influential critical thinkers in scholarly work and in his own thought process. “As exponents of the unmasking principle they were surely pre-­eminent. They taught the intellectual classes that nothing was as it seemed, that the great work of intellect was to strike through the mask” (ἀe Last Decade 237). The mask, embodied in contemporary critics such as

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Jameson, has led us to believe that the world needs an unveiling. Who or what is behind the mask, the enigma, the puzzle, the code? I begin this book, however, with an alternative proposition: The world is not masked. Or, to be more explicit, it does not need to always be masked, nor does it always need to be depicted as a site of unveiling, nor does it always need solving. Writing can explore topics and subject matter without always revealing the greater, hidden reality we have failed to perceive. My first gesture, in this introduction, is toward a type of personal writing that I could offer in contrast to the stereotypical academic view of the scholarly and the personal. In the introduction to their volume Personal Effects: ἀ e Social Character of Scholarly Writing, Deborah Holdstein and David Bleich outline the problem of the personal in academic writing as one of distance. Distance, as well, was Benjamin’s concern with reproduction (technology moving us further away from aura). The academic, Holdstein and Bleich note, distances itself from the personal since the personal does not contribute to knowledge, which must be objective. Objectivity represents authenticity. “The adjective ‘academic’ has meant, among other things, that scholarly writing about language and literature assumes that the subjectivity and social memberships of scholars are not factors in their humanistic knowledge in the same sense as physical scientists assume that their subjectivities are not factors in their knowledge of science” (1). Holdstein and Bleich remind readers of Cathy Davidson’s argument that “whether we put ourselves in or think we are leaving ourselves out, we are always in what we write” (1072). Despite this admission, Davidson does not embrace the personal as the authentic scholarly writing. Instead, she draws attention to the fictive, or we might say hybrid, nature of personal writing when it is situated in a scholarly context. Corder, too, in his graduate seminars promoted hybridity, and with both positions, the personal is not necessarily authentic but a mishmash that leaves us unsure of what we should be writing. Fiction? Nonfiction? With its uncertain status, personal writing works against justification. Being personal, Davidson notes, does not equate being true or more true than what is not personal. We are in what we write, but what we write is in us, too. When I write about myself to make a scholarly point, I am not necessarily engaging in a confession nor am I writing a memoir. I am merely writing. “The I in personal writing is a highly stylized presence, a character as fleshy as a character in a work of fiction. The personal is strategic and synecdochic, both individualized and, if it works, generalizable. Finally, a memoir is not a transcript. It is certainly not the same story someone might tell a s hrink” (1070–1071). The surest way around the confusion regarding the personal’s status in scholarly writing is to transform it into another form of unveiling or to make the personal merely a vehicle of

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criticism. Don’t tell the same story you would tell your psychiatrist; instead, tell the story of critique. That position, which returns us to hermeneutics, has been attractive to some academics interested in the personal. Academic memoirs, Cynthia Franklin writes in her examination of the genre, “serve as a barometer for the state of the humanities during a period of crisis” (2). Franklin’s project is not to recognize the personal for its value in writing overall, but to transform personal writing by academics, the memoir genre, into another form of Jameson-­inspired hermeneutics or criticism. Franklin wants memoir to expose the grand narrative of cultural oppression in order to promote “a collective politics” and “the struggle for human rights” (6) as well as those memoirs that “disrupt as well as support institutional hierarchies” (7). The personal, in other words, is allegory. Franklin is clear that she wants memoir to speak from “a location that is clearly marked institutionally and geographically as well as in terms of the more typical subject positions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation” (24). In scholarly writing, the holy trinity of race, class, and gender, then, cannot be denied. Even with personal writing, this commonplace lens of criticism must be employed in order to reveal the greater reality we, as readers, are supposedly ignorant to. Franklin’s project, however, is not my own. To subject the personal to yet another race, class, gender critique (as if the personal is merely another text to tear apart for what it does not adequately represent) is not to explore or understand personal writing (or memoir writing) as anything other than what we already know—­t he supposed coded world that we inhabit. To do the kind of academic work Franklin advocates would be to revisit a familiar grand narrative and to treat that narrative as the only authentic one worth writing. I hear that familiar grand narrative when Susan Talburt and Paula Salvio warn, “The very act of making public the seemingly private may not create sustained critique of the relations of institutional life and self but may encourage and end in personal consumption” (19). Or we reveal the hidden institutional codes or we end consumption or we . . . we do something other than describe, as Latour reminds us. I want the end of writing, at times, to be in personal consumption. I’m not afraid of consuming. I’ve spent a great deal of my life consuming: ideas, texts, beer, food, ideology, pedagogy, bourbon, and an endless array of other products. How could I end consumption? I cannot. Thus, I will write about it here. Corder is suspicious of mixing criticism with every form of writing imagined. He refers to the process of always critiquing as “clinging to the sacred,” in which academic writers such as Franklin praise “tribal virtues” and “tribal gods” above insight or perspective (“Hunting for Ethos” 305). In other words, the mere presence of a god such as critique is enough for many scholarly writ-

INTRODUCTION

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ers. One challenges the familiar objects of critique, such as consumption, and, in turn, one clings to the sacred (the end of capitalism, the exposure of desire, racism, or something else). In the case of Franklin’s work on academic memoir, the sacred clings to race, class, and gender as a worshipped god of writing. To write the personal, one becomes obligated to write this trinity as well. “What I see at work near the ideological center of the new work I have referred to—­ scary to me, even while I think I begin to understand the good that eventuates from it—­is a powerful reductive and tribalizing force. This force, to me, gives hope and takes it away, brings gloom, loss, and, at least to me, terror. Gives hope and authenticity, that is, to the reader, but denies hope and authenticity to the reader if he or she wishes to be the writer” (302–303). As a writer, I need my hope, too. I need to believe in the writing I perform and that I read. But I do not discover that hope in the authenticity Corder rightly acknowledges criticism providing. By framing even the personal as an always coded experience, criticism allows hope to evaporate for me because, as Franklin desires, it turns the personal into something grand and beyond the banal or everyday. Exhaustion, instead, settles in for me. I am exhausted with making everything a question of critique and grand narrative. Critique is the grand narrative we need rest from. As Nathan Robinson writes, “Cultural critics often display an unfortunate tendency toward ‘Zeitgeistism,’ the borderline-­paranoid belief that there are Zeitgeists everywhere, massive social and historical essences to be found in all kinds of everyday practices and objects.” Authentic Writing, instead, points in the opposite direction. It offers a scholarly writing outside of the massive or grand. It offers a scholarly writing of the everyday. I compose this book in segments, small fragmented chapters that connect to one another via the question of authenticity. Rather than offer a sustained argument spread out over four or five chapters whose organization I would foretell here in this introduction, I offer many small stories, each a part of a larger story of academic writing, my children, travel, food, authenticity, and the details and descriptions that I eng age with and encounter daily. These chapters ask for a r ethinking of what an authentic academic writing might entail, but they also ask for a rethinking of the broad concept of authenticity in general. “I’ve always felt conflicted by the notion of authenticity,” Louisville chef Edward Lee writes (217). I s hare such sentiment. I a m conflicted. I am conflicted about the practices my professional identity relies on, and I, as an academic with tenure, often enforce and encourage. Authentic Writing attempts to work through that conflict. Authentic Writing does not claim to be the authentic approach to scholarly writing. It does, however, ask readers to suspend the expectation of one type of scholarly writing based on one type of organizational scheme focused on one type of critical methodology. Authentic

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Writing, as a book about authenticity and its presence or lack of presence in contemporary culture, proposes an alternative approach to the scholarly as well as our understandings of parts of contemporary culture. Not a r adical approach. Not a revolutionary approach. A different approach. In the following chapters, as I explore the conflicted state of authenticity as an academic and nonacademic issue, there will be characters who appear and then reappear across chapters—­people, writers, objects, places, things, and ideas that move from one city to another, from one condiment to another, from my children to me, from my writing to theory, from theory back to my writing. These characters allow my narrative to network across a larger concept called authenticity. I don’t consider this book to be a memoir, but it does contain personal moments and experiences. I don’t consider this book to be a critical examination, but it is very much about rhetoric and authenticity. I don’t consider this book to be palatable to an academic audience accustomed to decodings or unveilings, but it is very much a book about scholarly exploration written with an academic audience in mind.

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HARD CORE

Even as I begin with the personal, I am aware of the personal’s difficult history in writing scholarship and the many problems personal writing has either encountered from other academics or has created in its deemphasis of subject matter. In composition studies, the expressivist movement—­roughly covering the late 1960s to mid-­1970s—­reacted against rigid definitions of scholarship and research by allowing writing to focus on the individual and his/her personal stories as the centerpiece of scholarship (as opposed to a pure research project). The opposite of Cathy Davidson’s position, expressivism believed in the personal as the authentic writing experience, one in which young writers were encouraged to find their true voices and not succumb to the stiff and copied language of an assumed, institutional image of scholarship. Expressivists resisted decoding as the form of scholarship. Not every moment, they argued, required critique and its formulaic genres (what David Bartholomae, reacting against expressivism, would later call the pedagogical process of “inventing the university”), and yet, despite being personal, this “other” form of writing could still address consequential matters. Expressivists contended that per-

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sonal writing was not pure navel-­gazing, but rather a way to engage the social and cultural. Ken Macrorie summed up the expressivist movement’s frustrations with academic writing when he penned the following in the opening pages of his canonical Uptaught: “In the university, the base of the whole academic endeavor has traditionally been the Freshman Composition course, where the student learns to write. Not to write truths that count for him. Not to connect his experience to what he reads and hears about in the classroom, but to master an academic tongue and a manner of footnoting and snipping out other persons’ words and rearranging them in a new introduction–body-­conclusion form” (8). Macrorie, like Peter Elbow, William Coles, Donald Murray, and others, rejected prescribed academic prose (and its formulaic structures) as well as writing that is purely hermeneutic. Instead, they favored writing that emphasizes personal experience, or what James Berlin critiqued as writing that “[shapes] private rather than social versions of knowledge” (185). All issues of the private, Berlin identified in expressivism, allow access to consequential meaning. With this supposed rejection of social knowledge, Berlin summarized expressivism as the quest for authenticity, a quest that arrives via knowledge and discovery of the self at the expense of cultural knowledge. Being authentic, as the cliché attests, is being true to one’s self and writerly voice. “Authentic self-­expression can thus lead to authentic self-­experience for both the writer and the reader. The most important measure of authenticity, of genuine self-­discovery and self-­revelation, furthermore, is the presence of originality in expression; and this is the case whether the writer is creating poetry or writing a business report. Discovering the true self in writing will simultaneously enable the individual to discover the truth of the situation that evoked the writing, a situation that, needless to say, must always be compatible with the development of the self” (485). Berlin established the general opposition to personal writing for contemporary pedagogy. When academic thought eventually rebelled against the expressivist rebellion (as each wave within the discipline rejects the previous position), personal writing became an object of scorn within scholarly discourse. Even as many academics in writing studies wrote from the position of the personal (Linda Brodkey, Eli Goldblatt, Geoffrey Sirc, Keith Gilyard), and even as many critical theorists wrote from the position of the personal (Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida), personal writing became deemed unscholarly by a significant body of scholars because of the assumption that all personal writing is an exploration for a supposed “true self.” Given the cultural issues scholarship faces and explores, the personal or even “true self” does not offer enough importance. Even as the scholarly object of scorn, it is worth noting that the expressivists employed

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the personal for reasons not too distinct from Jameson’s definition of academic writing. For the expressivists and their focus on the self, writing about the personal reveals larger issues absent from our understanding of everyday encounters. Just as hermeneutics does, the personal, expressivists claimed, allows insight into another supposed layer of reality. The personal clarifies what is obfuscated. The personal yields what is important. Personal writing differed little from the hermeneutic tradition it rejected with the obvious exception of not engaging in direct textual research or cultural/historical context. Their goals are quite similar. They both believe in a layered and decipherable system of meaning that must be taken apart. I am not an expressivist. But when I was in graduate school, I was drawn to Macrorie’s work, even though I did not embrace the expressivist movement he was associated with. Drawn to critical theory—­even as many of its writers used the personal—­I demanded critical examination, complexity of thought, and a p erceived distance between writer and object of study. Still, I w as attracted to how Macrorie valued the personal alongside the study of writing because I could never fully reject the personal, even as I was attracted to critical theory. If there were one expressivist who could capture my attention, it was Macrorie. Maybe it was his curmudgeonly attitude toward the university; maybe it was his no-­nonsense approach to institutional issues; maybe it was his, at times, unconventional writing style (e.g., the diary approach to most of Uptaught or his calls for writing to be taught like a s eminar). Uptaught, in particular, earned Macrorie the bulk of his reputation as an expressivist; his interpretation of academic writing as Engfish, “the bloated, pretentious language” of the university, became a canonical position within composition studies (18). Macrorie mocks Engfish as a “say nothing language” preferred by academics who mask redundancy, jargon, and hyperbole as critique (18). Engfish, Macrorie argues, is embodied in the students’ class papers as well as in administrative communication and academic publications. Engfish, Macrorie warns, haunts pedagogy. My favorite passage from Uptaught has always been the moment a student approaches Macrorie and complains about his class’ support for personal expression, causing Macrorie to believe she prefers Engfish to what her peers are writing about during the semester. The student expresses her dissatisfaction with his course. “It didn’t offer any ‘hard-­core scholarship,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to listen to some sorority chick telling what she said to a friend in the cafeteria line.’ She was referring to a student-­w ritten dramatic dialogue that had been read in our class. Hard-­core. I thought of how the epithet has sounded to me on the tongues of the narrow-­minded and ignorant” (114 emphasis Macrorie). Macrorie is as quick to dismiss the student’s opposition to personal

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writing as expressivism has been quick to dismiss any kind of scholarship outside of the personal or nonexpressivist (much like James Berlin rejected the personal). Macrorie reduces a legitimate student complaint (another student’s banality and inconsequential topic does not interest her) to an epithet: a statement of contempt. He wants to understand the student’s reaction, or he tells his readers that he does. But he cannot. This student is worthy of Macrorie’s contempt because she wants a classroom and an education akin to what Macrorie understands as the stiff and unappealing academic, educational experience (i.e., Engfish). This student wants scholarly work. Macrorie, even though he teaches in a university, finds her desire to be inauthentic. Macrorie describes the complaining student further: “This girl was the rare student who feels close to her professors, who talks with them before and after class and is invited to their homes for tea. She had learned her contempt from the masters” (115). By wanting to discuss “important” matters, by wanting to be a part of the university structure, this student, Macrorie claims, has been interpellated into the very being we should reject and struggle against. Macrorie cannot sympathize with the student’s desire for something more substantial than personal writing because in this student he sees the entire institution of research and scholarship he rejects. She has learned her contempt from the masters, we are told (“contempt” signifying critique). She rejects her classmate’s banality because the university has taught her to do so, not because she finds a conversation in the cafeteria line boring. This moment, therefore, stands for Macrorie as a greater reality, a hidden truth, a prematurely naturalized, objectified fact. The student’s complaint reveals the pretentious behavior found throughout the university, Macrorie argues. In this student, Macrorie identifies all that he hates about higher education and the supposedly fake discourse it produces. This moment, for Macrorie, is hermeneutic, whether he likes it or not. This moment is one of critique. He has read this student as a text and produced an interpretation of her. In many ways, Macrorie translates the student’s complaint as a pre-­Jameson allegory. While I sympathize with both the student who has no interest in the banality of daily cafeteria conversation, I a lso sympathize with the professor who encourages writing about such banality. Both the banal and the “important” have a place in scholarly writing. My scholarly trajectory has tried to employ both gestures. Like Macrorie, I want the banal, but like the student he dismisses, I want that which is not banal as well. At what point, I ask, can banality be scholarly writing? At what point can a discussion of standing in line at the cafeteria yield a rich writing worthy of scholarly attention without resorting to the standby and commonplace practice of hermeneutics or decoding? At what point can we have it both ways?

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That question drives the initial declaration I b egan with: this is a s cholarly book. Even as I c laim to be a t heorist, I’ve spent a l ong time trying to make my writing have it both ways. When I first wrote about the juxtaposition of temporal moments in 1963 and rhetoric and composition’s history, I wrote about the discipline I belonged within (personal). When I wrote about Detroit and the narratives employed to define the city—­such as devastation/ rejuvenation—­I wrote about the city I worked and lived in for five years (personal). When I wrote about craft beer and social media, I wrote about my own obsession with both (personal). In that final effort, I felt I had succeeded to completely merge the personal and the object of study. I am, after all, a craft beer drinker, just like the beer drinkers I was writing about. I felt that I had finally and completely merged the personal with my object of study. I felt that way until now. Despite my ability to perform the scholarly, scholarly writing still frustrates me. This book is my attempt to write a personal scholarly writing. I call this writing authentic writing not because I t hink it is the authentic writing the humanities should endorse, but because I desire a form of scholarly writing whose personal/scholarly hybridity both challenges and accepts differing notions of authenticity, whatever these definitions may be. I am, of course, not the first academic to question what we mean when we make a claim for an authentic writing. I situate this book within a continuing conversation of academics frustrated with an overemphasis on specific discourses/genres that feel limiting (e.g., what Macrorie argued against) but not eager to abandon the research and theory that we write with and that informs our thinking. In addition, this book is not a lament for a loss of authenticity in writing or culture, nor is it a call for some kind of return, either to the expressivists or some other movement. When Benjamin mourned the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, he tapped into those nostalgic feelings that force us to believe that essence (or what we believe to be authentic) is lost in the contemporary situation we inhabit. Benjamin turned to technological innovation in communication in order to understand how aura has eroded. “For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it,” Benjamin writes of early twentieth-­century media’s effect on performance (“Work of Art” 229). Presence suggests the authentic. The presence of an object of study or of a sense of self can suggest the authentic as both speak to original experience. The expressivists, after all, believed strongly in original experience. They believed in voice as aura. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (222). Replication supposedly erases such presence—­ copy machines, film, television, sound recordings, and today, the Web. Benjamin also argues that “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has

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its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty” (224). Working from Benjamin’s notion of ritual and the perception of authenticity, we can also argue that an insistence on a particular type of scholarly writing follows this tradition. Corder’s sense of gods and rituals echoes Benjamin’s presence and authenticity as both are ritualized into writerly practice. The claim for an authentic scholarship is ritualistic. It assumes presence in the repetition of critical gesture, such as insisting that memoir (or any body of writing) reveal inequities in race, class, or gender. “The mere existence of a thing in a particular time and space is not enough to create an aura of authenticity,” Russell Cobb writes (5). Existence does not equate value or aura or even authenticity. Authenticity is ideological. It is fleeting. It is based on interactions (human and nonhuman) that tag a given item as being authentic or not, or that tag our perception of the authentic. “Authenticity becomes not just an evocation of a certain time and space; it has the added burden of being synonymous with the Truth” (7). When Cynthia Franklin demands that academic memoir be read for the presence of critique, she is equating the academic’s personal writing with a quest for Truth. She is arguing for an authentic memoir, one that must critique and unveil reality for its readership. Without the presence of cultural critique, she claims, the personal memoir lacks authenticity; it has no aura. This book, instead of following such an ideological position, offers another type of thought process regarding what might or might not be authentic—­ the ways we write, the practices we adapt, the beliefs we subscribe to—­v ia an exploration, among other things, of the most unscholarly topic one might embrace: traveling and eating with one’s kids. In that sense, I shift questions of authenticity away from the Benjamin-­inspired presence of critique or race; class, gender, or hermeneutics; or allegory or any other tool frequently employed in rhetorical studies. I look closer at the banal, the everyday, the hybrid, the contradiction, the supposedly least authentic topics one might explore in a scholarly book. I do so not to be hard core or to write against the hard core. I do so because the banal offers its own authenticity to writing. And why this focus? If there is any topic that might evoke the unscholarly, I’d think it would be traveling and eating with one’s kids. After all, our rituals regarding writing seldom include writing about our children. We might analyze children’s speech patterns or behaviors, we might create metaphors from the topos called “children” in order to explain psychoanalysis (think of Freud’s fort-­da example), or we might extrapolate from children’s games in order to propose pedagogical methods, but do we ever write about any of these children-­based concepts from an approach other than that ritual of herme-

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neutics or critique? In other words, which of these examples draws from one’s own children and the inconsequential bullshit often associated with parenting? None. I can write about my children, for instance, without either romanticizing their gestures or arguing that their behavior stands for some metaphoric gesture. I can write about food or travel in similar ways. I am not writing memoir or a travel narrative, but rather proposing this project as yet another scholarly one. Children are not totally absent from theory. Critical theory has treated the text as the “child” of the author; the text is born, follows the author, and eventually becomes its own (as a child grows into adulthood). The child needs the parent (as the text needs the author), but also must distance itself from the parent (as the text must do as well). Elsewhere, children are negative signifiers of discourse. Derrida, employing his child/parent metaphor for writing, proclaimed, “‘Reproduction prohibited,’ which one can translate otherwise: no child” (Post Card 39). Without a child, one does not reproduce (reproduction also suggesting the repetition of a given meaning as true). Reproduction, then, is caught within the conflict of presence or authenticity. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes describes the scene of a marriage fight as “a way of taking pleasure without the risk of having children” (204). Imagine the scene Barthes displays: fighting—­which could be textual (fighting for meaning)—­is pleasurable because no children are present or will be conceived. Engagement flourishes without children. Barthes does not express concern over bothering or upsetting children; he is not worried that a lover’s fight will disturb children. Instead, he expresses the desire to be without their presence, to function at an original, authentic point of discourse where only the “aura” of an initial relationship exists (the pre-­children moment of a marriage or writing itself). Paul Elie places such beliefs into a historical conversation regarding the role of the father who felt a cultural need for distance. In the developing West, at least, men in eras prior to ours were kept at a certain distance from their families by a spread of social roles and expectations. Fathers were at work, or at war, or at worship, or at the club or the pub with (the expression is telling) “the boys.” A man was expected to maintain a certain distance from domestic life, a father from his wife and children. He who didn’t do so was made out to be something less than a man in full, even if his life was, as a consequence, fuller logistically and emotionally than those of his male counterparts.

Lack of engagement, it seems, would be the expected norm—­not only in writing but in life as well. Distance. Stay away. Children suggest domestication. Writing or life should not be domesticated. The risk Barthes alludes to suc-

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cumbs to that norm. Without children present, there is no risk, it seems, no challenge to whatever scene (or what Barthes elsewhere calls the situation of writing) we are placed within. Authentic writing is childless, or at least distant from children. But how can that be? At what point must kids (metaphoric or real) be considered a “ risk” in scholarly work or writing in general? Unlike Barthes, I take pleasure from the so-­called risk of having children. I take more pleasure from my experiences with my children than I d o writing about supposed cultural phenomenon, pedagogy, or digital rhetoric. I follow, to some extent, Andrew Leonard’s claim that children are meant to be shared—­in writing, via social media, through experiences. Sharing online, one part of our public imagination claims, risks a child’s safety because exposure is dangerous. When Leonard shares pictures of his children on Facebook, however, he believes that we are not risking our children’s safety but situating them within a larger network of engagement. Barthes, though, seems to view children differently, as outside of such engagement, actual or textual. “We are strengthening the ties that bind a larger community of family and friends together, embedding our stories and lives in contexts that are larger than those of the individual nuclear family or neighborhood street” (Leonard). Elizabeth Bastos, on the other hand, reacts differently, admitting that “there is a hunger in our culture for true stories from the parenting trenches where life is lived mud-­flecked and raw,” but the public sharing she once embraced online now feels as if she has “publicly disrobed” her kids. Privacy, as it is often presented, protects children. Writing, visual or textual, should shield children from any type of outward digital engagement. Engagement creates conflict. Many of these writers, despite expressed reservations, understand children via concepts of engagement. The Barthesian scenario distances children from engagement while the online situation strengthens engagement (for better or for worse). After all, Barthes calls that moment where there is no risk of children a “dialogue” (A Lover’s Discourse 204). What kind of discourse does not offer a metaphoric or real offspring? Do children, metaphoric or real, risk dialogue? Is writing about one’s own kids a risk (“Why should we read that?”) or a dialogue (a conversation with banal activities familiar to many). If one were to follow my Instagram account, there are only three types of pictures one would encounter as dialogue: pictures of beer, pictures of food, and pictures of my children. My kids eating ice cream in Tel Aviv. My kids in an airport Kentucky Fried Chicken in Zhuhai, China. My kids sweaty in some outdoor market. My kids in a brewpub. My own engagement, my sense of digital dialogue, overall, extends from the sharing of photographs or funny things my kids say or do to the writing I do for a profession. As a result, my children have ended up in my

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writing. My children have been intertwined within my own Barthian pleasure of the text that I earn a living from. The risk exists. So does the dialogue. This discursive engagement is never easy. Writing is never easy. Parenting is never easy. When I c onsider the so-­called hard-­core ways we engage our children—­in our writing or otherwise—­I think of an episode of Louie where Louis C. K.’s character Louie is grocery shopping with his two daughters. I think of this episode because I am always grocery shopping with my kids. As they begin the process of checkout, Louie has to shit. The banality of grocery shopping suddenly transforms into a bathroom emergency. “Do you have to poop right now?” his daughter asks. Louie begins abandoning the groceries in a rush to leave. As they make their way home and are turned away from a shop owner and a disinterested police officer who will not help, Louie holds in his shit and grimaces in pain. They abandon more and more groceries, throwing them into the street, his children’s panic greatly increases, and finally an exasperated Louie, no longer able to hold it in and too far from home, shits his pants. His children cry out for him, but all he can say is “Don’t look at me” (“A La Carte”). This scene captures the risk of parenting and writing. Its place in the larger narrative of the episode is never clear or explained. The shitting scene conveys the risks we encounter when trying to parent, trying to be professional, trying to participate in the banality of everyday activities, and trying to write. “Don’t look at me,” Louie says. In many ways, that moment of parental failure expresses an authenticity one would not usually experience in a comedy show. The dad shit his pants. When do dads shit their pants on a TV show? Nor would one experience this authenticity in academic writing. What moment of writing, after all, asks us to look away from bodily or expressive failure? What writing accepts the dialogue (emergency with children) but does so in a w ay that there is risk (making one’s self vulnerable during the banality of grocery shopping). Don’t look at me. And yet, look. Whatever risk Barthes imagines children pose, it seems to be about nothing. There is no follow-­up to his issue with children and risk. No explanation. Perhaps Barthes, like so many other academics, merely is annoyed at the thought of children or their metaphoric value for writing. I take pleasure in my children despite my embarrassments (though none have involved shitting my pants). I see my embarrassments in ἀ e Onion’s headline “Father Teaches Son How to Fly into Rage over Completely Inconsequential Bullshit.” Being a father does not necessarily translate into romantic descriptions of fatherhood or the pride of raising a child, moments familiar to us via media representations such as Family Ties’ competent Steven Keaton or ἀ e Cosby Show’s eccentric Cliff Huxtable. These fathers never shit their pants in front of their children or flew off in rages over inconsequential matters. The risk of being a

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father and writing about being a father does not include those moments when one flies into a r age over nothing, such as a c hild not putting toys away or even eating his breakfast in less than an hour. Instead, nothing is very much part of the father experience, a n othing that assumes no authentic (or lost) original presence. There is always a “nothing” to get angry about: mess in the living room, unflushed toilet, markers left with their caps off, someone not eating dinner, food in the couch, trash in the car, one child hitting the other. Even more than the notion of rage over a child’s transgressions, though, ἀ e Onion headline resonates for me something else that opposes Barthes’ sense of risk: inconsequential bullshit. Whatever is inconsequential, or whatever feels like bullshit, often completes an average day of fatherhood or scholarly (and administrative) work, what we might attribute to Barthes’ definition of the so-­ called scene attributed to marriage but generalizable to other situations—­and even equated by Barthes with writing and the “sentence” (A Lover’s Discourse 206). “No scene has a meaning, no scene moves toward an enlightenment or a transformation. The scene is neither practical nor dialectical; it is a luxury—­ and idle; as inconsequential as a perverse orgasm” (207). Nothing to get angry about. A s cene without meaning. Idle. Inconsequential bullshit. Hard core. No scene has meaning. Writing is. Elsewhere, Barthes calls the informational meaning that we depend on to read photography (and we can add to photography the ability to read other media such as Instagram or Facebook) to be that “very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste” (Camera Lucida 27). Consider Authentic Writing, then, as a survey of the inconsequential, of bullshit, of parent shitting, or, to paraphrase the canonical summary of the TV show Seinfeld, nothing.

2

BANALITY

The two writers I draw inspiration from regarding the banal are Michel de Certeau and Roland Barthes. These writers have occupied spaces in my previous books as much as they will in this book. Both writers, in different ways, engage with banality as an object of study. “His endeavor is to react against a banality,” Barthes writes of himself. “And often what he must oppose is not the banality of common opinion but his own; the discourse which comes to him initially is banal, and it is only by struggling against that original banality that, gradually, he writes” (Roland Barthes 137). Barthes begins the Roland Barthes book with a series of banal photographs: his city, a garden path, him as a boy, the housemaid, his sister, his father, a streetcar. These photographs do not return in the book nor seem to play a role other than to be snapshots or scattered citations of the banal. “I have kept only the images which enthrall me,” he writes, “without my knowing why” (3). The banal enthralls Barthes even when its role in his life is not clear. We experience. Experience enthralls. Explanation is not needed. Still, Barthes clarifies that his childhood has generated in him boredom and “the dark underside of myself” (22). Banality is dark even if it attracts. But this banality, it seems, is based on “never figurative 27

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signs” (4). It is not metaphorical, not symbolic, nor is it an allegory of another representation. Unlike Barthes, I don’t see banality as something to struggle against or as dark. If traveling with children is a banal experience, I do not struggle against it. In fact, it becomes the topic that gradually I write. It is the image I build around. It is what enthralls. This discrepancy or contradiction that exists among struggle, darkness, and enthrallment is central to questions of authenticity. The banality Barthes centers his writing around is not a pure thing; it consists of, at times, opposing forces. Despite the struggle he supposedly endures, therefore, Barthes writes his banality with what appears to be pleasure. He offers never-­ending lists of banality: showering, going for a walk, getting his hair cut, listening to the radio, or making dinner constitutes a g reat deal of what he called his autobiography. “Everything,” he writes, “circulates in familiarity and reflexivity” (Roland Barthes 49). My initial rationale for Authentic Writing was to avoid the repetitive nature of critique, a r epetition that becomes banal over time when race, class, and gender become the sole lens through which one maps experience. This repetition, for me, is a struggle. But what about showering? Going to the bathroom? Making dinner? These acts repeat as well. They are not struggles. Barthes notes that “political discourse is not the only kind to repeat itself, generalize itself, exhaust itself: as soon as there is a mutation of discourse somewhere, there follows a vulgate and its exhausting cortège of motionless phrases” (53). Critique, whose enigma-­based deciphering equates Barthes’ political, becomes commonplace, or a mere discursive stereotype in ways showering does not. The political exhausts; making dinner does not. “The stereotype can be evaluated in terms of fatigue. The stereotype is what begins to fatigue me” (89). Stereotypes, we are often told, need to be interpreted, demystified. That, too, reflects repetition. “When demystification is immobilized in repetition, it must be displaced” (71). Otherwise, fatigue sets in. A vulgate. Routine motionless, phatic phrases no different than everyday activities that repeat from day to day, month to month, year to year. These are the rhetorical moves whose displacement he calls for. What may appear unique (I wake up, I go to work, I write, I eat) is an act of repetition. I do these things every day. They are familiar. They repeat. A list captures that repetition for Barthes. These lists do not suggest struggle against the banal, but instead frame the Barthesian writing situation as banal. Our everyday encounters, Barthes suggests—­what we eat, what we do, what we see—­ can be categorized as lists. These lists do not need embellishment or explanation. They may not offer causal connections or logical organization. Under the heading “La Fraisette,” for instance, we read a scattered list of “drinks one drinks all one’s life without really liking them: tea, whiskey,” and “in recalling

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the little things he had been deprived of in his childhood, he found what he liked today: for instance, iced drinks (very cold beer)” (Roland Barthes 96). Under the heading of “French,” Barthes tells us, for some reason, what kind of fruit is pleasurable: “A predilection for pears, cherries, raspberries; somewhat less for oranges; and none whatever for exotic fruits such as mangoes, guava, lychee nuts” (96). With this list, Barthes assumes his audience cares what kinds of fruit he likes and what kinds he does not. Why does he like these fruits? What do they mean for him? Do they signify French culture? Are they authentic fruits? Does he really prefer pears to guava? We can believe him or not, of course. We can believe that these lists—­especially when posed as autobiography—­represent the “real” and authentic Roland Barthes. Does Barthes really hate mangoes? Is it important for us to know this fact? What is the fictive Barthes, and what is the “real” Barthes? These types of lists, in other words, allow Barthes to question authenticity and its relationship to writing. “When I pretend to write on what I have written in the past, there occurs in the same way a movement of abolition, not of truth. I do not strive to put my present expression in the service of my previous truth (in the classical system, such an effort would have been sanctified under the name of authenticity)” (56). For Barthes, writing is not obligated to follow the genres and conventions (“the previous truth”) that have long dictated scholarly work (including his own studies of structuralism or literary criticism), and that have defined the work’s status as authentic or not. Barthes, he confesses, is distracted from this legacy. The scholarly fails to keep his attention. He is overcome by the commonplace instead, such as what fruit he likes. He is overcome by what appears to be booing. Another list describes distractions: “Here is the list of distractions I incur every five minutes: a mosquito, cut my nails, eat a plum, take a piss, check the faucet to see if the water is still muddy (there was a breakdown in the plumbing today), go to the drugstore, walk down to the garden to see how many nectarines have ripened on the tree” (71–72). Or we might consider Barthes’ overall fascination of situating lists and the banal as simply a matter of what he likes and what he does not like. “I like: salad cinnamon, cheese pimento, marzipan, the smell of new cut hay . . .” and “I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord . . .” (116). He adds, “I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone, this, apparently has no meaning” (117). Likes and don’t likes are boring. But they are also markers of some semblance of being authentic. What do we make of these lists Barthes offers? Is there any significance to their appearance as writing? Are they the stage of writing degree zero, writing without meaning? Are they aggregations—­collections of items—­t hat signify an assumed singular identity called Roland Barthes? “It is certainly when I di-

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vulge my private life that I expose myself most,” Barthes notes (Roland Barthes 82). I want to believe that these lists are Barthes’ private life (he pisses, he eats a plum, he checks the water faucet), and that by reading through these random lists I learn about a writer whose work I admire (just as I want to believe someone will learn about me from reading this book). Or I w ant to believe that these lists indicate the final step of removing ourselves from critique and hermeneutics: the moment “which obliges others to endure me liberally” (117). Liberal readings take the place of those outside of expectation or disciplinary need. The Barthesian private life—­t he exposure—­is not presented as a romanticized moment. That private life, whatever Barthes means by italicizing it, whatever he means by exposure, is often banal to the point of boredom. “I make myself some black coffee. I smoke the day’s first cigar. At one, we have lunch; I nap from one-­t hirty to two-­t hirty” (Roland Barthes 82). A day of monotony exposes, it seems, a greater boredom. There is nothing “hard core” in this boredom. If there is a narrative, it is merely the updating of trivial matters. We call that boredom the everyday. I could replicate Barthes’ model by noting the details of my own random list: I make my kids’ breakfast, I make coffee, I work out at the gym, I sit in my office and no one comes to see me, I drink a beer, I pick my kids up from school, I make dinner, I tell my kids to stop yelling at each other. I oblige others to read me liberally. But the overall rhetorical effect, for me, is not the same as Barthes’. My lists don’t perform the exposure I i dentify in Barthes’ work. What I l earn from Barthes is not to reproduce the list as banality (mere stylistic appropriation), but rather to embrace and try to perform a banal writing as authentic writing (the heuristic or invention move). De Certeau, on the other hand, triumphed the everyday—­from walking to eating—­as a t ype of rhetoric, a p ractice of making and understanding meaning so that rhetorical strategy could be replicated. De Certeau does not struggle against the banal. How do people “make,” de Certeau asked, from “the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers and so on?” (xii). Part of de Certeau’s approach was to emphasize storytelling. Stories, de Certeau argued, organize everyday experience. “Every day they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentence and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). Our lives are shaped by stories that organize physical and conceptual spaces as trajectories—­movements of ideas and thought. In these spatial trajectories, De Certeau, at times, focused on space, food, and travel as the center of storytelling. “Every story is a t ravel story,” he noted (115). “Everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They

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are treatments of space” (122). Space provides access to stories. Within a given space, interactions shape stories (and thus, rhetoric). That space might be a city, a restaurant, a store, or a yoga studio. That space might be food such as a sandwich or a s alad. That space might be writing itself—­t he website, the paper, the book, the recipe, the itinerary, the list. I’m not sure what stories Barthes’ lists shape other than boredom. De Certeau’s everyday is more active. It transforms. It creates. “Space is a practiced pace. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a p articular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs” (117). Stories transform spaces because of how we interact within those spaces and the signs that fashion a space into a system. A classroom. A public bathroom. A falafel shop. A grocery store. A jar of mayonnaise. There are a multitude of signs we engage with in a g iven space, including our own. Some of these signs have accumulated stereotypical meanings (e.g., what a c ondiment should cost or where it originated). Others become re-­created in our telling of a space’s signs (e.g., what we did or where we went or what we can to believe). The individual has a role in the telling of space. The street is transformed by the walker. The kitchen by the cook. The classroom by the teacher. The home by the parent. The meal by the eater. In the stories we tell, we also discuss what we do, where we go, what we use. “Use must thus be analyzed in itself” (ἀ e Practice of Everyday Life 32). While food and travel suggest banality (an maybe even boredom) to scholarly writing, with de Certeau there is no Barthesian sense of listing monotonous activities. Instead, de Certeau views the everyday as a series of strategies and tactics in which individuals manipulate, construct, force, acquiesce, and so on the very things they encounter; these interactions produce meaning. Strategies involve the presence of power and the totalization of discourse. Tactics, on the other hand, lack power but often respond to it in the practice of the everyday. “Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong’ and art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf” (40). De Certeau finds in the banal a response to power. A space maintains power over those who walk through it, shop in its stores, and study in its universities by controlling how interactions might occur. Spaces attempt to control meaning—­space indicative of areas as diverse as the written page or a physical entity. A story counters a given dominant meaning by employing objects, practices, situations, and so on in ways often opposing to the space’s planned structure. “The narrativizing of practices is a textual ‘way of operating’ having

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its own procedures and tactics” (78). A story makes, de Certeau insists. When I enter a falafel stand, grocery store, or restaurant, the story I tell of my experience makes that space, and it often does so in a way that was never intended by the space itself. “The story does not express a practice. It does not limit itself to telling about a movement. It makes it” (81). Unlike Barthes’ lists, which may tell stories about a s pecific day but do not act as tactics, de Certeau’s reading of the everyday is meant as such a rhetorical strategy. His canonical view from the World Trade Center attempts to retell the totalizing narrative of urban space. Towering over the city, the World Trade Center totalizes space. It controls viewpoints. From below, the details and banality of daily life can counter that totalizing narrative. “Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible” (ἀ e Practice of Everyday Life 93). De Certeau’s readings are not as much hermeneutical as they are heuristics; they are meant to generate further thought. One does not interpret New York City; one utilizes the banality of the city for further writing and reflection. “People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper’” (105). Nothing is something. Waste produces meaning. What is inconsequential can become a tactic. De Certeau’s interest in travel, in particular, motivates a great deal of Authentic Writing. “We thus have the structure of the travel story: stories of journeys and actions are marked out by the ‘citation’ of the places that result from them or authorize them” (120). Imagine, then, a w riterly practice of citation based on interactions that might not meet expectation (what an academic book, for instance, should be or how it should be organized). A s andwich I ate. A grocery I shopped at. A city I visited. These brief citations construct a narrative when networked together. The spaces become spaces of writing. To engage that space, or the banal, I cite. My eventual citations—­where we ate, what we ate, where we drove, what beer I ordered—­may resemble a Barthesian list as story and not a traditional citation construction often called a “works cited.” These citations may also resemble Barthes’ concern with the stereotype as a reflection of the banal as many of them deal with the stereotypical interactions of daily life as a form of writing. “Frequently he starts from the stereotype, from the banal opinion which is in him” (Roland Barthes 162). Sitting in a brewpub. Yelling at my kids. Eating dinner. Reading Facebook status updates. Doing yoga. How banal is my life? As banal as such activities suggest.

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These banal moments are also stereotypes. They are generic assemblages of activities recognizable based on assumptions we might make regarding their makeup. What I search is not autobiography, not autoethnography, not memoir (critical or noncritical), not expressivist reflection. Just banality as a form of authentic writing. “The everyday banality” of living, de Certeau collaborator Pierre Mayol writes, “renders invisible its complexity” (ἀ e Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2 11). Beneath my forthcoming stories, there is complexity. This is not the complexity of hermeneutics but of networked interactions making visible the relationships I engage with and tactically produce. The invisible is the banal that we pass over as insignificant or not shaping meaning in space, in text, in performance, or otherwise. I, however, am not bypassing the banal. I am writing it, as stereotype, as reflection, as list, as citation. That banality begins with travel.

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Academics travel. We travel to conferences, we travel to give talks, we travel as invited speakers, we travel to do research, we travel to shop at large stores such as IKEA or Whole Foods that exist an hour or two away from where we live in small, college towns or midsize cities, and sometimes, we travel to take a vacation. In a given year, I might travel, as an academic, to Cleveland, Ohio; Tampa, Florida; Chicago, Illinois; Copenhagen, Denmark; Brooklyn, New York; and Tel Aviv, Israel. I might travel alone or with my family. I might give an invited talk, participate in a conference, or do research. And I might do other things as well. During a trip to Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 2014 where I was invited to give a talk at University of Northern Iowa, my host, an academic friend, drove me an hour and a half north of Cedar Falls to Decorah, Iowa, so that I could visit the Toppling Goliath Brewery. Then we drove an hour and a half back to Cedar Falls so that I could give my talk. Along the way back to Cedar Falls and with a few beers in my belly, I asked my host to stop the car along a row of cornfields. I had to urinate. Urinating along the side of the road somewhere in Iowa among the cornfields and open sky, I recalled Roland Barthes’ comment that he loved to uri34

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nate in his garden. “If I observe—­and I a m eager to observe it—­t hat in the country I enjoy pissing in the garden and not anywhere else, I i mmediately want to know what that signifies” (Roland Barthes 151). Except, even if he says he does, Barthes does not want to know the greater signification of urination. Signification for Barthes, who devoted so much effort to understanding meaning, has reached its limit. Not every act demands explanation. One simply urinates. Urinating is pleasurable. Urination is an obligation (my bladder is full). That is the extent of this act’s meaning for him. In the same section of his pseudo-­autobiography, Barthes is adamant that he does not want to make “the simplest facts signify” or to declare that all things “shudder with meaning” (151). Barthes, instead, celebrates and showcases the banal, as it remains banal and not interpreted. He notes a haircut he has just paid for or a nap he has taken. Without explanation or commentary, Barthes lists the everyday as a worthy subject for its mere mention. Along those lines, urination does not have to be defined. It can remain banal. A moment of pleasure, such as urination, Barthes felt, resists interpretation. Unlike the textual study that eventually bores him, Barthes eventually turned his attention to those things that do not require interpretation, urination being just one. Interpretation is the scholar’s greatest temptation. It is tempting to interpret why a C al State Northridge math professor urinated on his colleague’s office door in 2011 (“Professor Accused”). It is tempting to interpret what Mark Sample means by his pedagogical anecdote of a college mentor’s threat to urinate on him for lecturing. “Doc warned us that if ever we were to lecture more than 10 minutes, we’d feel a stream of hot liquid flowing down our head and back; this would be Doc, urinating on us.” It is tempting to interpret Cathy Davidson’s anecdote about taking a urine test for her teaching position at Kansai Women’s College in Japan. “The medicine I was taking for a minor bladder infection happens to turn my urine an exquisite azure color, reminiscent of the sky in old Japanese prints” (36 Views 6). The temptation exists, but like Barthes, I resist. I resist because I find such interpretations boring. Like Barthes, I discover pleasure in simply urinating—­in a garden or on the side of a road in Iowa after a few beers. Road trips are often marked by moments of urination. Tom Wolfe describes the fanatic Merry Pranksters as having “to pull into gasoline stations to go to the bathroom, cop a urination or an egestion” (81). Even with all of his documented and fictional accounts on the road, Jack Kerouac hardly mentions urinating; yet Paul Maher’s biography of Kerouac notes that when making the rounds of Lowell’s bars, Kerouac “continued his slovenly habit of public urination and was often arrested for it” (462). My kids, for some odd reason, never seem to have to urinate when we stop at rest stops along a highway. My son can

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hold in his urination for an entire day. If I begin the trip with coffee, I will have to urinate within the hour. If I stop at a brewery, I will have to urinate within a half hour upon leaving the brewery. And then the next half hour as well. This information is, no doubt, boring and not hard core enough to be included in an examination of authentic writing. When we stopped in the cornfields of Iowa so that I c ould urinate, I felt that boredom Barthes associates with definition. Did I need to define this moment to my friend? To myself? I drank beer. I had to urinate. What was there to define? The urination moment, like those I briefly cite, is a fragment among other experienced moments centered around travel: the talk I gave, the flight there and home, the food I ate, the conversations I had. Barthes documented a great deal of his academic experiences via fragments and photographs. One notable photograph in Roland Barthes features Barthes on a panel at a conference. His dissatisfied facial expression reveals academic discomfort. “Boredom” reads the caption. Is Barthes bored by what he is hearing from his fellow panelists, or does he believe that he is generating boredom by his own talk? Is the conference itself boring? Is he bored with his audience? Is he bored with life? In much of his writing, Barthes appears to be fascinated with boredom. “As a child, I was often and intensely bored,” he writes (Roland Barthes 24). Barthes’ attraction to boredom arrives via fragments, as his own writing advice suggests. For Barthes, boredom is not a g rand gesture, but rather a series of small moments, abbreviated versions of spatial stories. “I have the antecedent (initial) taste for the detail, the fragment” (94). He reveals his overall writing strategy as “an idea per fragment, a f ragment per idea” (147). Many of these fragments are about being bored: “There is no situation involving some physical constraint (temperature, hunger, boredom, compulsion, disorientation) which does not give rise to dreams of wine” (Mythologies 60). “Writing, however, has no past (if society obliges you to administer what you have written, you can only do it with the most profound boredom, the boredom of a false past” (“Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” 205). “To be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going” (“From Work to Text” 163). “I am offered a text. This text bores me” (Pleasure of the Text 4). This topos of boredom frames the writing situation as a specific response to intellectual work. To be an intellectual, to be scholarly, Barthes suggests, is to be bored. “I speak in the name of what? Of a function? A body of knowledge? An experience?” Barthes asks (“Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” 202). I speak in the name of what. That sentence captivates me. I speak in the name of what? What do intellectuals speak in the name of? Race? Class? Gender?

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Social justice? Cultural phenomenon? Urination? Sometimes, boredom. Like Barthes, I imagine myself, at times, sitting bored on a conference panel, reading an article, listening to an argument, writing my own argument about some phenomenon. I imagine myself bored. I likely am. Boredom stems from repetition. “We are bored,” Benjamin writes, “when we don’t know what we are waiting for” (Arcades 105). With repeated exposure to an idea or moment without anticipation of what should occur, one becomes bored. To travel with your children on long car trips is to hear the repeated refrain: I’m bored. My children’s boredom, though, differs from Barthes’ boredom, though both are grounded in repetition. Barthes, like myself, seems bored with scholarly repetition, its preference for repeating ideology at the expense of content. “Nothing is so shallow as dogmatism,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes (191). Barthes, it seems, grows tired with dogmatism. My kids grow tired with time in the car. Boredom is not alien to academic writing. In addition to Barthes’ comments, boredom is a circulated trope often repeated through academic or literary moments. “Swallow up existence with a yawn. . . . Boredom!” Charles Baudelaire declares in the opening pages of Flowers of Evil (5). In ἀ e Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac asks, “Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is” (43). Boredom suggests discontent. Boredom contrasts with an engagement of the interesting. Boredom is historically associated with modernity, urbanization, and industrialization, as if this network of forces brought together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced people to finally experience the everyday as the same or as repetitive. When the same item, saying, belief, or work repeats, this logic dictates, we get bored. “Boredom,” Mark Kingwell writes, “amounts to a stall or block in the self’s relation to its world. Foiling this stall or breaking open the block can feel like emerging into sunlight after a long enforced darkness.” Boredom is ideological, Kingwell attests, largely blaming technology for this stall and endorsing art as the liberator of boredom. “The interfaces of certain devices and platforms are specifically designed to prevent satisfaction, even while promising it. Facebook’s endless feed, Twitter’s unrelenting chirps of messaging, the streams of texts from friends and co-­workers, the email inbox that never reaches zero—­t hese are all, philosophically speaking, versions of those feed boxes in rat experiments where an edible pellet drops with every successful push of a button.” Boredom sounds like a frivolous topic to a scholarly audience. “When I told colleagues that I was traveling 5,000 miles to attend a conference on boredom,” Randy Malamud explains, “the first reaction was, inevitably, a sardonic

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chuckle. But I a lso sensed that people felt on some level threatened or even scornful, channeling comeuppance on a group of scholars that they suspected might be trivial or trendy, or, even worse, flouting the taboo of that which shall not be named in our scholarly endeavors.” Malamud, like myself, questions how writing about the same topics, in the same repeated manners (like Kerouac lamenting repetitive, abusive behavior), can elicit anything but the feeling of being bored. “We are supposed to be seekers of original and unique truths, creators of new knowledge, but we spend a lot of time writing the same books (or books so similar as to defy distinction) over and over. War, Shakespeare, race, gender, culture, sexuality, unemployment: there’s nothing wrong with any of these topics, but, as Peggy Lee sang, ‘Is that all there is?’ Shouldn’t we be trying something new, something outside the box?” (Malamud). When we reflect on our interactions with the same, we become bored. Originality wanes, and repetition occurs. How many times, after all, can I tell the same story about race, class, and gender? At what point does this story lose its academic authenticity? Walter Benjamin understood boredom as the result of narrative’s demise as a c raft. With the loss of narrative and its complexity, Benjamin argued, we become bored. While Benjamin does not lament the repetitive nature of narrative (or even critique), he does seek out some form of writing that is “authentic” so that narrative either might be restored to an assumed glory or we might be saved from our boredom. Authenticity, and its suggestion of aura, is a claim to the novel and original, not the repetitive. To be authentic is to avoid repeating oneself. Of course, a great deal of Benjamin’s canonical lament of aura was tied to the problems of repetition, and repetition’s problematic effect on concentration. “Boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation,” Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller.” “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away” (91). Rustling equates disruption, and disruption suggests a newfound value. “The first form of boredom is the result of predictable circumstances that are very hard to escape,” Peter Toolney writes (4). “Boring becomes worse when a situation seems valueless” (5). Authenticity, in this case, suggests value. When we encounter value, we believe we will not be bored. Without value, without perceived meaning, we are bored. Such is my dilemma. Those positions repeated as truths, but which are often nothing more than repetitive phrases or words—­power, race, gender, hegemony, privilege, neoliberalism, capital—­have become, for me, valueless and shallow. Boring. “Besides,” Michael Jarrett writes, “I am not only bored by but suspicious of works that lay bare myths constructing the West. Demythologizing is most often an excuse for aggression” (Drifting 266). These positions’

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repetition speaks to the opposite of authenticity (or of possessing aura), even as these terms often stand in as scholarly placeholders of the authentic. While such words (race, class, gender) contain meaning—­and their meanings can be rooted in specific cultural, historical, or economic moments—­t heir endless usage as an indicator that all moments shudder with meaning renders them valueless to me. Their aggressive presence in a critical text, Facebook status update, tweet, or conference paper has no value beyond its placeholder status. The repetitive word or phrase does little more than mark the speaker/writer as authentic to an assumed audience (usually one who holds the same opinion), even if the repetition is predictable (authenticity often suggesting the opposite of predictability). As a placeholder, such terms do not offer representation (they do not stand for some existing thing) but instead are nonrepresentational (they function as pure repetition). The terms hold the place of what they profess to represent (e.g., a problematic moment), but through repetition, these terms shed value or the very meaning they claim to circulate. The repetition, as Benjamin would argue regarding aura, destroys the argument as original or insightful. “Being original” Alf Rehn writes, “is both strenuous and difficult. In order to be original, you have to understand your field, read tons of bad studies and hackneyed papers, go to boring conferences” (3). Even the possibility of originality, then, can be boring. “Boredom always contains a critical element,” Lars Svendsen notes, “because it expresses the idea that either a given situation or existence as a whole is deeply unsatisfying” (22). Keywords such as race, class, or gender dominate texts that attempt to explain a variety of unsatisfying situations (racial and gendered oppression, power structures, racism) but which, for me, fail to do anything but bore me. Because of their repetition, nothing is being revealed or laid bare, as Jarrett might claim. My boredom is not at racial or gendered oppression; instead, it includes the response “heard it before” but also the response to a p redictability and repetition Benjamin believed dilutes aura or authenticity. The conference moment of cortical declarations may offer the representation of authenticity (traveling to a city to give a paper, publishing) but can often generate nothing more than being unsatisfied. A panel in a h otel room in a l arge city. A r eception. An awards ceremony. A group of academics huddled around a hotel bar overpaying for Sierra Nevada Pale Ales and Budweisers. Phatic conversation. A publisher’s event. The book display. Another critique of a m ovie or book not accurately representing a culture or ethnicity. These are deeply unsatisfying moments because of their repetition. Often critique of the academic conference ignores critical repetition and focuses on delivery (reading of papers) or overall presentation (PowerPoint slides). “With the occasional exception,” Duncan Green comments on

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such activities, “my mood in conferences usually swings between boredom, despair, and rage.” Delivery and presentation, though, compete with repetitive content for a lack of attention. What we have accepted as scholarly, for me, is boredom. Talks without aura. During my own panel once, bored and after a few beers consumed at lunch, I left in the middle of one of my co-­panelist’s presentations, walked down the long aisle toward the door, and exited to the bathroom to urinate.

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I speak in the name of boredom. I speak in the name of boredom with Jameson’s hermeneutical or Macrorie’s hard core. I speak in the name of boredom with repetitive academic keywords. Being bored, though, does not offer me an alternative for scholarly writing. Being bored does not offer me a sense of what I want to speak in the name of—­as if I will give this boredom some content worthy of thought and thus transform the writing space into one of interest. Barthes, as well, does not offer an alternative to either what bores him or to boredom itself. He informs us that he is bored, he lists the activities that distract him from boredom, but how does he work around this boredom? Maybe he doesn’t. Barthes’ nod to boredom encapsulates much of what bothers and fascinates me. He offered little as alternative to being bored other than to write about what most of us would consider boring as well: day-­to-­day activities lacking any obvious importance. One alternative to boredom, as I previously alluded to (though not for my kids), is travel. Nevertheless, sometimes, and even with my own roadside urination in Iowa, academic travel is boring. Sitting at dinner with people who often don’t know my name or why I am on their campus. After the given talk, 41

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answering questions that have nothing to do with the talk’s subject matter (“I understand your overall point, but what about race?”). Responding to how my semester is going or whether it gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer where I live. A ride to the airport—­no one talks. Sitting with an assigned campus guide and a cup of coffee—­silence. In Pulp Fiction, dining in Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Mia asks Vincent: “Don’t you hate that? Uncomfortable silences.” Silence suggests boredom. I have nothing to say to you. So, we sit. Boredom in these situations is uncomfortable. If I have traveled to see you and talk with you professionally, why are we uncomfortable? I wish I had troubled to write down all of my experiences of traveling as an academic. Not that I have experienced anything out of the ordinary or beyond the typical tales of mistreatment during job campus visits, confusion over restaurant bills that exceed the amount of money friends had placed on the table before leaving, eating in overpriced steakhouses in touristy downtowns because nobody wants to venture far from a conference hotel, waiting in long lines at Starbucks in the conference hotel because few downtowns have local coffee shops anymore, experiencing boredom during dinner conversations or while overpaying at a hotel bar, or even the need to urinate on the edge of a cornfield in Iowa. I wish I had detailed these moments somewhere in my notes not because they are extraordinary and worth remembering, but because they are so banal and so repetitive that any insight I c an gain from their occurrences would be owed to the details I have now long forgotten. The details, I believe, would spark my memory, would flesh out the overall story, and would provide me with just the right anecdote to share. Anecdotes provide insight into the human experience. The details of my anecdotes would provide evidence of something of value. The details would confirm the importance of a book that clings to a fairly banal sentence: Academics travel. The details would bring that sentence to life via personal anecdotes or memorable encounters that, in turn, would stand for a greater or forgotten reality. Michael Bérubé, writing in ἀ e Chronicle of Higher Education, offers one such anecdote. Bérubé recalls a travel experience in which his university hosts booked him far from campus in a Hampton Inn, abandoning him to find his own dinner options. Left alone, Bérubé reflects on his search for something to eat: “Clambering over the concrete divider to the road, I realized that I had only two options within hailing distance, Burger King and Gyro King. I chose the local king.” When I picked Bérubé up at his Columbia, Missouri, hotel for a talk he was to give at the University of Missouri (where I once worked), I took him to neither a Burger King nor a Gyro King. In fact, I have never stopped at a Burger King, a Gyro King, or any other king in my academic travels. During a job visit to a small private college in Orange County, California,

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I spent two days not having a single meal with one of the tenure-­line faculty. For lunch, I w as told: “We have a m eeting we have to attend. You can find something to eat on the nearby street.” When I travel for academic events, I often leave home with premade sandwiches or, if stuck in an airport, search for the least noxious-­looking sandwiches available: on a bagel, from Rick Bayless’ O’Hare Tortas Frontera (a long line stretching down the corridor past various gates), or just something on bread with cheese. I was once left in a Hampton Inn in Bloomington, Illinois, with no breakfast options other than the cereal dispensers in the hotel’s dining area or the Starbucks two parking lots over. I, unfortunately, climbed over a cement barrier in the hotel parking lot and chose the Starbucks. They were out of breakfast sandwiches that morning. My wife and I, both academics who work in the same area of study and who are employed by the same department of writing, sometimes travel with our kids. We are academics who value being with our children and often associate our academic lives with having children. Where we go and what we eat demand as much attention as what we study and what we teach. Both of our children were born into the academic lifestyle. They were born in college towns, though not in university hospitals: State College, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, Missouri. Both of our children have learned the word “campus” as part of their daily vocabulary. Both of our children have sat in department meetings and even meetings with the dean on a r egular basis. Both of our children are, as the commonplace expression goes, “academic kids.” As academic children, they may not be easily divided from the scholarship we do, no matter what we write about nor where we travel for work or for leisure. They are also not divided from the food we eat on campuses or on the road at academic events. On campus, my daughter consistently insists to be taken to the Starbucks at the Student Center so that she can get a treat and a hot cocoa. She associates trips to the University of Kentucky campus as twofold: hot cocoa and the computers in our offices. Food and computing. Beverages and writing tools. There is something more to this juxtaposition than a b asic anecdote, I believe. There is something suggestive of a l arger situation in which food and writing merge, but not through conventional approaches to writing about food. Instead, the anecdote suggests children, or my children, are central to such an overlap. “Children are the enemy of scholarship,” Jacques Berlinerblau recalls a faculty mentor once telling him. I’ve never felt that way. In fact, I have, on several occasions, attempted to incorporate my children into my scholarship beyond what a trip to Starbucks on campus might entail. For instance, I have written about my daughter’s eating in St. Louis as part of a larger concern with spatial meaning, and I have written about my daughter and the notion of what I call

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“menu literacy,” the practice of understanding meaning via the menu. I have written about both my children sitting in front of beer samplers at various brewpubs around the country in order to comment on the public sharing of imagery via social media. I’ve done so because of a concern I have regarding the question of what may or may not be worthy of inclusion in a given piece of scholarship, no matter how influential I feel that information to be. Issues of space, literacy acquisition, and social media are obvious places of scholarly inclusion. But if my daughter’s eating habits are important to a discussion on space, can I also include them? If a moment I experienced in a restaurant feels related to a given professional or culture dilemma, can it be included in the conversation? Such are the questions of not only scholarship, but of being a parent and an academic. What if, instead of being the enemy of scholarship as some academic positions might relate, children become the focus of a generic scholarship, or, at least, the exigence of a particular kind of scholarship that may involve travel, children, being an academic, and a t ype of scholarly writing not currently identified as academic writing? Such a question frames a central focus of this book. While not everything I d iscuss in this book will involve my children, children serve as a topos for what is supposedly not scholarly or academic. Thus, they become, as Berlinerblau notes, the enemy for specific academics. They annoy. They get in the way. They cry. They fidget. They distract. And, in the end, they are not what we write about. Kenny Shopsin, of the famed Shopsin’s restaurant romanticized by Calvin Trillin in ἀ e New Yorker, writes, “One of my redundant theories of life is that one of the reasons to have children is not to have the children but that it allows you to go through your life a second time” (259). My children are not the enemy of my scholarship, as some scholars may believe; at this point in my academic life (tenured, published, working in administration), they are allowing me to travel through my scholarship a second time, a time removed from the standards and conventions of writing I have mostly followed throughout my career. Academic writing, whose identity is tied to disciplinarity, is not necessarily scholarly writing, and scholarship, if it does not follow the disciplinarity identity outlined for it by academic fields, may not be considered academic writing by the audiences we compose for. This book is meant as a challenge to such concerns. My children are not necessarily exciting, and the travels we do together can be, at times, boring as well. Yet, I want to go through my life a second time via them, whether the subject matter is boring or not. Writing through your children, to most academic venues, sounds inconsequential. It does not sound academic. Shopsin, of course, was not an academic. He was a well-­k nown eccentric and loveable cook. But it would not

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FIGURE 2 My son eating chicken wings in Macau, China

be uncommon for an academic who is writing about food to cite Shopsin or to include his thoughts on food in a scholarly commentary on contemporary food practices. His statement, though, is partly my exigence in this book. Writing through your children, a t ypical academic might imagine, does not grasp the serious and important issues facing contemporary culture, our profession, and the university, issues that demand a complete understanding of a given phenomenon through scholarly writing. And yet, connected to this notion regarding writing about one’s children, scholarly writing should embrace the notion of the scholar, what Wayne Booth defined as one who “works as a member of many groups, belongs to a time and place, asks questions and performs tasks that are in no sense private” (ἀ e Vocation of a Teacher 50). These groups, whatever they may be, that Booth demands not be kept private could include the family as much as they could include the university. Writing about children could, then, be scholarly. As Booth notes, any scholarly subject

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is not private. Nor does the family experience need to be private to scholarly discussion. The family experience connected to eating and travel, as well, need not be kept private in scholarly writing. Gregory Ulmer identified family as one of four potential categories that shape identity. School practice, the discipline one becomes an expert in, popular culture, and the street all can be used within the other three categories. Other categories that help organize identity could substitute for these as well. Ulmer calls this heuristic scheme the popcycle. The popcycle is “the matrix of languages and administrative orders that every citizen learns, and that serves to interpellate (hail) or socialize people into the cultural order of their community (the nation-­state within literacy). The popcycle is so named to reflect the circulation of ideas or memes through all the institutions, with any of the discourses being a potential source for materials used in any of the other discourses” (19). In the popcycle, family serves as one space within a l arger intersection/network of cultural and writerly moments, moments that shape a given idea or discourse. Academics occupy the family space, Ulmer argues, whether they write explicitly about family or not. Family calls identity into being as much as any other area of the popcycle, but it does so via its intersection with these other areas. At that intersection, patterns form or objects, ideas, words, and beliefs overlap within a larger discursive network. The point of overlap is identity. In academic writing, we might think of the calling of identity, or what Louis Althusser called interpellation, as mostly motivated by discourse, the political, religion, the state, gender, or other tropes repeated as central to being. To include the family in this matrix, as Ulmer does, is to personalize what one would think should be personal: identity. In pedagogy, the popcycle offers an alternative to a writing that often bores students, the stiff academic prose the expressivists rejected and David Bartholomae praised in his canonical “Inventing the University.” With the popcycle, writers are asked and encouraged to incorporate into their academic voices these other areas of discourse vital to expression. University writing—­ generically framed as academic writing—­offers a very different understanding of expression. Academic writing allows Bartholomae to sanction a repetitive writing because of how it repeats the norms and conventions attributed to writing done in academic settings, and it does so even when the writer is bored. “They must learn to speak our language,” Bartholomae writes about students. “Or they must dare to speak it, or to carry off the bluff” (5). Writing is a bluff. A fakery. Cookery. Repetitive. Not authentic even if required. Such writing, though, is absent of the personal. Bartholomae advocates a writing in which the personal is outside of academic discourse. Describing one example selected from a set of student work, Bartholomae notes, “The writer was able

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to write that story when he was able to imagine himself in that discourse. Getting him out of it will be a difficult matter indeed” (15). To bluff, one needs to get out of discourse. Separate. Be removed from the object of study. Ulmer does not call for a purely personal writing in response to academic writing, but he does advocate being within discourse. Family—­or the personal—­is only one area of experience that shapes meaning. The other quadrants of experience always interact with the personal. In this interaction, there is overlap. In Ulmer’s heuristics, the overlap a w riter discovers among the four quadrants produces a pattern. The pattern offers insight. Without my family, I c annot offer any insight via my writing. But with only my family, I also cannot offer insight. I understand why my colleagues may want to keep their family lives private, but there are times when I don’t, and there are times when I can’t. There are times during my writing when, as Booth notes, I want to juxtapose the various groups I belong to—­university department, discipline, teaching profession, and family—­w ith the subject of my writing. I do so not because I am trying to engage the popcycle, but because I s imply recognize that family shapes my thoughts as much as these other areas of influence. To many, this may sound inconsequential within the parameters of disciplinary expectations whose reading habits often focus on race, class, gender, and other coded bodies of information that shape conventions of academic prose. Based on this limited definition of the scholarly as it is circulated throughout conferences, publications, and conversation, Booth writes, “Is it any wonder that when one eavesdrops on a g roup of experts in a g iven field, talking about experts in other fields, one hears a lot of contemptuous dismissal?” (ἀ e Vocation of a Teacher 314). That dismissal comes from an ideological position regarding what is or is not authentic scholarly work. It is too easy for a group of experts to dismiss an anecdote about my daughter eating factory-­made pastries at the campus Starbucks as inconsequential (much as Macrorie’s student dismisses another student’s anecdote about eating in the cafeteria). It is too easy for a group of experts to dismiss a b ook that emphasizes the simplistic sentence: Academics travel. These items don’t feel scholarly. These items don’t capture the affective meanings as scholarly, as a topos, projects. Regarding English studies’ notion of the scholarly, a field I h ave mostly been a member of throughout my career, Booth notes: “Perhaps the largest circle of those who claim to understand one another would be found in English and other modern language studies. Hundreds of thousands of us profess to understand just about anything that falls into our hands. But when we look more closely at humanists’ claims to membership in large circles of understanding, they appear pretty feeble” (ἀ e Vocation of a Teacher 315). I feel just

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as feeble when I attempt to understand why my children eat what they do. I feel just as feeble when I cannot talk my daughter out of that Starbucks pastry. I feel just as feeble when I attempt to explain my shift in writing from object of study to the idea of traveling and eating with my children. I f eel just as feeble at times when I encounter the disciplinary demand to understand everything, public or private, as grand, totalizing, or complete—­t he very point Booth approaches in his critique of humanist discourse. De Certeau called the desire to know everything or “see the whole” an “erotics of knowledge” (92). “I wonder,” he wrote, “what is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92). For Jameson, such a statement greatly counters his canonical notation of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which, he claims, “aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd” (Postmodernism 40). What is the source of Jameson’s need to totalize the Bonaventure? Why take a hotel and make it represent a hidden reality, such as the ambiguous postmodern collective Jameson reads into the building’s architecture? It’s a hotel. People sleep there. Conferences may take place there. It likely has a Starbucks. It could also represent an allegorical meaning, but it will still be a hotel. It does not need to be totalized. De Certeau asks us to look beyond totalizing spaces and gestures, and to pay attention to the banal. “Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible” (93). What is, in other words, the pleasure of only interpreting? In Jameson’s readings, and those who write like him, there is a pleasure of interpretation, a pleasure that asks writing to only interpret. I am interested in putting aside the totalizing gesture of interpretation in favor of the strangeness of the everyday, an everyday that is not as visible as we assume nor matter how familiar its subject (such as family)? What if the exigence for my contemporary scholarly writing is not to enter the large circle of understanding but is as inconsequential as an aside or a brief thought: we are academics; we have to travel; we sometimes travel with our children. What if children might be, to paraphrase Lloyd Bitzer, a generic rhetorical situation for one type of academic writing whose scholarly value is outside of some of our disciplinary expectations? My exigence, then, borrows somewhat from Shopsin as I think through my children in order to present academic writing that, in many ways, is about academic writing and the desire to write scholarship from the position of more than one group I b elong to. This writing, as I d esire it, should not totalize

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or only interpret the activities, places, food, moments, and beers we engage with. Nor should my writing totalize writing. I do want it, however, to question writing and the group formations that shape visions of writing. That is, this book is about eating and traveling with my children (to some extent). But it is also a r ethinking of scholarship overall. Such rethinking precedes me by many scholars who have challenged, in their own writing, supposed conventions of academic writing by bending the nature of personal writing as metaphoric (Linda Brodkey), using metaphor to compare writing to the avant-­ garde or grocery store chains (Geoffrey Sirc), exploring an image as a chain of linked connections (Craig Dworkin), following a c hild’s artistic creation (Doug Hesse), relaying on choral associations (Gregory Ulmer), and so on. These are groups of writers who, following Booth, attempt to cross the public and the private. One group I b elong to might be professor. One group might be parent. Since academic year 2014–2015, I have belonged to the group called department chairs. Since 2007, I have belonged to a group that might be called “academics on Facebook.” For the most part, I imagine myself as somewhat part of a group called “foodies.” Within these networks of interests and activities, I am an academic. Some academics, such as my wife and me, are part of an academic generation who had children later in life. I was thirty-­seven when my daughter was born; I was forty and tenured when my son was born. I did not have to endure certain balances that untenured parents experience. My wife and I like to think that we are more mature parents for having children later in life than our own parents were (my parents were twenty-­t hree when I was born and just beginning to shape their professional lives). As we tell ourselves: We’ve experienced more. We’ve learned more. We understand more. We know how to explain to our children what something does or does not mean. We like to think that all of this is true. Whether we really are more mature than our parents were or that we grasp explanation better than others, what many parents my age do is foreground and share their experiences with their children. Thus, we travel together. Elsewhere, we extend the travel moment by sharing these experiences in social media spaces: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Instagram, Google Plus, Flickr, and so on. From the embarrassing to the proud, we want others to know about our experiences or understand what these experiences mean to us. My wife and I have found meaning in both our kids and in our digital lives. We juxtapose these moments eagerly, even as Henry Jenkins notes regarding online sharing: “We cannot identify a single cause for why people spread material” (13). I cannot explain or identify a single cause regarding why I share these moments. I cannot explain these juxtapositions. But I can guess some

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FIGURE 3 My son in Tel Aviv, 2015

form of value that might emerge from my sharing. A photo of my son standing in front of Rabin Square in Tel Aviv with his hands extended, shared on Facebook on June 13, 2015. Who cares? At least I do. So, I share it. Without digital sharing, my banality is limited to me. When we juxtapose food or travel with other moments of expression, moments that may have caused Berlinerblau’s mentor to curse children in general, a worthwhile writing project might await even if its rationale or end point is not clear. A scholarly writing might emerge. An authentic writing might await as well. With that point in mind, I note, in a very simple statement, that my wife and I like to travel with our children. In Lucky Peach, food writer Naomi Duguid describes traveling the world with her kids while on writing assignments. Duguid’s essay attempts to familiarize the unfamiliar experience regarding foreign travel with children; she instead wants readers to imagine family travel as a normal experience in which children see “the other” as merely commonplace. During these global trips that find her on assignment, her children

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enjoy foods that they would otherwise never experience: luchis, chapati, and other dishes. Eventually, her children find these foods normal as they learn to appreciate cuisines outside of their American comfort zone. My children have traveled abroad four times. Prior to that, they have been to nearby Cincinnati and Louisville more than any other city in the United States. Louisville and Cincinnati might more accurately reflect “the other” experience to them than their three weeks in Tel Aviv in the summers of 2014 and 2015, where they rejected the local cuisines of sabich, humous, and falafel. Duguid’s children have been abroad longer. After trips to Bengal, Laos, and other exotic locations, Duguid settles on the following observation: “I think that family travel made us all appreciate and like each other” (13). What was meant to be unfamiliar—­t he fish out of water narrative—­quickly becomes familiar for her readership. At the end of the fish out of water narrative, a conclusion is reached: We learned to like each other. As an academic, I m ight interpret this conclusion as an easy response to the complexity of family travel, a summation that offers little information other than a cliché or commonplace narrative gesture where everything works out in the end. “We traveled, we learned to love each other,” the cliché attests. I might interpret Duguid’s conclusion as a refrain of popular culture storytelling best summarized in the South Park “I learned something today” episode endings. Travel writing, even when unusual in focus, can still choose the easy way out regarding explanation. This challenge exists for academics as well. As an academic writer, I might summarize our frequent day trips to Cincinnati and Louisville as “We learned to appreciate and like each other” even when my then three-­year-­old son screamed in a restaurant or threw his food on the floor and we ended up exhausted with exasperation. I might explain our three weeks in Israel as “We learned how much we mean to each other” and not how frustrated I was that I could not get either child to eat falafel once.

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The easiest way for me to explain to an academic audience our family’s fairly inconsequential travels might not be to repeat Naomi Duguid’s reliance on familiar narratives of reacquaintance but instead to borrow a g esture from Fredric Jameson, who explained most cultural phenomenon via the concept of cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping is Jameson’s response to the complexity of globalism and the various conflicting meanings globalism raises for contemporary culture. Jameson argued that “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping is a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some heightened sense of its place in the global system” (Postmodernism 54). In a system of confusing political and cultural meanings, cognitive mapping (as opposed to basic critique) allows for a way to navigate one’s position among the various meanings typically encountered in architecture, popular culture, literature, and the political. What the popcycle grants Ulmer’s theory of identity formation, cognitive mapping allows for Jameson. Within a given performance of cognitive mapping, as Jameson outlines it, is theory. Traveling with kids, thus, would mean more than just traveling with kids. There must be some theoretical explanation for this travel. For Jameson, 52

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cognitive mapping produces the other level of meaning exemplified in the rhetorical practice of allegory, and allegory clarifies how the representational narrative (I traveled with my kids) explains an alternative, previously inaccessible to the casual reader, mapped narrative—­be it economic, historical, cultural, or something else entirely. Jameson applies this process to the highbrow early in his work (though later in his writings, he applies the same logic to popular culture texts): “There is of course no reason why specialized and elite phenomena, such as the writing of poetry, cannot reveal historical trends and tendencies as vividly as “real life”—­or perhaps even more visibly, in their isolation and semi-­autonomy which approximates a laboratory situation” (“Periodizing the 60s” 179). Poetry, Jameson reflects, might reveal “the concept of history” (180 emphasis Jameson). Jameson offers a strategy for understanding our relationship to various activities or events as narrative-­based mapping so that we do not believe that the first narrative, the encountered representation such as reading a poem or traveling with kids, is a mere representation and nothing more. A p oem indicates something greater than its initial reading, something totalizing, something grand in gesture. Every narrative, following Jameson, is really another narrative. When cognitively mapped, ἀ e Godfather, as Jameson tells us via one example of this process, reveals that the film’s diegesis is, in fact, a s tory of capitalism’s “moral corruption” and not just a narrative of an Italian-­American family negotiating personal relationships and organized crime (Signatures of the Visible 32). If I were to cognitively map my family’s travels, I m ight, then, find another allegorical tale—­other than learning to appreciate each other, balancing two kids at a conference, eating lunch, avoiding Starbucks, or driving hours in the car while my children play with iPads—­t hat allows me to explain some aspect of American culture or the academic lifestyle. That explanation might address the coding of experience and the so-­called hegemonic cultural control of daily life by various powerful entities. That explanation would work against the banal by transforming experience into something important, something authentic. That explanation easily could serve as scholarly writing. And, in fact, it has served as scholarly writing in such a manner, from Jameson’s work on to contemporary food writing. Allegories, however, do not reveal all or transform every experience into something important. “Allegories are alluring because they promise to light up inchoate objects, trace unimagined connections, and resolve ambiguities and paradoxes of human—­and more-­t han-­human and abiotic—­life,” Jason Pine writes. “At the same time, modern allegories reveal their own failure to cohere” (Pine). That failure, I contend, is explanation. Explanation is easier than it seems. A food writer settles on the cliché. A critical theorist settles on the problems of representation. Scholarly or essay

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writing need not result in settling. Explanation settles when I can quickly reduce a narrative to one of coding or encoding practices. A movie obviously is coded. Restaurants are coded. Travel is coded. Being an academic is coded. Being a parent is coded. My life is coded. Codes, Stuart Hall famously argued, are embedded in all aspects of communication, but often are obfuscated in their transmittal. ἀ e Godfather is hardly the only coded text encountered. All representations are coded. I am not interested in embarking on a narrative of explanation, one that, for me, takes the easy, disciplinary route of essay writing where critique and decoding are the focus, and where both pose that route as authentic, academic writing. Scholarly writing has long been held hostage by the demand for critique and decoding. As scholars, we often demand that every moment, in every essay or book, be subjected to the destabilization of one meaning (a supposed dominant meaning) for another (allegorical or otherwise). We expect things to shudder with meaning. As Hall writes, “Thus there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code. Iconic signs are therefore coded signs too—­even if the codes here work differently from those of other signs. There is no degree zero in language” (“Encoding” 95). No degree zero, a phrase borrowed from Barthes, suggests a state where meaning is neutral, where the text is without code (though later Barthes would suggest such a thing for imagery), where the presented meaning is not the actual meaning. Hall is concerned with “the structure of access” and how dominant meanings are reproduced because of uncritical reception (“Encoding” 101). Whether a particular reading is uncritical, however, is debatable and depends on the context, on the reading’s delivery, and on how we respond to any given situation. What we often ignore when focused on decoding dominant representations is the wondering and discovery relevant not just to travel, but to writing in general. Decoding erases a particular kind of rhetorical reflection. Decoding prevents writerly wandering. Decoding shifts writing about one’s kids to writing about something else entirely. When Michel de Montaigne created the essay and its focus on the personal, he invented the sense of reflective wandering the essay was meant to promote, what he called “meddling with writing” (“Of the Affection” 278), or what Edwin Duval refers to in Montaigne’s writing as “the gradual but radical shift in perspective over the course of the essay that in turn produces strange contortions and inconsistencies in its argument” (99). In one such inconsistent reflection, Montaigne wrote about fatherhood, a topic that serves as my own initial writing exigence. “If I did not live among them,” Montaigne wrote of his children, “I should at least want to live near them in a part of my house, not the most showy but the most comfortable” (284). I understand this proclamation to not only mean a physical house, such as the one I share with my

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children on the south side of Lexington, Kentucky, but the emotional, familial house we inhabit, one that is comfortable with its travels, but not showy regarding what we do or where we visit. I also understand this remark as the living “through your life a second time” comment by Shopsin that I previously highlighted. I am not always living alongside my children, Montaigne seems to say, but I may also live near them, or through them, in comfortable (if not obvious) ways. Even in that comfort, however, there is room for inconsistency, as Duval notes. After all, despite a call to be open, such as “I open myself to my family as much as I can” (288), Montaigne adds the very closed belief that women are “unfair and capricious” regarding the raising of children (290). I take these comments, with their inconsistent parenting observations and obvious sexism, their mixture of love and feeling repelled, to suggest an open essay writing that, beyond its ability to critique sixteenth-­century gender values (which I a void), can, if it desires, map onto its subject concerns of the family. This type of mapping is not necessarily easy because it cannot rely on the topoi of critique (decoding) to move through its subject. It cannot rely either on a settled outcome—­positive, negative, or otherwise. It can, however, meddle with writing. It can prefer the comfortable (exploration) to the showy (critique). Cognitive mapping, like other critical gestures regarding culture or meaning, often functions as the easy way out and, in this easy gesture, as the showy. Cognitive mapping abandons the narrative function of an essay by relying on the familiar gesture of critique. In other words, it obfuscates narrative (the story I want to tell) for a mere decoding (here’s why the story isn’t really the story). It would be easy, for example, to address travel and children by critiquing the fast food options we encounter when on the road or while waiting in airports. Baskin Robbins. McDonald’s. Hardee’s. Subway. Pizza Hut. These options are everywhere we go. They follow us, and other travelers, throughout the country; they transform our travels into banality by being where we are, no matter where we go. They even occupy the White House in 2017. The president of the United States, ἀ e Washington Post reports, eats only fast food, preferring Big Macs and fish sandwiches to more healthy or local options. “Trump’s appetite seems to know no bounds when it comes to McDonald’s, with a dinner order consisting of ‘two Big Macs, two Fillet-­O-­Fish, and a chocolate malted’” (Kranish). There is no escaping fast food no matter how I map fried chicken, hamburgers, and bad pizza. I could cognitively map Trump’s bad eating habits as the story of America’s bad voting habits, racism, or commitment to frivolity. Trump’s preference for McDonald’s could be cognitively mapped as the superficiality of American leadership and the preference for homogeneity in politics. My lamenting the presence of fast food restaurants,

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however, will not make these options vanish or stop people from frequenting these places, nor will it change Donald Trump’s eating habits or politics. Addressing the ubiquitous presence of fast food would, of course, allow for mapping as an allegory of the decline of American eating or the fall of American decency in the White House. Pointing out the abundance of fast food and franchise options along America’s highways and suburbs as indicative of the homogenization of food culture or the loss of American traditional cooking, however, is hardly a novel gesture. As Jameson famously writes, the postmodern age is marked by “the motel and fast-­food landscape of the postsuperhighway American city” (“The Politics of Theory” 112). Our landscapes are now franchises. Our time a massive postsuperhighway. Whatever preceded these atrocities (items likely far more authentic than what exists now) is now gone forever. The lament is strong. It’s also repetitive. Jameson could produce this map. So can I. This gesture, repeated by Jameson and many others, is an expected one among many academic audiences; it offers a topoi (commonplace) of critique that attempts to resolve a p roblematic situation by decoding inconsistency (i.e., how we eat or how we travel). Critique irons out the inconsistencies we experience and encounter by overpowering breaks in logic or argument so that a reader might eventually understand the proper path to follow, whether in politics, in ideology, or in consumption. Topoi are commonplaces of expression we reach for when positioning arguments and narratives. Their repetition establishes a belief, idea, or supposed fact so that the audience identifies familiarity. These topoi stabilize narratives (they make academic storytelling a familiar experience for academic audiences). These topoi are comforting. If capitalism or neoliberalism—­common academic topoi circulated within critiques—­are to blame for our cultural problems, then pointing a finger or pointing out an inconsistency becomes easy to accomplish because the terms are familiar and repeated into meaning. Critique is a type of topoi for much of academic writing. Postsuperhighway acts as one such topos. McDonalds is another. Cognitive mapping, thus, generates topoi. Some examples illustrate my point. Among the many critics of food culture searching for and lamenting the loss of authenticity, George Ritzer maps the commonplace fast food critique for readers in convincing and broad fashion regarding the dangers fast food poses to travel. Ritzer has called our culture a M cDonaldization. What McDonalds has done for the hamburger (fast, cheap, homogenous), it has also done for every other aspect of our society. McDonald’s, therefore, is allegorical. “We no longer need to leave many highways to obtain fast food quickly and easily. Fast food is now available at many convenient rest stops along the road. After ‘refueling,’ we can proceed

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with our trip, which is likely to end in another community with about the same density and mix of fast-­food restaurants as the locale we left behind. Fast food is also increasingly available in hotels, railway stations, and airports” (ἀ e McDonaldization of Society 10). Ritzer’s analysis offers the tropes of ease and convenience as indicators of a lost culture of eating. Food was, in this assumed narrative, once prepared in methodical, authentic ways and not always obtainable as the same product each time we ate. Frank Lloyd Wright, writing against what he called “the machine” and in favor of the nonindustrial, nonhomogenized vision of craft, precedes Ritzer’s argument by several decades, but arrives at similar conclusions. “One may live on canned food quite well,” Lloyd Wright argues, “but can a nation live a canned life in all but the rudimentary animal expressions of that life? Indefinitely?” (109). Why should I c ritique fast food or industrialized food arguments when they have been made for me many times over? Fast food’s conquering of the nation’s highways and rest stops is a sticky idea, as Chip Heath might contend. Such a critique taps into an expectation regarding writing (the binary of good vs. evil or healthy vs. bad for you or capitalism vs. community) popularized in a variety of already encountered texts. I’m also stuck to its persuasiveness; the argument irons out food and travel for me as an easy escape; if I don’t know what to write, I will write about the problematic role industrialization plays in creating the same eating experience along the highway (and more generally, in our everyday lives). As John Thorne notes regarding the repetitive nature of fast food critique: “Selective revulsion can sometimes prove to be very contagious” (Mouth Wide Open 351). Neither Ritzer nor Lloyd Wright were the first (nor the last) to be repulsed by cheap food or homogenized culture. I don’t stop and eat at these fast food restaurants Ritzer and others critique; I don’t even eat fast food. Still, the claims bore me. They lack aura. Even if I a gree with the position, I don’t need to repeat the claim. Cognitive mapping or its variants, in some situations, is the rhetorical gesture of making a topos sticky so that a gesture is repeated. ἀ e Godfather is about capitalism. Fast food is evil. The story sticks to us. In that stickiness, the story and its familiarity (“fast food sucks”) comforts us, the academic audience. Thus, we repeat it. Repetition, however, can equate boredom more than insight. Eating is no exception to this process of creating repetitive, critical narratives. When William Least Heat-­Moon writes about eating in Frankfort, Kentucky (twenty miles from where I live), he, too, maps such a c ritical—­ and familiar—­gesture regarding fast food’s entryway into American culture. “Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill. After all, the year before, franchisers did nearly three hundred billion dollars of business. And there’s

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nothing wrong with that except the franchise system has almost obliterated the local cafes and grills and catfish parlors serving distinctly regional food, much of it made from truly secret recipes. In another time, to eat in Frankfort was to know you were eating in Kentucky” (16). Fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, as well, shares in this critique. Among his many writings on agriculture and food, Berry offers his own critical stance regarding fast food: “The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processes, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived” (Bringing It to the Table 286). The consumer is “passive,” the food a simulation of what was once real. By pointing such items out, Berry persuades his audience of its problematic eating habits, and that audience supposedly becomes enlightened eaters. They also, because of this sudden awareness, will consume less. The logic, though, is debatable. Berry also reminds us in these expected critiques he often delivers regarding the commercialization of food and the loss of the family farm that “the aim of consumers is to buy as much as possible” (“The Whole Horse” 246). Food, Berry shows, is part of hyperconsumption. In this type of narrative or cognitive map, industrialization, capitalism, and the rise of the conglomerate have destroyed a cherished and lost aspect of American life (the small-­time diner or local option) as consumer culture spirals out of control. The critical task is to return consumers into beings who don’t consume. The gesture is to make us more authentic human beings. Narratives of exploitation, injustice, commercialism, and co-­option are the easiest stories to tell among academic writing, whether the subject is food or something deemed more important or political. They are the easiest narratives to tell because they are the easiest ways to respond to the problems of everyday life and our typical banal expression over such problems on a daily basis. We normally do not fret over fast food or movie narratives; we consume them. Then we write about them differently than we believe the stories have been initially told. In turn, we generate a meaningful experience out of the banal. The Godfather has to b e about the exploits of capitalism. Fast food is destroying America. All of these movements and moments exist (franchises do dominate significant portions of the highway landscape; I hate fast food as well and prevent my children from eating it; franchises divert earnings away from mom-­and-­pop restaurants), and in many cases, we encounter these items daily and in multiple ways. Narratives of explanation, however, often do little to minimize the effects of problematic practices, even when such practices greatly affect our lives. Af-

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ter all, when faced with minimal options, Bérubé, a cultural studies scholar who understands and performs decoding, almost ate at a Burger King. I went to Starbucks. Friends once talked me into eating at a Taco Bell. My kids have eaten at Shake Shack and Five Guys. They drink soda! Even with Least Heat-­Moon’s and Berry’s critiques, which supposedly should influence local practice, fast food dominates Kentucky’s (and, of course, other states’) eating. There are at least twenty-­six Subways in Lexington. I have to think about that point for a second: twenty-­six Subways. If one really wanted a fast food sandwich in Lexington, Kentucky, one should—­regardless of political or food position—­be able to easily find a Subway wherever one is. There is a Subway on my campus. There is another Subway a few blocks away from campus. In my office, I see English department graduate students sometimes ignore Subway and buy Chick-­fi l-­A from the nearby campus food court. These are the same graduate students who critique homophobia and gender representation in literature and cultural texts while still purchasing chicken sandwiches from an anti-­gay corporation closed on Sunday in order to support Christianity. I cannot explain away Subway. I cannot cognitively map it in order to overcome or bypass it. Neither can these students completely explain away discrimination when they eat chicken fingers and fries. They want a chicken sandwich. What is a sandwich? Is it a cognitive map? Often, on our campus and elsewhere, a sandwich is without politics. Elsewhere, as I l ater note, a s andwich is only politics.

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As the University of Kentucky English department graduate students’ lunch preferences demonstrate, not every cultural phenomenon can be reduced to power or control. Behavior, such as daily, mundane tasks like eating lunch, can override our concerns with power. Eating, though, is often reduced to academic terms associated with the deconstruction of power. “Discourse. Materiality. Power” are the keywords used by the editors of ἀ e Rhetoric of Food to introduce their collection of essays that explain the “sociological, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical motives and consequences” of food culture (1). Discussion of food, Niki Strange writes elsewhere, “suggests the assumption that cookery programmes (and other lifestyle/leisure genres such as gardening and home decoration) are transparent: that they are merely about food and the instruction of cookery methods and, as such, do not merit closer examination” (252). Strange, in turn, explains these problematic representations so that we better understand the television representations we watch and internalize (which, it seems, we are oblivious to). Eventually, as critics such as Strange desire, we will realize the benefits of closer examination. Everything, therefore, deserves closer examination. Even Jameson has something to say 60

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about the coding of food and the need for closer examination. “Along with food, architecture may be thought to be a relatively late taste among North Americans, who know all about music and storytelling, have been less interested in eloquence, and have sometimes painted small, dark, secret pictures for suspicious purposes, redolent of superstition and the occult. But until very recently have not wanted—­for good reason!—­to think much about what they were eating” (Postmodernism 96). For some time, I have thought a great deal about what I eat. I think about what others eat—­and they ask me not to. I think about what my children eat as well. I l ive in Kentucky, and while I am not familiar with the local eating habits of Frankfort, where Least Heat-­ Moon visits, nor am I a s agrarian focused as Wendell Berry, I s upport local options and am familiar with the mix of fast food and local restaurants along the street aligning the University of Kentucky, where I work and where Berry once taught as well: Raising Cane’s, Subway, Fazoli’s, McDonald’s, and Hugh Jass Burgers can be found opposite the local restaurants of Sav’s, Han Woo Ri, and Pazzo’s. Whether these are late or new tastes to Kentucky culture matters little to me. These representations present eating habits among professors and students, residents, and visitors to Lexington. People traveling through Lexington—­w ith or without their children—­might stop at any one of these spots or the twenty-­six Subways throughout the city and experience one representation of Kentucky eating. That representation need not embrace eloquence, as Jameson calls for. Nor need it be decoded even if it is the repetitive representation of every other city in America. The representation, though, is experienced. Academics distrust representations. Representations are not natural; they are myths, Roland Barthes pointed out in the mid-­1950s. I have been taught to distrust representations, yet I possess representations of traveling with my kids, representations that only map, at their most basic level, banal moments in our travels: watching TV in a hotel room; eating at Hot Doug’s in Chicago; playing in Chicago’s Crown Fountain; arriving at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis before it opened; bland franchise-­hotel breakfasts of cereal and hard-­boiled eggs; my daughter asleep at Chez Panisse, my son sleeping in his stroller at Mile End; a tiny, crowded Hong Kong hotel room; Chinese strangers in Shanghai asking to take photographs with my children; my kids refusing to eat falafel in Tel Aviv. These are, indeed, banal moments. They are sampled representations of our time together. I d o not have a m oment of grand explanation, as Jameson might have for postmodernism or its various material artifacts. The representations of these banal moments that I possess are not only memories whose banality resonates for me, but they are also digital photographs often taken with my iPhone. Digital photographs represent where we

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FIGURE 4 West Sixth, 2014. My son experiences the boredom of his father’s drinking

have been and what we have done. Digital photographs shared online provide evidence of our banality. In our travels, we might visit a k id-­oriented place (usually a children’s museum) and a place for lunch (often a brewpub). We might eat street food. We might share beds. If I were to cognitively map these travels to Seattle, Brooklyn, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Petaluma, Asheville, Cincinnati, Louisville, and elsewhere, I m ight not discover an allegory worthy of Jameson’s various cultural critiques or a decoding of what, at first, appeared to be transparent (but which, obviously, is opaque). Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of saved photos on my phone, I have no grand narrative to tell about America because of our travels. In fact, as an academic who, following Bruno Latour, has come to believe that “critique has run out of steam,” I m ay discover very little among my iPhone photos that allows me to analyze or explain cultural phenomenon. With these digital photographs, I have no closer examination to tell. I may only discover, among

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FIGURE 5 My daughter, bored, Copenhagen, 2017

my many iPhone-­captured photographs, some random pictures of my kids sitting in front of sampler trays in random brewery taprooms across America. One place for me to begin with an inconsequential exigence might be the sampler tray encountered during a g iven moment of traveling. The sampler tray usually consists of four to six four-­ounce pours of beers offered at a brewpub or brewery tasting room. Instead of ordering a full pint (sixteen ounces of one beer), patrons can try multiple beers by sampling a taste of several beers at once. The beers are served on a wooden, metal, or plastic tray that holds the four-­ounce glasses. The sampler tray, for me, does not tell the grand story

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of capital, imperialism, neoliberalism, the craft beer revolution, or any other critical theory trope Jameson, no doubt, would discover among the nation’s many brewpubs. The rise in popularity of these brewpubs has publicly—­and in the craft beer community as well—­been interpreted as a revolution against homogenized, mass-­produced beer culture (InBev, MillerCoors) and a return to a more respected, artisanal, craft production previously dismissed by consumers in the age of mass production (and its fast food offshoots). This narrative is an extension of the fast food narrative that typically pits mass-­produced chicken and hamburger against local farm-­to-­table dining. Craft beer, like food, rebels against a dominant order that makes all of our experiences the same. As the beer writer Andy Crouch argues, “The craft beer revolution has always been about one beer, a single experience that shatters decades of programming big brewery advertising and changes the way people perceive beer” (15). “We’ve all played a part in the American craft brewing revolution that forever changed the beer industry,” Ken Grossman writes in the acknowledgments of Beyond the Pale, the story of Sierra Nevada (xviii). Or as Stone Brewing’s Greg Koch proclaims, “I must fully admit that I feel a bit of a revolutionary” (Kaplan 26). Beyond these declarations of craft revolutionary spirit that repeat and circulate through various interviews and writings, the sampler tray, for me, tells only the story of an outing. A few hours away from home. Time with my kids. Lunch. And beer. No revolution present within my own narrative. I do not have a cognitive map of the sampler tray. Unlike Jameson, or other cultural critics, I am uninterested in explaining these outings via the representations that, in fact, give meaning to my daily engagements. I recognize that the sampler tray moment is banal, not a revolution. Banality, however, does not equate unimportance. “Evidently,” Barthes writes, “he dreams of a world exempt from meaning” (Roland Barthes 87). But no such world exists. Even as I r esist the impulse to identify easy explanations of my travels, I recognize that each moment of traveling with children has meaning. So do the sampler trays that sit in front of us in brewpubs when we have lunch. Objects, such as a beer, a plate of food, or a sampler tray, have meanings. Objects affect perception, environment, assumptions, and ideology. With objects, Ian Bogost writes, “physical reductionism can never explain the experience of a being” (62). I don’t, then, reject meaning, but instead ask how objects or moments offer meanings outside of critical meanings. Barthes’ most canonical discussion of objects involved not the explanation or critique of being but rather how an advertisement’s pairing of colors, a can of tomatoes, a package of spaghetti, and peppers into one physical space produces the rhetorical arrangement of what Barthes deemed “Italianicity.” Aggregation of objects, Barthes showed, can demonstrate neither

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being nor authenticity, but the notion of being as a gesture of what something means. “The perceptual message and the cultural message,” Barthes writes of the grouped-­together image of Italian objects, are assembled by the viewer of the ad so that a sense of what is Italian is understood (“The Rhetoric of the Image” 36). Italianicity, as Barthes names this perceived meaning, captures the rhetorical feeling of all things Italian by aggregating a number of past activities into one space. The object, within the viewer’s network of perceptions and previous understandings, produces meaning for the viewer by drawing upon previous assumptions, cultural bias, past experiences, reading habits, viewing habits, and so on. We expect, in the case of the advertisement, Italian to mean something specific. In this case, the carefully arranged advertisement produces the sensation of Italian culture. That sensation does not need to be authentic. The viewer only needs to believe that the state of being Italian is being represented. As Barthes will write about other topics, the advertisement supports the writing of stereotypes. Any aggregation of stereotypes—­such as color or type of food—­into one space produces an overall affect or icity sensation. A sampler tray set in front of me produces a certain type of meaning or representation, as well, when I tilt the iPhone in such a way as to capture one of my children on the other end of the tray. This representation might read: I am sitting at the tray. My child is not. One may think that the image suggests otherwise; one may think that the image veils the situation’s supposed reality—­a lunch somewhere in a brewpub—­at the expense of another experience. One might think that the image hides a reality regarding liquor laws, leisure time, the privileged life of a professor who can take time off and drink beer, the artisanal versus the industrial, or some other reality. The image does not veil anything. The image, for me, counters Jameson’s claim that “the truth of our social life as a whole . . . is increasingly irreconcilable with the possibilities of aesthetic expression or articulation available to us” (Signatures 54). A sampler tray image captured by a mobile device and shared over a social media network is my aesthetic experience communicated to others. The juxtaposition, startling or not as Marshall McLuhan might declare regarding new media, is meant to say: I am with my children at a brewpub. Shared on Facebook and Twitter, the photograph makes this juxtaposition public, and in that public display, I am supposedly making a claim about my “authentic” status as a father and as someone who appreciates good food and beer. I am promoting myself. I am promoting an aggregated stereotype as well. I am mapping my position within a larger system of online friends and followers. I am projecting the sense of fathericity via my chosen arrangement of objects (beer, children, myself) within a phone’s camera frame. In place of

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FIGURE 6 Against the Grain, 2013

performing a cognitive map that seeks to clarify my position within a larger system of food politics, the economy, eating habits, normative parental behavior, resistance or acceptance to perceptions of parental behavior, or cultural trends, I accept my place within my online communities as father and kids eating out while father enjoys a beer. But I do so via an advertisement for myself. I share the photograph online. The sampler tray anchors the various aggregated images for the viewer to engage with fathericity. I, who positions the sampler in the photograph, experience samplericity. I sample and am digitally

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FIGURE 7 Revolution, 2012

and socially sampled among 870 Facebook friends and 1,300 Twitter followers. In this sampling, there is no shortage of the kind of rhetorical aggregation Barthes teaches. Each aggregation—­each placement of an item in my grouped-­ together images—­demonstrates my version of authenticity. My authenticity, though, must be publicly proclaimed via the social media gesture of sharing. If private, I cannot express fathericity or samplericity. My object aggregation must be public the way Barthes’ understanding of advertising must be public. Jameson famously questioned authenticity and its media representations when he challenged the role of pastiche in American Graffiti as nonhistorical, where a “stereotypical past endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a g lossy mirage” that eliminates what Jameson called historicity (Postmodernism 21). Pastiche, therefore, made the film a n onhistorical and problematic representation of the early 1960s. The film’s stylistic aggregation of cars, music, and fashion, Jameson claims, leaves out the discrimination and abuse relevant in the struggle for civil rights. Ital-

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ianicity, of course, does the same. It leaves out much of Italian culture and emphasizes the stereotype in place of historical or critical reflection. “Frequently,” Barthes writes, “ he starts from the stereotype, from the banal opinion which is in him” (Roland Barthes 162). The writerly impulse, in fact, is not to start with the interpretation or explanation, but with the stereotype. Generic observations. Clichés. Time period settings that fail to account for the complexity of what is being covered. Barthes’ initial observation regarding the stereotype recognizes that stereotypes are not necessarily what we resist, but are, instead, the places we often begin from or rely on to rhetorically frame expression. In that case, American Graffiti may be an authentic writing of the early 1960s precisely because it relies on stereotypes to advance a narrative about teenagers and car culture. How else can a writing demonstrate the 1960s, Barthes might suggest, without the engagement of the period’s most recognizable imagery? These specifically selected objects, which Jameson understands as ahistorical, serve as interacting commonplaces whose familiarity makes the narrative understandable. Fathericity, as well, generates the same kind of writing. The beer-­drinking father is one of the most recognizable images available in a parenting inventory of effects. The beer-­drinking father who is paying more attention to his beer than to his children, too, is among that set of images. The beer-­drinking father who drags his kids to breweries or to the store so that he can buy a special release before it sells out, as well, is another set of images. Whether my particular fathericity projection only represents such a meaning is debatable. I do not, however, resist that project or ask that it be decoded so that my supposed “true” fathering might be revealed. I settle with these stereotypes. Neither aggregated representations of fatherhood, however, need to be experienced as the sense of authenticity. Social media allows for a variety of authentic iterations when images are shared. Public sharing in social media spaces, in some ways, is a d eclaration of authenticity, and not the sense of authenticity. I make authentic my identity for others to see via my particular demonstration of samplericity. I a m a father, my photograph might declare. This image proves as such. This father wants his children to be situated within a specific network of experience (going out to eat while traveling, visiting a brewpub, trying unique beers). Authenticity, as well, is a form of representation easily questioned; I make no claims to its pureness. Calling something authentic, as Barthes also argued, must also allow for the recognition of the always present textual contradictions every text owns, or what Barthes called the pleasure of the text. Every text contains contradictions. No text, no matter how authentic it claims to be, is pure. American Graffiti obviously contains contradictions. A closer examination of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cul-

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tural Logic of Late Capitalism would reveal contradictions. Mapping my place in the world will reveal contradictions as well. My sampler images, whatever their stylistic “pseudohistorical depth” may be (Postmodernism 20), still map my acknowledged pastiche-­like position in a d igital map: father, beer, Facebook, academic, iPhone user, and so on. These are the items I aggregate into some sense of digital authenticity. In food writing, authenticity is questioned for how it, too, situates an experience in a conflicted, global system of meaning as a pure state of meaning, a state that should not be challenged or questioned because of how we might emotionally desire specific representations. “Authenticity,” Louisville chef Edward Lee writes, “which we often use when defending our narrow culinary views, can be a hindrance, a means of exclusion, a distortion of history” (5–6). McDonald’s or Subway, for instance, represent for many people inauthentic meanings (a challenge). Neither presents the “authentic” hamburger or sandwich, yet, as fast food, they hardly exclude mass consumption of their hamburgers or sandwiches. Local food represents the authentic (not a challenge). Yet, in food writing, some writers turn away from the purity of the food narrative and muddle their challenges to representations. At the conclusion of “Power Steer,” for instance, popular food writer Michael Pollan, who throughout his essay has traced the very problematic practices of commercially raised beef and positioned his ethos as locally directed, confesses that he doesn’t like locally raised beef and even enjoys beef imported from Argentina. “So how does grass-­fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-­fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I’ve ever eaten.” When Calvin Trillin writes of the Kansas City canonical barbecue of his youth, Arthur Bryant’s, he addresses the question of sustained authenticity and the role of consumerism (buying as much as possible, as Berry would argue). The local, it seems, has gone commercial. Trillin notes that with Arthur Bryant’s popularity, “there was reason to be concerned that barbecue, like so much else in America, had become self-­conscious and labeled and packaged and relentlessly organized and fitted out with promotional T-­shirts” (Feeding a Yen 82). No matter how commercial the restaurant became, Trillin never abandoned his love of Arthur Bryant’s, just as Pollan cannot abandon imported beef. Commercialism does not always waver the belief in food authenticity. Trillin can recognize the commercialist turn Arthur Bryant’s took but still find value in its brisket. Such beliefs run counter to the narrative of authenticity. They do, however, allow for a samplericity approach to the authentic. Consider Los Angeles food writer Jonathan Gold, who after sampling a perplexing and unknown to him Russian dish called “Herring Under a Fur

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Coat” in the Moscow airport comes to a s imilar observation regarding authenticity. Gold questions whether cuisine must be authentic in order to have consumer or food value. “Was the Herring Under a Fur Coat authentic? Was it delicious? Did it matter?” Gold asks after conducting a quick internet search to ensure he ate an authentic Russian dish (“Herring in Fur” 94). Social media offers him the evidence he needs to make his meal feel as if it mattered; the Web provides visual examples of Herring Under a F ur Coat that Gold can then sample into an internal image justifying his food choice. The salad, bright pink in color, consists of pickled herring, eggs, beets, carrots, potatoes, and often mayonnaise. The “fur coat” description derives from either a beet or mayonnaise covering of the rest of the salad. The answer to his initial question, Gold realizes after discovering visual evidence that the dish does exist in Russian cuisine, is no, it does not matter if Herring Under a Fur Coat is authentic. Place, Gold suggests, which typically anchors claims of authenticity in a type of terroir-­based ideology, is not as important as we think it should be. We sample experiences regardless of where we are: an airport in Moscow or a strip mall in Los Angeles. “So while authenticity might be the most important thing in the culinary world, a cuisine coming alive in its birthplace in a way it could nowhere else on earth, it is simultaneously not important at all” (“Herring in Fur” 95). Place is not the only force that samples. In another fish-­based food moment, New York chef Tyler Kord begins a d iscussion of a c eviche-­inspired sandwich by saying, “Let’s talk a little about authenticity.” Let’s talk, he notes, because the image of authenticity is a t ime-­based ideological belief, not a representational-­based belief requiring exactness. Concern over what is or is not true ceviche, for instance, depends on the time period one is in. “People love to yell, ‘ἀ at’s not authentic!’ and hammer you for it. But if a food is good, and it becomes popular and other people copy it, and it becomes commonplace on menus, then won’t it be ‘authentic’ in ten or twenty years? If we decide what is authentic today, and nothing that is created after today can be authentic, then what will people talk about in the future when they discuss 2015?” (106). In one time period, one might find authenticity in the properly prepared acid-­cured fish. In another temporal period, one might complain over which acid was used. Ceviche, like many foods connected to ethnic groups or locales, attracts authenticity debates. Douglas Rodriguez notes one type of ceviche accordingly, pointing to what he believes makes it authentic: “Ecuadorian ceviche is made by curing fresh fish in the juice of a particularly acid lemon” (xi). Or as Calvin Trillin writes about ceviche’s authenticity: “Ecuadorian ceviche starts out with fresh fish cured by being marinated in lemon juice and enlivened by whatever else the chef has thought to add. It’s liquid,

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like a bowl of tangy cold soup” (Feeding a Yen 55). At Panda Pita in Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market, I ate ceviche stuffed inside a pita and covered in tahini and various chopped vegetables. What is authentic? Pita or no pita. With or without lemon. Liquid or no liquid. Current or past. Kord positions his ceviche as just as authentic as any definition or experience might allow. A lemon may be the stereotypical object—­or icity—­employed to define authentic ceviche, but the feeling of ceviche, as Kord argues, can be achieved in many ways, depending on the time period (and possibly place) one makes ceviche in. Time and place are samplings. In his response to authenticity’s limitations, Gold uses the herring moment to draw attention to a larger concept than time or even representation: fusion cuisine. Fusion cuisine occurs when two different cuisines are appropriated and juxtaposed in order to produce dishes such as “kung pao pastrami” and the “Kogi taco” among other things one can discover in the Los Angeles eating scene. Fusion cuisine samples. Gold enjoys these foods even if they are not authentic Chinese or Mexican foods the way Herring Under a Fur Coat is supposedly an authentic Russian food. These foods, without authentic status, bring meaning to Gold’s eating experiences in his hometown of Los Angeles the way fast food does not bring meaning to Least Heat-­Moon’s travels in Kentucky nor my own eating habits in Lexington, where these dishes cannot be found. The meaning is ideological, not taste or authenticity based. When David Lopez, owner of Kansas City’s Manny’s Mexican Restaurant, discusses the Kansas City taco, a taco deep-­fried and covered in Parmesan cheese, he identifies not only taste, but economics as markers of fusion. “‘My grandmother made tacos with peas and with potatoes,’ says David Lopez, the general manager and a second-­generation owner-­operator of Manny’s, ‘because if ever ground beef got expensive—­which it tended to—­maybe my grandma and grandpa couldn’t afford to get as much ground beef.’” (Ralat) If these fusion-­ food meanings are, indeed, authentic because they are not authentic, it is only because of how their presence is eventually aggregated into other eating and life experiences that Gold and others recognize, the pastiche that they actively engage with and seek out. In that pastiche, one can identify a sense of aura that Benjamin associated only with an original piece of work (not a hybrid or fusion). The unoriginal fusion (borrowed food moments displaced from their origins), however, offers aura for foodies. Herring Under a F ur Coat in the Moscow airport has its own aura, one constructed out of the food itself, the imaginary sense of the authentic, the airport, being in Moscow, online photographs of Herring in a Fur Coat, travel, and other networked items that form the specific experience Gold has. Kansas City tacos, as well, have their own aura: childhood memory, class, the Midwest, Mexican food practices, lack of

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money. Neither Gold nor Lopez reject that aura. It exists in fusion. Fusion is a network. “If people want to call it fusion,” David Chang says about his own cooking, “well fuck you. It is fusion. Tell me, what food isn’t fusion” (“Inside Momofuku Nishi”). Norman Van Aken is often credited for describing American cuisine of the 1980s as fusion. “The fires of fusion are coming,” he predicted to an audience of American eaters gradually becoming exposed to new food traditions like Korean kimchi, Mexican tacos, and sushi (Van Aken). “In my cooking, I a m seeking to create an interplay, a f usion, between regionalism and restaurant technical know how. My fusion cooking is the result of coupling our native regional foodstuffs like conch, black beans, plantains, mangoes, coconuts, grouper, key limes, snapper, shrimp and the folk cooking methods intrinsic to the preparation of these goods, with a selftaught type of classical cooking” (Van Aken). Or as Chang argues: fuck you. It’s fusion because it’s sampled. My experiences, as well, are fusion based: from a dish I cook at home called “It’s Not Asian Asian Food” to eating falafel in a local restaurant that specializes in fish, I engage with fusion daily. Fusion lacks aura but has it as well. Fusion does not deny authenticity, but it transforms it into the power of networked relationships or aggregation. Kogi tacos don’t trouble Gold because he can aggregate their position into a larger food network of meaning whose historicity is never challenged, or never challenged in a specific locale such as Los Angeles. Calling kogi tacos inauthentic will not diminish a city’s love of kogi tacos; it will only serve to undermine an experience as feeling authentic. Or as Hua Hsu writes, “Inauthenticity becomes a kind of power, a refusal of someone else’s expectations and tastes.” At some point, we do accept representations—­troubling or not—­into our systems of meaning, and often, despite their hybridity or fusion status, we label them authentic or inauthentic, either as refusal or as simple acceptance of everyday life. Pizza, we would likely not claim, is a fusion experience (though it is). Sushi, such as the California roll, is the most accepted of everyday fusion in American eating. Pasta, when presented as Italian, is fusion. Consumption, food or otherwise, is one fusion representation I have accepted. Traveling is another. Being a father is yet another. Whether via pastiche or aggregation, I integrate these meanings into my life without concern for mythical aura. I map my sense of being (or icity) by writing these items down and defining their network as experience. An academic who travels with his kids and who wants to map such travels without resorting to critique might consider a t ype of fusion writing, as well, in order to express or map out thoughts and ideas. That fusion writing, which I am slowly trying to materialize here in this book, might find its place among traditional scholarship as a type of authentic writing. Even when I post

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a digital photograph as declaration of the authenticity of our travels, I am also representing the fusion moment of various groups, the space where academic (me) and father (me) and foodie (me) and beer drinker (me) are aggregated into an authentic/nonauthentic identity. Sampler tray and daughter holding up an iPhone? This is a m oment of such juxtapositions. Or this moment is authentic (my daughter is able to show that all of our moments are digital ones by ironically or critically presenting the iPhone to me as I snap a picture). Or this is merely a staged moment meant to draw attention to my travels as I post it to Facebook or imagine it as the cover of my next book. Or this is merely a banal moment in a Chicago brewpub that I happened to take a picture of. After the picture was taken, we continued on with our meal. Like Gold, I a sk: Does it matter? Does pastiche matter? Does historicity matter? Does aura matter? When Marge Simpson attempts to eat Ethiopian food for the first time, she asks the waiter, “What’s the craziest thing on the menu?” Lisa corrects her, “She means the most authentic” (“The Food Wife”). Crazy? Authentic? Appropriated authentic? The issue with appropriating the cultural logic of critique in order to map out every experience or take apart every encountered representation is the reoccurring, to me, question of does it matter? Critique is a gesture of mattering. Cognitive mapping or delayering representation is an effort to get at the “real” (and thus, authentic) meaning. I know these acts matter to many academics, and I know these acts matter to me at times as well, but I don’t always know why they have to be all that matters in the writing I or someone else might do. While I likely have asked, unfairly, that Fredric Jameson’s methodology represent many critical approaches to explaining how meaning functions, I turn from his work to this important question regarding the authenticity that critique supposedly teases out of a representation or code: Does it matter? Can I write without proving whether critique matters? If I c an perform such writing, can it be scholarly? Latour asks, “While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? ” (“Why Has Critique” 227). Latour draws attention to the question I have been asking, what he refers to as an illusion of prejudice: Does it matter? Revelation insists that what is behind the revealing matters. Does academic writing have to reveal the illusion of prejudices, as well, in order to value a writing that supposedly matters? I don’t want to pull back the cultural curtain of eating in restaurants and reveal what is hidden behind my, my kids’, or others’ prejudices of eating and travel. I don’t want to pull back any curtain whatsoever. That is not what matters to me. Food culture is coded. I understand that point. When my wife and

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I watch Top Chef in the evening after our kids have gone to bed, we understand that the close-­ups of Monogram ovens and Toyota Corollas, or the obvious rows of Glad bags or Kraft cream cheese packages stationed behind the chefs in the waiting room for the judge’s table are advertisements. A hundred packages of Kraft cream cheese didn’t mysteriously find their way into the shot or this kitchen’s storeroom. These are situated objects projecting an intended meaning of sales that is aggregated into the show’s diegesis. Knowing what these representations are, unveiling the appearance of commercialism in an already commercial endeavor (chefs competing on TV) does not make the experience of watching Top Chef any less or any more enjoyable for us. I accept these commercial prejudices and their appearance among show content. A commercial can be just that: a commercial. Commercials are appearances among an endless aggregation of other appearances. When I share a sampler photograph on Facebook, I share an appearance. When I eat a f usion-­based dish, I consume appearance. When I post a status update about traveling with my kids, I share an appearance. Top Chef shares the experience of using Glad bags. Latour challenges the ever-­present critique of appearance, as if each appearance hides another layer of meaning waiting to be uncovered (i.e., cognitive mapping). “Appearances are not shams,” Latour writes. “They are simply true or false depending on whether they veil or lose what has launched them” (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence 272). As Latour also writes, with critique and its never-­ending quest to unveil, “you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of complete illusio of their real motives” (“Why Has Critique” 229). If we unveil the real origins of a fusion taco, it is often because of our suspicions regarding cultural appropriation or the ever-­present topos of colonialism. These acts, of course, must be the real reason behind a Kansas City taco! What are my motives as I write of my travels with my children or my lack of interest in critique? What is my motive, or thesis, or claim, or objective? What are my motives when I post a digital picture of my children in front of sampler trays? Or should I say: What are my real motives? What are my authentic motives? And should one be suspicious of me and this narrative beginning with its generalizations regarding Fredric Jameson and repetitive attacks on critique (as if Jameson represents all critical theory or cultural studies work), or should I be suspicious of the representations I encounter? Where, in other words, is the anticipated or expected topos of academic writing, the totalizing gesture? Where is the thing that matters? Suspicious of totalizing gestures, Michel de Certeau coined the concept of the small, spatial story. As opposed to the grand narratives that might explain

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culture, place, or identity, there exist small stories we circulate, stories that allow for us to move beyond the encompassing, totalizing gestures we often rely on for perspective (like, for de Certeau, trying to view New York from atop the World Trade Center in order to fully understand the meaning of the city, or Jameson equating Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster movie with America’s moral corruption). “Stories could also take this noble name,” de Certeau writes. “Every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). Stories of travel are one such trajectory. Stories of eating can be another. Maybe my real motive in writing this book is merely to create spatial trajectories, movements, and gestures that allow me to trace or accompany small stories of experience without too much emphasis on what does or does not matter. I ask “what is a sandwich” or is traveling with one’s kids scholarly not to discover an authentic answer, but to instead follow a spatial story. In lieu of the totalizing experience of cognitive mapping or critique or even narrative at its most basic demonstration, I search out the smaller stories of travel and food. I am offering, then, small, spatial stories of sampled consumption. My purpose is, like cognitive mapping, larger in scope than the initial story I begin with. That is, my purpose extends outward from the story of academics who like to travel with their kids or who take their kids to brewpubs for lunch. My purpose is to offer a type of academic and scholarly narrative outside of the limitations of critique. My purpose is to pose another authentic academic writing regardless of the writer’s content or focus. I, then, am performing my own version of cognitive mapping. This is not an authentic version of cognitive mapping as Jameson instructs, but is instead a feeling or icity of cognitive mapping. My map—­my brief trajectories I offer—­a llows me to frame one aspect of my place in the world, among a discourse, alongside my family, within my discipline. In the following chapters, I map out a perception of my place within a specific academic-­f usion writing system. Each chapter is meant to represent a p art of my sampled map. The samples, read together, aggregate what I call authentic writing (writing that does not make claims of being academically authentic, and instead shapes a sense of authenticity). This, then, is not a book about traveling with my children. This is a book about scholarly writing. This is a book about authenticity. This book is a sampler. These are sampled stories. Each sampled story reflects a state of consumption. Each sample, though, is a trajectory, not a separate entity. These trajectories cross and overlap, narrate out of patterns, sometimes lack conclusive moments. What is my real motive? A narrative of sampling. Samplericity. I have, it seems, already begun that sampling.

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Every day, as I walk to my office or from it on the University of Kentucky campus, I see colleagues and students with Subway sandwiches in hand. The sandwich sits inside of a clear bag with Subway’s name featured so that I, and those around me, know that the person in question has purchased and will shortly eat a Subway sandwich. Subway projects itself to the everyday pedestrian via an anonymous purchase. Any individual can buy a foot-­long sandwich (twelve inches of bread and meat!) and then advertise the purchase by merely strolling through a campus, an office, a building, a hallway, or a department’s floor. “Eat Fresh,” it says on the Subway bag. Eating a mass-­produced, industrialized sandwich often sold in stores adjacent to gas stations or within a Walmart, a generic critique might offer, is not a fresh eating experience. Advertising one’s fresh eating, however, is a different kind of projection. The line at the campus Subway, which is located in the Student Center, is always long. The long line suggests that whatever kind of sandwich one can buy at Subway, it is worth waiting for. One might assume that only students eat at Subway, but that is not correct. In the elevator of our building, I often stand opposite a colleague or two holding on to a Subway bag. “Nothing succeeds 76

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like ubiquity,” Will Self writes, “and the more Subways there are, the more the sandwiches they serve approach the Platonic ideal.” That Platonic ideal might be the eidos of a sandwich conveniently carried in a plastic bag and consumed far away from the long line one previously stood in waiting for a f ast food sandwich to be assembled. “Horrified Subway Execs Assumed People Were Buying Footlongs to Share with a Friend,” an Onion headline and news video mocks. How idyllic can a whole foot of a sandwich be? Is this the ideal length of a lunchtime meal? Is a foot of sandwich healthy? There are two Jersey Mike’s Subs shops in Lexington, Kentucky. There are seven Penn Station East Coast Subs shops. There are fourteen Jimmy John’s and five Paneras. There are four Firehouse Subs. Grocery stores, like Kroger, typically run a deli counter where you can order a sandwich. We have seventeen Krogers in Lexington; each makes sandwiches to go. We have one lobster roll restaurant. Gas stations often sell premade sandwiches. One can buy a barbecue sandwich at any of the barbecue places around town, a falafel sandwich at a handful of Middle Eastern restaurants (and even at the co-­op grocery store where sprouts are added), a fish sandwich at several different locations, including one inside a brewery. Whole Foods sells premade sandwiches. One local Greek restaurant chain has four locations in Lexington (including a small setup in a K roger), and it sells gyro sandwiches, which is the Greek way of saying shawarma, a meat (lamb or turkey) Middle Eastern sandwich served in a pita. In the café within the eighteen-­story office building I work in, one can buy a sandwich ranging from tuna to grilled cheese. There is a new sandwich restaurant in the revamped downtown Lexington courthouse. None of this includes the many other fast food restaurants or non–fast food restaurants in Lexington that serve sandwiches for lunch, such as Arby’s (“We have the meats” at thirteen locations) and McDonald’s (a fish sandwich at nineteen spots). If one really wants a sandwich in Lexington, Kentucky, there is no excuse for not being able to find one. There are twenty-­six Subways in Lexington. Subway employees are “sandwich artists” who create before your eyes an assemblage of processed meat, vegetables, salad dressing, and mayonnaise. A consumer might consider this the ideal sandwich moment of consumption. “By choosing to have your sandwich with iceberg but not red onion or with honey mustard sauce instead of oil and vinegar or with sliced turkey instead of pastrami,” Ben Wilson writes, “you feel you are the architect of your own lunch. It makes a b asic assemblage of meat and bread feel special; in a word, you are free to ‘elaborate’ as you choose” (Sandwich 91). If there indeed exists an ideal assembled Subway sandwich, Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki, by its taxonomic representation alone (“sweet,” “teriyaki”), sounds as if it could fulfill that image. As both

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the ubiquitous meat chicken and the tempting “ethnic” (teriyaki representing an amorphous stereotype of Asian identity), such a sandwich must be idyllic to my colleagues who stand in our building’s elevator, Subway bag in hand, heading off to eat at their desks. I, on the other hand, think of a so-­called artisanal sandwich differently. As do others. Rapper Action Bronson’s “perfect fucking sandwich” is not Subway. Instead, it includes rib eye, basil, olive oil, vinegar, and ricotta salata on a roll, and Bronson recognizes that “there’s still more weed to smoke” afterward (“How to Make”). In 1897, Maud Cooke detailed the ideal sandwich as not chicken teriyaki, but as “very thin, its entire thickness when finished not over half an inch; it is spread evenly with butter, and its flavoring or filling is delicate and dainty, a suggestion rather than a substantial reality” (326). M. F. K. Fisher remembers her ideal sandwich as her Aunt Gwen’s fried egg sandwich, which, in addition to its call for six fresh eggs and twelve slices of bread, requires a half to one cup of drippings, “the kind poured off an unidentified succession of beef, mutton, and bacon pans, melted gradually into one dark puddle of thick unappetizing grease, which immediately upon being dabbed into a thick hot iron skillet sends out rendingly appetizing smells” (621). Subway claims the mass-­produced homogenous sandwich as “art.” Other critics of the sandwich offer different perspectives. On the food podcast ἀ e Sporkful, Dan Pashman asked, “What makes a sandwich a sandwich? ” Pashman states that an ideal sandwich has to be picked up with one’s hands (i.e., it can’t be too sloppy), eaten without utensils, and eaten without touching the fillings. “The fillings must be sandwiched between two separate hand-­ready food items,” Pashman states. “In other words, something’s got to get sandwiched.” Bee Wilson insists that a “true sandwich necessarily carries with it the idea of enclosure” (Sandwich 12). The New York tax code defines a sandwich’s legal status accordingly: “Sandwiches include cold and hot sandwiches of every kind that are prepared and ready to be eaten, whether made on bread, on bagels, on rolls, in pitas, in wraps, or otherwise, and regardless of the filling or number of layers. A sandwich can be as simple as a buttered bagel or roll, or as elaborate as a six-­foot, toasted submarine sandwich” (Tax Bulletin ST-­835). On ἀ e Late Show, John Hodgman and Stephen Colbert debated whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Colbert’s pro-­sandwich position is based on the premise of “meat between two slices of bread.” Hodgman’s counterargument is that “cut in halfability” defines a sandwich, and no one cuts a hot dog in half in order to eat it (Campbell-­Schmitt). The website Mashable’s response to the hog dog/sandwich debate was to publish an animated feature that, in the end, offers both sides of the debate as legitimate since hot dogs can be eaten with or without bread. “If you really want, a ‘hot dog’ can be

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both a sandwich (frank and bun) and not a sandwich (loose frank)” (“Is a Hot Dog”). After the Louisville Courier Journal published an apology for calling the hot dog a sandwich at various moments between 1887 and 1966, the newspaper’s columnist Joseph Gerth wrote an op-­ed condemning the apology. A hot dog, Gerth insisted, is a sandwich. “The major push back on this generally comes from people who argue that a s andwich includes two slices of bread and the hot dog comes on a bun that is split only partially down either one side or the top.” On Saturday Night Live, Martin Short perfected the Tin Pan Alley songwriter and cigar-­chomping character Irving Cohen, who loudly declares that “you don’t call the great Adolph K. Mussleman a sandwich! The man was a genius! The man was a saint! The man was not a sandwich!” Cohen and his showbiz friends who frequent Lishman’s deli represent the old-­school New York Jews who patronized New York’s canonical delis (Katz’s, Stage, 2nd Avenue), and who had sandwiches named after them and other celebrities as markers of authenticity. Bread. Meat. Can it be cut in half? New York. Is it named after someone? These are tropes circulated in order to present the “real” and “ideal” idea of a sandwich. Such ideals vary with media representation or the person who plans on eating a sandwich. Popular culture circulates authentic representations of the sandwich. On the cartoon show Adventure Time, Jake the Dog makes “the perfect sandwich” by combining sous vide steak, cream cheese, dill pickles, hard-­boiled eggs, the soul of a lobster, a bird he grabs from the window sill, and other items (“Time Sandwich”). Adventure Time, it seems, loves sandwiches. In addition to Jake’s sandwich making, Princess Bubblegum makes her “special sentient sandwich” of egg, cheese, ketchup, and peppercorn fart (all the ingredients alive when used) (“Angel Face”). In another episode, Princess Bubblegum’s “most perfect sandwich that has ever existed” (basically, a cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwich) involves witchcraft to make the bread and then spinning a cow in a roulette-­like device to make the cheese (“Five Short Graybies”). It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Frank Reynolds makes a sandwich by putting the separate items of a hoagie in his mouth at once and chewing. The show’s character Charlie makes a g rilled cheese sandwich on the radiator: two slices of Wonder Bread with Hershey’s syrup, peanut butter, and American cheese. The first episode aired of Teen Titans Go is titled “Legendary Sandwich.” Robin claims to have “developed a sandwich design that will take your mouth on a flavored journey,” and Raven challenges Robin’s bragging by sending the Titans on what she thinks will be a wild goose chase for the ingredients of “an ancient sandwich of power.” At the end of Martin Short’s Saturday Night Live skit, Gumby enters Lishman’s and orders a “Maury Amsterdam” sandwich. “What the hell’s a M aury Amsterdam? ” the waiter

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asks. The conversation turns into a debate over what it is, and what are its most authentic ingredients. In When Harry Met Sally’s iconic Katz’s Delicatessen scene, whatever the ingredients are in Meg Ryan’s piled-­high meat sandwich, it brings her to a pretend orgasm. Her sandwich must, we are led to believe, be authentic. It gave the semblance of pleasure. I once believed I had invented the perfect/ideal sandwich: a fried egg with lamb bacon on challah. When I shared that idea to Facebook, nobody seemed to care. For New York Times columnist David Brooks, fancy gourmet, artisan sandwiches are responsible for the decline of American values (though, within this decline, he never mentions the relationship between the sandwich and the public orgasm). These inauthentic sandwiches, for Brooks, demand a vocabulary so rich and hyperbolic that “average eaters” cannot comprehend what is being offered or served. Food, Brooks contends, is a social barrier if it does not appeal to the lowest common denominator. Subway, then, is preferred to a “gourmet” sandwich shop (though both might claim sandwich artists as employees). “Recently I took a f riend with only a h igh school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodoro’ and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican” (Brooks). Brooks specifically finds fault with Whole Foods (and maybe he means the Brooklyn one) for his failed lunch outing. The stereotypes of “gourmet” eating (which Brooks associates with typical everyday Italian words such as soppressata) can be blamed on a college-­educated clientele that forgoes Save A Lot for Whole Foods. If Whole Foods signifies a specific aspect of American culture (Wholefoodsicity), Brooks agues, it does so because its customers are so educated that only they understand the supposed elegance of Italian food. They would never prefer what, one assumes, is the more working-­class or average Joe distinction of Mexican food (whatever that means). In this food conspiracy narrative, only the educated understand cultural codes (and Stuart Hall might disagree with this point). Italian food is too coded for Brooks. Mexican food is not. What does Brooks mean by the generic “Mexican food taxonomy?” Tacos? Enchiladas? Refried beans? Mexicanicity? It is not clear. “The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-­shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes” (Brooks). Brooks’s hostility toward Whole Foods, a college education, and “artisan”-­styled food is confusing since, as a professional writer for a newspaper often deemed “elitist,” one would assume that he, too, has a college degree. His degree, though, must have lacked a read-

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ing of Barthes, whose “Italianicity” would have shed some light for him and his companion on some of those “fancy” Italian sandwiches they almost ate. Maybe they went to Taco Bell instead. Brooks likely would approve. Brooks likely would find the Danish smørrebrød not only elitist (who, but an elitist, college graduate shopping at Whole Foods, can pronounce an o with a slash through it?), but possibly even more culturally coded than a t ypical ham on rye. Serious Eats’s Emilia Morano-­Williams called smørrebrød “the best sandwich you are not eating.” The smørrebrød, an open-­faced sandwich that promotes Danishicity to those interested in Scandinavian food, signifies the tourist experience in Copenhagen (found on many tourist-­oriented menus), but also the regionalism of local Scandinavian cuisine (a marker of “icity”). Smørrebrød typically piles on dense rye bread a variety of toppings, meats, or fish. Most visitors to Denmark expect to encounter smørrebrød instead of pizza, falafel, and hamburgers, which are more prevalent in the cafés and restaurants around the city than the traditional Danish sandwich. When we were in Copenhagen in 2017, we waited almost three weeks for Frederiksberg Smørrebrødsanretning to open; it was located on Gammel Kongevej, just two blocks away from our apartment. When it did open after the late summer Danish break, we saw why it only needed to be open for a few hours a day. The glass cases featured beautiful and cheap fifteen-­k roner sandwiches ranging from traditional egg and shrimp to roast beef to lox to even duck. The egg and tomato, though, was layered in a mound of mayonnaise too rich for even a former mayonnaise eater like myself. When the shop finally opened, we ordered more smørrebrød than we should have been capable of finishing, and gobbled them up within minutes. My son ate nothing. The history of the smørrebrød is that it was meant to be an edible space for leftovers. Eggs? Meat? Tiny shrimp? What to do with the leftovers? Pile it all on rye bread with mayonnaise and eat. Even though smørrebrød is a traditional Danish meal, and even though it is featured on the menus of many touristy restaurants near Frederiksholms Kanal, you will not find smørrebrød restaurants on every corner in Copenhagen. You will find a 7-­Eleven on most corners. Danish 7-­Elevens sell sandwiches, but not smørrebrød. My son lived off of Danish 7-­Eleven chicken on sticks. Even though it is open-­faced, and even though a culture strongly claims it is as such, is the smørrebrød a sandwich? Popular culture has long been interested in sandwiches, whether by definition or consumption. When that interest transformed the sandwich into another element of fast food, such as what one finds at Subway, criticism emerged. Such criticism outlines how the everyday has become cheap, low-­quality food. Thus, for many critics, Subway can be understood as representative of a consumer culture where impulse or ease prompts the eager consumption of a

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FIGURE 8 Frederiksberg Smørrebrødsanretning’s glass case

tasteless, mass-­produced sandwich that can be carried around in a bag that bears its name. Subway does not sell smørrebrød or most other markers of ethnic authenticity. For mass consumption, it seems, authenticity is not the perfect sandwich or hoagie in your mouth or even an open-­faced sandwich of shrimp and mayonnaise; it is ease. A Subway in Lexington, Kentucky, on the University of Kentucky campus, therefore, could represent the lack of desire to walk across the street where several local, inexpensive restaurants are sit-

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uated, some of which also serve sandwiches. In many types of sandwich critique, Subway represents a problematic lifestyle of ease that Americans export to the world. As George Ritzer argues, “The fast-­food restaurants are bringing to the rest of the world not only the Big Mac and French fries, but more importantly the American style of eating on the run. The fast-­food restaurant brings with it the idea (and the structure to implement it) that eating is something to be completed as quickly and effortlessly as possible” (ἀ e McDonaldization ἀ esis 84). Or the Subway moment could represent merely buying a p oorly made sandwich and not caring. Food criticism assumes that most people care about what they eat or how quickly they eat it. Often the opposite is the case. “Eat fresh,” Subway’s slogan demands. “Eat fresh” offers an assumption that one cares about freshness. If one does not eat fresh, does one eat rotten? “Eat fresh” offers its own aggregation of consumer concerns, whether the slogan reflects reality or a fictive state. Ease or difficulty, too, can represent fictive states of writing. “Eat fresh,” however, does no more than demand that eating involves fresh produce or meat. “Eat fresh” does not provide any specifics regarding what the statement may, in fact, mean. If ease is problematic and responsible for the McDonaldization of the world, what is the role of fresh? What do we rhetorically mean by the category called freshness? Items displayed in a tray? Vegetables presented by their own culturally perceived eidos? What if the vegetables are grown in environments not conducive to organic farming, and thus are also treated with chemicals and sprays? What if the meat comes from animals raised in factories where they are crammed into cages and pens and sit in their own filth until slaughter? People may feel that they are eating fresh when they eat at any one of the more than forty thousand Subway restaurants. The bag one holds after a purchase, after all, insists one is eating fresh. Commercials insist that I am eating fresh if I order a Subway sandwich. Insisting is persuasive for how it gathers items into a specific space for reflection or information. To insist is to aggregate experience into an act of persuasion. Subway, we might say, offers a sense of aggregation not unlike Barthes’ Italianicity, a spatial pivot where eating lunch equates choosing meats and veggies from a display and paying eight dollars for a suggested experience of fresh food (as opposed to the alternative, suggested experience of eating fried food). In the aggregation, one assembles a number of ideas and experiences into that belief called eating fresh: vegetables, bread rising in a nearby oven, deli-­sliced meats and cheese, and “fresh” colors such as red, green, and yellow. What is a sandwich? The answer, according to the aggregation, might be Subway. Aggregations, however, always obfuscate. But does it matter? Comedian Jim Gaffigan writes about his habit of eating at Subway, drawing

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attention to one particular contrast to the Subway fresh thematic focus: capability. When eating Subway, the issue is not freshness for Gaffigan, but how something as basic as making a s andwich is culturally deemed too difficult to do on one’s own. Subway, for Gaffigan, represents our incapability to put meat or cheese between bread, a task that should be simple to perform in any kitchen around the country. “Subway is another place that shows you how lazy we’ve gotten in our society. I can understand the appeal of fast-­food burgers and fries. Who has the time to make a burger? Who owns a deep fryer? But we are too lazy to make a sandwich?” (249). There are few things easier to prepare than a s andwich. Here is my basic recipe for making a s andwich to take to work: • Take two slices of bread • Spread a condiment on one slice (mustard, mayo, spicy mayo, humous, tahini) • Put something on top of that condiment (veggie, cheese, egg, or meat —­ or all) • Put the other slice on top of everything else • Wrap in tin foil Gaffigan’s take on Subway’s “Eat fresh” campaign is: “The baffling success of Subway was basically constructed on not selling burgers and fries. ‘Eat Fresh’ was a creative apology for not having French fries” (235). French fries signify fried food, cooking oil, unhealthy eating, cholesterol, obesity. Eat fresh, then, means that eating a sandwich is superior to eating a hamburger or its typical fried potato accompaniment. But why is that point part of our overall sandwich aggregation? Why does that point shift the authenticity of a s andwich definition? Frying is not authentic? Most cultures fry food. I can fry cut up potatoes in a matter of minutes. In 2013, two Subway franchise owners in Lexington were arrested for human trafficking. They allegedly forced undocumented, illegal immigrants from India to live in a s ecret room in their home and work fourteen-­hour days in order to pay off a supposed $100,000 debt (Scherker). If this information constituted a part of most of Lexington’s sandwich eaters’ aggregation of Subway—­t hat a franchise owner forced people to work under deplorable and illegal conditions equal to indentured servitude—­I do not know how many people on our campus would continue to line up for the sandwiches. Maybe none. Maybe all. Academic authenticity (as scholarly writing) often demands attention to labor practices or other value-­based issues as writers cognitively map cultural positions to reveal inequity or misrepresentations. Subway sup-

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porting indentured servitude should draw such attention. That demand, of course, does not always materialize as practice. After all, even though the Chick-­fi l-­A ownership is staunchly opposed to same-­sex marriage, graduate students in our college and my humanities colleagues—­who strongly support same-­sex marriage—­eat at the Student Center Chick-­fi l-­A as well. There are only five Chick-­fi l-­A restaurants in Lexington. Chick-­fi l-­A has some work to do in order to catch up with Subway in Lexington. Political values are typically aggregated into academic writing. Aggregation is an assemblage. Aggregation, as represented online in an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader, compiles in one place a number of perspectives that otherwise would be read or viewed separately in the user’s browser. Vilém Flusser called aggregation the “technical image,” which he named “computations of concepts” (10). These computations, as they are picked up within images and by viewers, are mentally constructed to produce ideas and discourse as singular entities (and not as aggregations, though they are). The computation involves how one might assemble the items—­present or absent—­w ithin the image or text. In every image, Flusser argued, exist previous ideas and concepts the viewer aggregates into the image’s meaning. And these meanings or technical images are often repeated as viewers take the meanings into future discursive moments and present them as if no computation occurred. The present moment—­I am eating fresh—­may feel unique, but as a technical image, it is merely a repetition of previously encountered images of freshness, each layered within the next. Eating fresh is an already aggregated concept—­an icity—­t hat many of us have engaged with previously, even if not via a Subway ad. “These images are programmed for an eternal return of the same; they were invented for this specific purpose: to bring an end to linearity, to reactivate the magic circle and a memory that eternally turns, bringing everything into the present” (59–60). For Flusser, we read the image—­an actual image or idea—­v ia prior interactions. These interactions are computed into a space (a protest, a p hotograph, a c hicken sandwich, a f ast food lunch, an advertisement, eating fresh, a f ranchise’s politics critique). The interactions are aggregated. The consequences extend beyond eating a sandwich. Politics and ideology, therefore, can take on their own versions of Barthes’ rhetorical notion of icity, where aggregations replace authenticity (i.e., the freshness is not that fresh since it is shipped from a factory farm and a warehouse to the restaurant). But with Flusser, we don’t just believe in the sense of an icity; we turn that sense into a r ecitation. And the more we recite (i.e., the more we repeat the claim, idea, bias, etc.), the more we believe in the aggregation’s—­or technical image’s—­authenticity. Thus, the freshness is fresh. Thus, Subway,

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FIGURE 9 A “kip” sandwich bought in Ghent, Belgium. I learned what kip was after I began eating the sandwich: chicken

whether or not a local franchise engaged in human trafficking or industrial cheese and meat production, is the site of fresh food. Thus, all scholarly writing must address race, class, and gender. Like eating, reading can be an aggregated experience where texts and ideas are repeated in the present so that we believe in authenticity. We read texts, but we read across experiences as well, as Flusser’s concept suggests. For some time, Google Reader was among the most popular of all RSS readers available

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for online reading. As an RSS aggregator, Google Reader was accepted as one of the main, if not the main, ways to read a variety of online sites in one space. With Google Reader, one did not have to go to the websites one wanted to read; the websites arrived in one space on the browser. Unlike bookmarking, a way to save a website in one’s browser, RSS does not require a return to the original site one wants to read daily. RSS brings the site to a common space. When Google announced its Reader’s discontinuation early in 2013, users, like myself, experienced panic. Without Google Reader, I wondered, how could I aggregate information into a space on my browser for easy consumption and navigation, much in the way a campus Subway allows for easy consumption and navigation (the restaurant is located in the Student Center, a space most students pass through regularly)? RSS allows me to follow news easily. Bookmarking does not. The Reader consolidates the feeds into one space. I don’t want to visit hundreds of websites each day; I want aggregation. Eaters don’t want to track down the parts of a sandwich across grocery stores or even one store. They want franchise aggregation. Some of the topics (as I have arranged them) in my RSS subscriptions are as follows: • • • • • • • •

Beer City Food Music Sports Tech Kentucky Sandwiches

Aggregation teaches. Aggregation provides information. This is true in an RSS feed and in the logic of aggregation overall. I l earn that Subway represents “eating fresh” because of how I aggregate experiences in addition to the commercial’s message or even news reports of human trafficking and local franchises. RSS is a digital method of generating technical images. RSS, an inconsequential aside notes, was initially “nicknamed Pie” (Hammersley 10). RSS, too, has a food origin. In addition to what I k now about fast food, I c an attribute a g reat deal of my beer (and alas, not sandwich) knowledge to my RSS subscriptions. On a daily basis, I l earn about beer releases, commentary, tastings, upcoming events, promotional materials, video releases, collaborations, and so on. This information eventually became aggregated into a b ook I w rote about craft beer. RSS is how I spend some of my day, learning by aggregation. One might think that a Subway customer, too, has learned by aggregation. Over a period

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of time, that customer has no doubt seen Subway advertising, heard about the sandwiches from friends, experienced fried food, passed a Subway restaurant, eaten a sandwich somewhere, made a sandwich, saw someone eat a sandwich in a movie or on a TV show, seen fresh produce in a grocery, eaten at a Subway, and so on. All of these aggregated experiences create the desire to “eat fresh” or to just eat a sandwich. Via RSS or other forms of aggregation, we engage with technical images. Each technical image or aggregation builds from each of these experiences. These images can be repeated until they become habit or belief: “Subway is fresh food. I am hungry. I want fresh food. I want Subway. I stand in line with everyone else for Subway instead of walking across the street or bringing a sandwich from home.” The lines at our campus Subway speak to this repetition and its persuasive hold on, among other things, consumption. Consumption—­whether of a theoretical idea or of a sandwich—­extracts its power from repetition. Repetition performs familiarity. Many cities and sandwich shops embrace familiarity for purposes of consumption. Las Vegas is probably the best known city of them all.

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In my family, when we travel, we consume. In 2013, my wife and I spent some time in Las Vegas at our field’s main conference. We did not bring our kids. Despite the assumed need to attend our field’s main conference, I did not want to go to Las Vegas. Nothing on my RSS feed revealed intriguing beer opportunities for me in Las Vegas; nothing in my online reading aggregated for me the feeling of excitement regarding what new brewpubs I could visit. I don’t gamble. I’m not interested in shows. For some time now, I have aggregated an internal image of Las Vegas that does not appeal to me. That aggregation, or technical image, likely resembles many critics’ image—­and repeated version—­of Las Vegas: Las Vegas is superfluous; Las Vegas is unnecessarily extravagant; Las Vegas is symbolic of excess. All of these positions are familiar because of their critical repetition and consumption within popular and academic writings. All of these positions are critical commonplaces. Despite my interest in food and despite the amount of time I spend watching food-­related shows on TV, my aggregation does not include interest in the expensive celebrity chef restaurants found along the Las Vegas Strip in its various casinos, from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon to Joel Robuchon’s Robuchon. Celebrity 89

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chefs, as well, mark the familiar, or they do for audiences who watch as much food TV as I d o and see their various shows repeated throughout the day. Walking along the Las Vegas Strip, with the rest of Vegas’ visitors, I encountered the opposite of celebrity chef restaurants: Sammy Hagar’s restaurant, the Hard Rock Cafe, the M&M store, Margaritaville, and a number of other chains (restaurants and stores) that are found (repeated) in other cities across America. These places, too, mark the familiar for audiences who eat candy or enjoy the second incarnation of Van Halen. On our last night in Las Vegas, we ignored these chains and visited the Ellis Island Casino and Brewery. My wife was intrigued by the rumor of an unpublished $7.99 steak dinner special (steak, salad, potato, and a beer) that rivaled many of the expensive options we had encountered on the Strip. In the smoke-­fi lled Ellis Island Casino, not far from the Strip, patrons nodded off at slot machines or sat hunched over the machine’s arm, pulling, pulling, pulling. The beer was awful. The IPA did not taste like much of an IPA. The salad was uneventful. The steak overcooked. The special, indeed, was real, if not particularly tasty. As my Las Vegas Strip walking and Ellis Island dinner are aggregated into previous aggregations that I have read or heard about, I know why I don’t like Las Vegas. The overpriced restaurants, $8.50 beer pours, gambling, and dominance of chains inform my dislike. Even a r un-­down casino and its cheap steak dinner special don’t alter my aggregation. I d oubt I a m alone in this dislike. But it’s too easy to offer up a critique of superficiality regarding my visit; superficiality is the commonplace or topos aggregated in a c ollective critical knowledge that has written about Las Vegas before me or mapped this experience onto an allegory or other narrative genre. Las Vegas’s superficiality has been recited many times already. Jameson, for instance, famously sketched Las Vegas’s postmodern flaws as “a rainbow-­flavor landscape of its psychedelic monuments” (Postmodernism 97). Robert Venturi and colleagues famously wrote of Las Vegas’s complexity, noting that “essential to the imagery of pleasure-­zone architecture are lightness, the quality of being in an oasis in a perhaps hostile context, heightened symbolism, and the ability to engulf the visitor in a new role: for three days one may imagine oneself a centurion at Caesars Palace, a ranger at the Frontier, or a jetsetter at the Riviera rather than a salesperson from Des Moines, Iowa, or an architect from Haddonfield, New Jersey” (53). Las Vegas, in other words, challenges authenticity. Las Vegas removes aura and demonstrates the affective value of repetition. Las Vegas generates fusion. Whether that act is good or bad is debatable. Instead of reciting traditional critiques of Las Vegas or repeating their place within the technical image of Las Vegas, I’m left with the question regarding

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why other people enjoy vacationing in Las Vegas. Obviously, people like Las Vegas and the places that constitute what we might call Vegasicity as much as people like Subway sandwiches and Chick-­fi l-­A, or as much as academics like critiques such as cognitive mapping. People like the very aggregations I, at times, hate or feel distant from. It would be easy to label my position as an anomaly when attempting to understand any of these aggregated moments of pleasure. It is too easy to respond accordingly: “But you are a fussy academic or a beer snob or a food sob or a doting parent or an asshole; that is why you dislike these items.” Such a response may have some degree of accuracy, but it doesn’t completely explain how one interprets or explains an aggregation. My fussiness, too, has to be an aggregation based on specific encountered technical images, such as a Subway artist or a craft beer sampler. When I left Las Vegas at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning for an early flight back to Lexington, the Strip was packed with people at that early hour. Las Vegas is an aggregation of franchises whose name recognition provides a common, yet still exotic, experience that one does not seem to tire of—­as long as one likes the city and its offerings. Las Vegas visitors enjoy the aggregation of the commonplace (similarly, we can say, to how critics enjoy their own aggregated commonplaces such as a typical critique of Las Vegas). You can go to a House of Blues in many cities; why come to Las Vegas to go to one, whether in the middle of the afternoon or at 3:30 a.m.? You can drink a Coors tall boy at 10:00 a.m. anywhere. Why come to Las Vegas just to drink a common beer while walking down the street, where the price of a C oors tall boy is more than elsewhere? In Las Vegas, there exists an aggregation that is meaningful to many people the way my Google Reader was meaningful to me. Google Reader made news and information common for me; it brought a variety of so-­called exotic or unique moments into my computer space: Appellation Beer, Beernews.org, Beer Street Journal, Brookston Beer Bulletin, and others. Those who visit Las Vegas find pleasure in the stream of familiar storefronts and headline acts: Faith Hill, Blue Man Group, Roseanne Barr. In the case of Las Vegas, unlike an RSS feed, the people go to the aggregation (as Flusser argued individuals interact with the technical image and are not only receptive to its repetition). The aggregation is assembled for us in Vegas because we have interacted with these franchises elsewhere—­not just on highways and at rest stops as Ritzer argued. We encounter franchises everywhere. Franchises represent banality no matter how often they repeat across our professional and personal landscapes. We do not always reject cultural repetitions such as a franchise. At 3:30 a.m., concerned about my long flight back to Kentucky and short layover on the way home, I bought a Subway sandwich for my trip in the casino where my hotel was located.

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When Google Reader stopped functioning, I switched to the Old Reader, a Google Reader clone. My aggregations remained intact. My RSS reading experiences, like a Las Vegas regular’s travel experiences, are neat and orderly. My content, though, changes daily. On the Strip, there will always be Grand Canyon tours, Eddie Griffin appearing in three shows a week at a given casino, franchises to frequent, and expensive beer options. What makes RSS special, then, if aggregation exists already in numerous spaces in a variety of material forms, like on the Vegas Strip? I could say that aggregation affords the virtual element of “surprise” (look at what I got today in my reader!), or offers more substantial content (my feeds are more meaningful to knowledge acquisition than the Hard Rock Cafe is to a casual diner), or provides the juxtaposition of disparate material (as opposed to the same $8.50 beer draft price along the Strip regardless of which bar one sits in) or that aggregation is a shared experience (what I w rite online, too, is aggregated, I hope, in others’ Readers so that my work networks with other writings circulating in various spaces). Or I could say that RSS aggregation appeals to me the way Las Vegas appeals to its visitors. The topics I choose are commonplace to me: beer, food, Kentucky, technology. These topics regularly inform my thinking or world outlook regardless of my place online. When I write, I draw regularly from these topics. Aggregation can also be an appeal to what I already want to experience. These familiar experiences are what make technical images, for Flusser, so commonplace and so powerful. For this reason, Flusser claims that the technical image brings the individual back to the place she began from, that the technical image does not advance one’s place within a given knowledge economy either for critical or other purposes. Sampling four to six beers in an afternoon at a brewpub by ordering a sampler is a commonplace experience; it is a way to maximize tasting (six as opposed to one pour) as well as travel (I may never return to this brewpub again). Many of us who enjoy brewpubs are ordering samplers. Many of us pass our afternoons this way; the overall interaction is commonplace. Taking a p hotograph of one’s child and sharing it on Facebook is a commonplace experience. Visiting a tourist attraction, such as Las Vegas, is a commonplace experience. Commonplaces, as Barthes argued throughout Empire of Signs, perpetuate pleasure and meaning. Japan, as Barthes argued, serves him as a series of commonplaces that when aggregated create an icity of a country and culture. Japan, Barthes writes, consists of the commonplace as stereotype: Chopsticks. Pachinko. Bowing. To create a Japanicity, not the country of Japan but a Japanicity of Japan, Barthes composes with the commonplace, what he calls “the elementary character of the writing” (Empire of Signs 14). A commonplace can positively serve as an elementary character of one’s writing: aggregated familiarity, sandwich shop,

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shared photograph. Breweries evoke their own commonplaces: tasting room, shaker and tulip glasses, sampler trays, card games, children and dogs, stools, couches, countertop at the bar. People enjoy Las Vegas for a variety of reasons, but one reason may be the ability to compose with the commonplace, to shape an experience (vacation, tourism, anniversary) via a series of commonplaces that serve their own elementary character of writing. Without the commonplaces of Las Vegas that bother me so, would anyone actually vacation in the desert of Las Vegas? Beer. Gambling. Vacations, Travel. Food. These items act as placeholders for an elementary character of writing. Notable restaurateur/cook Kenny Shopsin, too, offers an elementary character of writing in his cookbook Eat Me, though without mentioning Las Vegas. Cookbooks can serve as authentic representations of recipes and food history, or, in the case of writers such as Shopsin, they can also serve as imaginative presentations of any given icity (much like Las Vegas or related areas of experience). Opening a c ookbook and reading through its recipes and accompanying narratives, one typically engages with a series of commonplaces posed as the imaginative: how to cook Middle Eastern food, how to cook Chinese food, how to cook Mexican food, and so on. One does not need to be Middle Eastern to own and cook from a book about Middle Eastern food. My bookshelf of cookbooks offers my own interest in culinary commonplaces: bread, eggs, vegetarian food, fermented foods, foods of the Mediterranean, Scandinavian food, Mexican food. When I open one of these books, I am not looking for how to make an authentic tortilla or falafel from home, but instead, I am reading commonplaces that aggregate for me a variety of experiences I don’t need to replicate in their entirety, only in their imaginary. The cookbook, like Las Vegas, is an imaginary space. Reprinted in Shopsin’s book is Calvin Trillin’s essay “Don’t Mention It: The Hidden Life and Times of a Greenwich Village Restaurant,” which introduced Shopsin to ἀ e New Yorker’s readership in 2002 as an eccentric restaurant owner who banned parties greater than four and prohibited “cheating” (i.e., ordering the same thing someone else ordered). If Las Vegas aggregates the commonplace tourist experience of buffets, gambling, extravagance, being able to drink a beer in public at 3:00 a.m., and entertainment, Shopsin aggregates the individual within a larger food economy of sameness. Food can be the same when posed as unique. Las Vegas can demand sameness while situating itself as a unique tourist destination. With Shopsin, however, that sameness yields to commonplace aggregations meant to shift individual awareness regarding what a p articular food might be. In his essay, Trillin questioned Shopsin about the makeup of what Shopsin listed on the menu as the Egyptian Burrito. Trillin had accidently mentioned the Egyptian Burrito to a New York

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Observer reporter who was writing about Shopsin’s restaurant. Talking about Shopsin’s to news reporters, Trillin noted, was not allowed according to Shopsin’s rules. Shopsin asks Trillin what he told the reporter. “I said, ‘An Egyptian Burrito is a burrito, and inside is sort of what Kenny thinks Egyptians might eat.’ Kenny considered that for a m oment. ‘Well, that’s accurate,’ he finally said” (xvii). Egypt is not a c ountry associated with burritos. Neither is Las Vegas a city originally associated with the Eiffel Tower. Whatever stereotypes the average foodie might have about Egypt, they likely include falafel and ful (cooked fava beans), not a Mexican street food featuring meat or chicken inside a tortilla wrap. For Shopsin, the stereotype he has internalized regarding Egyptian food—­whatever that aggregation might entail—­a llows him to “write” an authentic dish called the Egyptian Burrito. An Egyptian Burrito is, of course, different from a Mexican burrito. Egyptians, first of all, don’t eat burritos. But in one’s own internalized aggregation (or technical image) exists an image of what Egyptians might prepare as a burrito. That sense of might is Shopsin’s elementary character of writing. Might, as well, belongs to Las Vegas. Despite its lack of representation, a might form of writing can be authentic. Organized among the various recipe sections in Eat Me’s table of contents is another elementary character of writing reflecting the might of authenticity: Mexican Food Fiction. Mexican Food Fiction does not pretend to be authentic Mexican food, but it may be authentic if one operates from a specific aggregation or technical image of Mexican food. “The fact is,” Shopsin writes, “Mexican food can be sophisticated and subtle and it can use all kinds of exotic ingredients, but that is not the Mexican food I am talking about” (206). Shopsin’s Mexican Food Fiction resembles Barthes’ fictive nation of Japan where one “isolate(s) somewhere in the world . . . a certain number of features” that shape an entity called X (or what Barthes elsewhere calls the trait of icity) (Empire of Signs 3). As Shopsin explains his Mexican Food Fiction: “The kind of Mexican food I l ike is the kind I w as introduced to in my twenties at a place called the Chili Parlor on Tenth and Bleecker Streets in the Village. It is Mexican food based on a foolproof combination of melted cheese, spicy peppers, and greasy red meat” (206). Mexican Food Fiction is an aggregation. Others’ aggregations of Mexican food might include Taco Bell or the Texas-­ based chain Chuy’s or salsa or tacos or refried beans on a plate with rice and several cheese and sauce smothered enchiladas, or Rick Bayless’s restaurants. Shopsin’s aggregation consists of cheese, peppers, and greasy meat. Shopsin’s stereotypes might anger authentic Mexican chefs or foodies; academics may be angered by faulty representations and cultural appropriations; Barthes’ Japan may provoke anger among Japanese experts; Las Vegas superficiality

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may anger purists of place. All of these, however, are fictive writings. Shopsin never claims Mexican Food Fiction is the only Mexican food in the world or the most authentic. Neither does Barthes make such a claim for the Japan he composes. Las Vegas, as well, does not make a claim that it is not fictive. Among Shopsin’s recipes for Mexican Food Fiction include Carmine Street Enchiladas, Huevos Rancheros, and Taco-­Fried Chicken. Huevos Rancheros is a traditional Mexican dish found in many restaurants and consists of eggs, tortillas, and salsa. Shopsin writes about his own version accordingly: “I know that Huevos Rancheros is a specific Mexican dish, but this isn’t that. I don’t even know what real Huevos Rancheros is. When I came up with this dish, I envisioned a rancher out on the plains, cooking over a big open fire behind a chuck wagon, one of those things with the wooden wheels and the big canvas top” (210). Imagining. Envisioning. What something might be. These are the rhetorical features of a w riting based on stereotype or an elementary character of writing. The critical stance would be to target such food as cultural appropriation and not fusion or fictive; the critical stance would be to dismiss the Las Vegas imaginary that still appropriates familiar symbols and images. What Shopsin does, though, is less fusion and more of an imaginary writing that aggregates stereotypes into a projection or technical image and eventually food on a plate. Shopsin does not make claims to authenticity and neither does Las Vegas; he makes a claim for food as food writing. “I don’t even know what real Huevos Rancheros is.” And it doesn’t matter. To his Huevos Rancheros, Shopsin adds collard greens, black beans, and chicken stock. That’s what his technical image informs him regarding Huevos Rancheros. My wife, raised in Texas and in love with Austin, would likely think differently; her technical image might make a greater claim for authenticity than adding collard greens to Huevos Rancheros. My kids, however, don’t eat Huevos Rancheros. They would have no opinion on the matter.

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We find elementary characters of writing throughout any number of commonplaces that comprise a g iven day, whether we visit a t ourist city or a restaurant. Besides my visit in Las Vegas and its focus on food, I experience the elementary character of writing when grocery shopping. I often joke that the benefit of being a professor is being able to grocery shop in the middle of the afternoon. Among the aisles of a typical grocery store experience that I am familiar with—­from Publix to Kroger to Hy-­Vee to Whole Foods to our local co-­op Good Foods—­we encounter the commonplace food shopping experience: canned foods, bin coffee, cold beer, dairy, a meat counter, cheese, produce, and sushi. “One spends more time” in the grocery, Pierre Mayol notes, “than anywhere else, at the same time revealing one’s capacity to master the complexity of this overabundant universe” (83). Michael Pollan once called Whole Foods the “most cutting-­edge grocery” (Omnivore’s 135). “I love going to Whole Foods,” Bonnie Kristian writes, “which I do every two weeks, like clockwork, to pack a cart full of groceries for the fortnight to come.” She also admits to holding her twenty-­eighth birthday party in a W hole Foods’ café. In 2017, industry analyst Morning Consult surveyed two hundred thousand 96

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customers and discovered that Kroger, at 53 percent approval, is the most popular grocery store in the nation. Whole Foods came in second at 48 percent (Sen). Grocery shopping is so important to daily life that stores that previously sold toiletries, household items, and clothes now also sell groceries (Target, Walmart). “Grocery stores,” Michael Ruhlman writes, “are more than just places to buy food, they are in a b roader sense a r eflection of our culture” (Grocery 1). In at least one Kroger in Lexington, one can also buy furniture. Grocery shopping exemplifies banal weekly activities: driving our car to a parking lot, parking, entering a large store, purchasing food, returning home. “On the surface,” Ruhlman adds, “grocery stores seem banal. Perhaps because they are so ubiquitous” (Grocery 2). This banality represents one of our most commonplace experiences: we must purchase food somewhere in order to eat. The grocery store was not always banal. When Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in 1916 in Memphis, the innovations he brought to grocery shopping seemed mysterious and confounding. The tedious, yet for its time authentic, nature of clerk-­driven shopping (clerks getting products for customers from behind counters or from giant bins) transformed into an entirely novel experience that challenged norms and commonplaces. “Inside the Piggly Wiggly, the visitors found a grocery store that did not look like a grocery store. There were no flour or cracker barrels, no display counters. There were no white-­aproned clerks waiting to fetch groceries for them” (Freeman 161). With the Piggly Wiggly, the grocery store was suddenly magical. Packaged goods. Checkout lanes. Self-­service. Banality, though, arrived with time, exposure, and repetition. The authentic grocery familiarity of being waited on and buying products from bulk changed into another type of authentic food shopping experience of aisles of products, variety, debit card transactions, nonfood items for sale, and grocery carts. For some people, grocery shopping is transformed into an activity outside of the banal. Groceries are becoming emotional spaces. “Shopping,” grocery store architect Kevin Kelley believes, “is all about navigating our personal hopes and fears, and grocery stores will only succeed when they play to those emotions” (Fassler). Even as our shopping moves online and into the digital realm, the grocery store commands our emotional attention. According to Kelley, “Physical stores are a way to capture attention, to subject customers to an experience, to influence the way they feel and think” (Fassler). This thinking can be focused on the local, the economic, the authentic, or even the spiritual. “There is something essentially religious about working at a Whole Foods market,” Benjamin Wurgaft writes about his work at the grocery’s cheese counter (87). Whole Foods mirrors religion because, for a certain social class, it conjures up images of morality and ethics exemplified in the pres-

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ence of organic labels, cage-­free eggs, local produce, and non-­GMO products. Whole Foods does not sell, for instance, Doritos. Whole Foods, unlike a Piggly Wiggly, made grocery shopping feel ethical. “A moral atmosphere surrounds socially conscious shopping, as does a vocabulary of religious images that we use to describe and negotiate morality” (Wugraft 89). While generic grocery shopping is banal, organic or health-­conscious grocery shopping is banal and moral. My house is less than a mile from Kroger; I can walk to it. We shop at Whole Foods, several miles away, instead. I wish morality had something to do with our choice, but we simply like the selection at Whole Foods better. One item Whole Foods stocks, and I never buy, is frozen garlic bread. Frozen garlic bread is a commonplace food item that appears to occupy a great deal of shoppers’ time and possible emotional investment. Every supermarket—­ whether Kroger or Whole Foods—­sells frozen garlic bread. Like a Hard Rock Cafe, frozen garlic bread translates a p articular food moment (shopping as opposed to dining out) into a common and familiar experience; though doubtful, a spiritual one. Garlic bread emotionally suggests ethnicity (stereotypically associated with Italian food) and American consumption (a typical everyday food). “Garlic bread,” John Thorne notes, is a small component, an appetite stimulant in what is usually a very large meal” (Simple Cooking 35). I am fascinated with frozen garlic bread far more than I am interested in Las Vegas. Frozen garlic bread is a product that never ceases to amaze me because, if I were a food executive at a major conglomerate like General Mills or Nabisco, and if someone brought me this idea of frozen garlic bread as a product we should make, I’d say: “No one will buy in a frozen state something so easy to make.” Such is Gaffigan’s opinion of buying a sandwich from a franchise. Frozen garlic bread, like a sandwich, is too easy to make. Why buy it? Ease, though, does not obstruct emotional attraction. What I would have argued about garlic bread, I might have also stated regarding visiting a House of Blues or a Sammy Hagar restaurant in Las Vegas. “Nobody will travel that far to do what they can do closer to home.” And yet, people do purchase frozen garlic bread. People also travel to Las Vegas to eat at Sammy Hagar’s restaurant. People are drawn to familiarity as an authentic experience. Frozen garlic bread serves as familiar and authentic simultaneously. Based on his visit to Safeway with his son to grocery shop, one would think that Michael Pollan never encountered frozen food. Within the grocery’s freezers “the choices were stupendous—­a lmost stupefying, in fact.” Among the many items Pollan and his son discover, they identify “the roast-­turkey and fried-­chicken dinners, the beef Stroganoff, the burritos and tacos and fully loaded hero sandwiches, the frozen garlic bread and sliders” (Cooked 196). As Pollan discovers, anything that can be made at home (authentic) can be purchased frozen in a

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supermarket (supposedly not authentic). Consumers, like Jonathan Gold in a Moscow airport, tell themselves it doesn’t matter. Despite not mattering, garlic bread is not so complex that it must be bought premade and frozen. Here’s how to make garlic bread at home: • • • •

Cut a piece of bread. Rub butter on the bread. Rub garlic on the bread. Toast the bread.

Kenny Shopsin offers a m ore complex variation of my version where the method is similar but the ingredients differ: • • • • •

2 tablespoons salted butter, softened. 1 teaspoon grated Parmesan cheese. ¼ teaspoon fresh garlic. One 10-­inch baguette, halved. 1 tablespoon chopped parsley (optional). (150)

Garlic bread is simple to make. Its two basic components, bread and garlic, are easy to purchase and are available at any grocery store. Why, then, do people buy frozen garlic bread? Asking that question is like asking, Why do people visit Las Vegas? Asking that question is like asking, Why do critique? Asking that question is like asking, What is a sandwich? Asking that question is like asking, Does it matter? Garlic bread, like the Las Vegas Strip, where one can drink a Coors tall boy at 10:00 a.m. or eat a generic hamburger and fries in the Hard Rock Cafe, aggregates experiences into one space: the process of making garlic bread, enjoying garlic bread at, maybe, a nearby Italian restaurant where the bread is brought before the meal in an expected fashion, reheating frozen food after a busy day, not having time to cook in the evening, bread as a daily staple. Garlic bread, too, displays the sense of icity Barthes highlighted as exemplary of the rhetoric of advertising. “Everybody loves warm bread when it arrives at the table,” writes well-­k nown Italian chef and food writer Lidia Bastianich. “And when it has the scent of garlic wafting from it, you know it has the Italian touch” (20). Garlic bread equals Italian food. The imagined and romanticized “Italian touch.” Icity, I note, is a form of aggregation. Garlic bread is easy consumption (reheat) and navigation (make one’s way around the kitchen). It aggregates experiences into an icity that allows for a specific belief to occur: this is the easiest way to prepare food. I don’t believe my kids have ever eaten frozen garlic bread. My writerly moment may be the recognition of this brief and inconsequential success story: I have prevented my children from experiencing frozen garlic bread. I a m a

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good parent! Despite this act of pride on my part, in our freezer, there are frozen Whole Foods mini pizzas. Mini pizzas are small, circular pizzas purchased from the freezer of a nearby Whole Foods and that have the Whole Foods 365 label on the box. We reheat these pizzas in the morning when we are rushed to get our kids ready for the day, and we put the reheated pizzas in our children’s lunch boxes for school. If I have prevented one object from entering into this moment of aggregation (food values) and yet allowed another object (frozen food product) to be substituted, I don’t know how important my shift in food aggregation has been. In other words, what is the value of this shift? How pure are any of the shifts in my aggregation regarding food? Have I made a difference by rejecting one kind of frozen bread (garlic) for another (pizza)? Making a cheese pizza, after all, is not very difficult. Flour. Yeast. Water. Let it rise. Add the cheese. Bake. These pizzas could just as easily be made the night before and frozen for the week. In fact, I make pizza almost every week and tell myself that I do it well. Still, I buy the frozen mini pizzas for my kids’ lunches. While she has never eaten frozen garlic bread, my daughter has been twice to a Subway; the first time, we were moving to Kentucky, and on the way to our new state, we stopped at a Subway outside of Louisville rather than push a l ittle farther to New Albanian Brewing Company, whose pizza and beer we had enjoyed on previous trips to the region. My son was only a baby, and he was too young to add Subway to his aggregation of food experiences. My daughter doesn’t remember the experience, so I am unable today to judge whether the Subway experience and “eating fresh” resonated with her then. During the second time, we were in a Harrison, Indiana, Pilot gas station, we were hungry, we were only an hour and a half away from home, but I let her and her brother buy sandwiches from the Subway inside. His sandwich consisted of only two cheeses. No vegetables. So sauces. No condiments added. “You call that a sandwich?” the artist serving us asked. She was confused by the order. In 2013, Subway introduced its own version of garlic bread for sandwiches. It was recalled in the same year due to contamination.

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We traveled to Philadelphia in 2012 to attend the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference. RSA is one of the two major conferences in our field. In 2012, due to a lack of grandparent availability for watching them, we took our kids. A great deal of conference attendance involves finding places to eat. Most attendees—­to my frustration—­desire to stay near the conference hotel and not venture out into the city. Conference hotels are often located in downtowns where eating options are limited or spotted by franchises. It is easy to find a Subway in any of America’s downtowns. Academics are sometimes too afraid to leave the comfort of the hotel or the familiarity of franchises when visiting another city; thus, they line up for a hotel Starbucks rather than go to a local coffee shop or, much to my disgust, eat meals in the hotel restaurant. My academic colleagues, at times, resemble Natalia Ginzburg’s description of the reluctant travelers who “take refuge in a hotel, this hotel signifying not a point from which to set out and see the city, but truly a refuge in which to hide and cower, the way cats or mice cower under a sofa” (122). “The one thing a traveler needs is curiosity,” André Aciman writes (“The Contrafactual Traveler” 93). Aciman, however, does not seek out the new (as I 101

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think I want to do or I want my fellow academics to do); he, an Egyptian, Jewish exile, is curious by the familiar. He wants the authentic experience of being Egyptian, an experience long abandoned in exile. He wants to return to the known. “I like to walk down the streets of foreign cities and spot imaginary signposts—­unreal signposts that are real to me because they point to a parallel place and to a shadow time zone elsewhere in time” (96). These walks provide Aciman with a sense of the most familiar of all places: home, or what he names “closest to what goes by the name of a comfort zone” (“The Contrafactual Traveler” 97). Being in another city can either comfort or alienate. In one situation, frozen garlic bread comforts. In another situation, a downtown Subway also comforts. But curiosity of place, as well, can comfort. Most times, though, my academic colleagues, at RSA and other conferences, choose not to be curious. They want the familiar environment of a hotel and its recognizable offerings. Thus, they line up at the hotel Starbucks in the morning. In the nineteenth century, Xavier de Maistre documented a f orty-­t wo-­ day “journey” around the most familiar and comfortable space available, his room, describing every detail and object encountered. Maistre’s project confronts the banality of travel, from academics who refuse to leave their hotels to those who seek adventure across the globe. Maistre appears to be aware of the bizarre nature of turning one’s room into a travel narrative and how the topic would not be viewed as valuable among contemporary travel writings. “Of what subject can I treat which would not now be insipid?” Maistre asks early in the book (35). To narrate travel from the position of not traveling, Maistre depends on the banal and insignificant encounters within the small confines of his room. Proximity matters (as it does for academics in a hotel). “Do not reproach me for the prolixity with which I narrate the details of my journey,” he states. Details are essential to this type of writing. Travel writing, whether in Barthes’ daily tasks, in one’s room for forty-­two days, or in a far-­off, exotic locale, depends on details. Otherwise, as with critique, we write only repetition. “The number of persons who formed the party, the number of mules, the quality of the food, the excellent appetite of the traveler,—­everything, to the very stumbling of the quadrupeds, is carefully noted down for the instruction of the sedentary world” (Maistre 49). Food, as Maistre notes, is one such detail. Appetite. Quality. While food criticism argues against the homogeneity of downtown dining (which a plethora of Starbucks might symbolize), academics who write or read such criticism—­what Jameson or Ritzer offer—­ forget the warning to not succumb to industrial food culture. Instead, they settle on a nearby Subway or Brazilian steakhouse chain rather than catch a cab or ride the train into another neighborhood or the suburbs. Such is the les-

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son learned from Maistre, who settles on staying home rather than enjoying his native France’s regional cuisine. Settling seems antithetical to food authenticity. Often, though, it isn’t. Jonathan Gold’s food discoveries, after all, are typically located in local, suburban strip malls, the most obvious topoi of food settling, the suburban spaces where homogeneity is meant to thrive (at least that’s what critique tells us), and fast food dominates. While he avoids fast food and chains, Gold’s discoveries are in the alternative comfort zone of the city, the suburbs, far from downtown hotels and tourist spots. In City of Gold, a documentary about Jonathan Gold, Gold says, “People not from Los Angeles sometimes don’t understand the beauty you can find in mini-­malls. In this completely ordinary place there happens to be extraordinary food.” The commonplace, the strip mall or suburb, can contain within its settled banality extraordinary experiences. In Lexington, Kentucky, some of the best and most authentic Mexican food can be found in strip malls along New Circle Road, a circular highway encasing the city. The generic hotel and downtown, however, can be more banal than a suburban strip mall despite their supposed proximity to the life of a given city. This contradiction is at the heart of my colleagues’ choice of Starbucks in the hotel. A suburban strip mall is too far away, too inconvenient, too unknown. Philadelphia’s Chinatown offers a c onvenient middle ground to the dilemma of where to eat nearby when staying in an urban hotel. Chinatown is walking distance from where our conference hotels are usually located in downtown Philadelphia. This means it is close enough to frequent, but at the same time close enough to be completely ignored by academics searching for a convenient Subway. In Chinatown, we ate at Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House. Hand-­drawn (or hand-­pulled) noodles are made by stretching and pulling dough into strands of various sizes. Strands may be thick or thin. They are often very long. ἀ e Village Voice’s Robert Sietsema credits Calvin Trillin for showing him Super Taste, a New York restaurant where the hand-­pulled “noodles are so hot, temperature-­w ise, that it’s a matter of both good etiquette and good science to suck them down with a l oud rush of cooling air” (Sietsema). Supposedly, one can order hand-­pulled noodles from several restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip, such as Beijing Noodle No. 9, but I was unaware of this fact during my visit in 2013. During our Philadelphia trip, it is possible that my wife chose Nan Zhou based on the number of stars the restaurant had accumulated on Yelp, a s ocial media site that aggregates reviews of, among other things, restaurants. While Yelp’s inconsistencies have caused one Chowhound thread to ask “Why is Yelp so wrong?” we still turn to Yelp as a source of advice or recommendation when visiting other cities whose eating spots are unfamiliar. Yelp provides us with an aggregation when we are unable to visit

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each restaurant separately, look over its menu, or even try its food. Yelp is a contemporary technical image of eating, layering the reader’s past experiences (e.g., of Chinese food) upon other diners’ experiences and expectations, and from that layering one draws a conclusion of potential value or of no value. Yelp, therefore, comforts when a distant city appears alienating. X liked Nan Zhou. I don’t know where to eat. But I am comforted by X’s review, so I will eat at Nan Zhou as well. Andrew Zimmern detests Yelp, calling it useless for identifying places to eat. Zimmern critiques Yelp for its amateur aesthetic, which obviously lacks authenticity due to inexperience. Average diners, Zimmern suggests, are not gastronomes. The amateur, Zimmern argues, cannot offer authentic writerly critique or praise. “I find it useless. If you’re aggregating a lack of expertise, then when I plug in ‘best sushi bar in Los Angeles,’ Yelp doesn’t help me at all. So, if you are a huge food geek like me that really believes in quality—­not expensive food, just quality. Above all other things—­quality. If you’re into quality, Yelp is not for you” (Kim and Appolonia). Nan Zhou’s good reviews on Yelp are based on commentary claiming its hand-­drawn noodles to be quality. For ἀ e New York Times’s Lee Siegel, quality is not an issue when it comes to social media; receiving an aggregation of positive reviews on a site like Yelp merely confirms individuals’ tendencies to search out the familiar (food topoi), particularly when that familiar place or restaurant has reached a s tate of mass popularity. Referring to the “Yelpification” of culture, Siegel critiques aggregated food rating sites like Yelp because the aggregations can be based on factors outside of quality. They are based on our desire to conform or embrace the familiar. “You have to go to a place that has received the best reviews from lots of people, even if you have no idea who they are or what their motives might be for spending their time rating restaurants. Gone are the days when ‘conformist’ was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-­star dispensers, you are a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.” Siegel’s point reflects a fear of repetition: repeated critiques or praises reflect crowd mentality. The crowd, many of us believe, prevents us from being tasteless shlubs. Yet for Siegel the crowd does transform us into tasteless shlubs, as it removes the aura of discovery or individuality. I, for one, have no desire to be a tasteless shlub. I don’t mind being a shlub, but I have taste. I also don’t mind the crowd. The crowd aggregates taste for us in order to prevent shlubiness from occurring, or so we want to believe when we rely on aggregation for choice. On a site like Yelp, aggregation builds a stereotype of pleasure associated with taste. When I wanted to eat in Philadelphia’s Chinatown and did not know where to go, I searched out that aggregation. Social media enthusiasts such as Clay Shirky have praised the power of the crowd

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and its ability to aggregate. “Ridiculously easy group-­forming matters because the desire to be a part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs. Now that group-­forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups” (Here Comes Everybody 54). Or as Twitter founder Biz Stone notes, “As soon as people gather into groups, their energy can be harnessed. They can move as one. They can make things happen” (183). Yelp, which Siegel rejects for the loss of individuality that such activity requires, is one such new “kind” of group. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram represent other types of groups where aggregated logics push or congregate information or ideologies, either as dissent or as conformity. As with the expressivist discourse I began this book with, individuality suggests authenticity—­whether in a w riter’s “real” voice or in an individual’s ability to think for his-­/herself. The individual has aura. Authentic selves don’t necessarily follow a crowd or group-­mind think, critics of groupthink argue. To be an authentic hand-­drawn noodle diner, one should already know, Siegel might say, what that experience should be by one’s own self (however that may be). I assume, without a site like Yelp, that knowledge would come from trial and error, reading about hand-­drawn noodles, eating a lot of Chinese food in general, and spending time in so-­called authentic places such as China, Chinatown, or strip malls. Thus, one would be engaging in aggregation, much as Yelp does for us on a different level and on a media, interconnected, platform. With or without Yelp, we still must aggregate. We still construct technical images. I don’t know if we were or were not following a c rowd or if we were or were not individualistic when we visited Nan Zhou. The Nan Zhou noodles were inexpensive, very tasty, and hand-­drawn. At most places that one orders noodles, one has to guess if the noodles are fresh (made in-­house or by a local vendor) or bought from Sysco or another restaurant supply company. At Nan Zhou, we could see the noodles being thrown down hard on a large table in the kitchen from where we were seated, flour shooting up in the air and across the kitchen. An arm went up, and the noodles came down with a solid smack on the stainless steel table. Pasta or noodles represent the least artisanal of most eating experiences; pasta is so common that it is almost all my son will eat on a nightly basis. Pasta represents the most familiar of ethnic food (Italianicity). While there are many artisanal pasta makers, pastaicity demonstrates the ease of buying pasta as opposed to making it. Noodles come easily in boxes and need only be dropped in boiling water for ten minutes to cook. Boxed noodles are slightly less convenient than frozen garlic bread; it takes longer to make pasta at home than it does to toast bread with butter and garlic on it. Hand-­

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drawn suggests the artisanal—­not a farmer’s market artisanal, but a simple, not-­made-­in-­a-­factory artisanal. ἀ is pasta was made by hand, not by a machine. This pasta rejects McDonaldization, we might say. Here is my recipe for my making my son’s nightly pasta, a recipe I have used in Lexington, Zhuhai, Tel Aviv, and Copenhagen: • • • •

Boil water Drop pasta in boiling water for ten minutes Drain pasta Grate cheddar cheese and parmesan cheese over hot, steaming pasta so that the cheese melts • Serve pasta to boy who won’t eat anything else This is my craft method that keeps my son alive and frustrates me greatly. Hand-­drawn, as opposed to boxed, pasta suggests a m ore authentic craft. Craft, as a marker of nineteenth-­century artisanal movements such as William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement or as a marker of small production beer such as craft beer, aggregates a v ariety of emotions and consumption habits into one category. Despite Siegel’s warning, even crowds can desire the artisanal, whether they imagine that artisanal in Las Vegas or in a Chinatown noodle shop. The artisanal is as much an emotional state of being as it is one of commerce or small batch production. Dunkin Donuts can call its bagels “artisan,” McDonald’s can offer an “artisan grilled chicken,” or Subway can call its employees “sandwich artists.” “Everything Fake is Now ‘Artisan’” a Gawker headline proclaims (Nolan). Time magazine’s Josh Ozersky calls artisan a “laughably transparent ploy” because its status as marketing buzzword hides the cheap quality that artisanal products typically contain and because true artisanal work is “hard to find and a signifier of quality.” Artisanal evokes anger as much as it evokes pleasure. With every craft beer or cheese admirer, there are equal numbers of individuals dismissing the whole idea of handmade products. Much of the disagreement revolves around how specific artisanal stereotypes (or signifiers) circulate and what they actually mean. “Artisanal and hipster,” Jen Doll writes, “are two words that most people will, at least in public, agree should be buried together and covered liberally with fresh earth held in the hands of skinny-­jeans-­wearing, ennui-­riddled twentysomethings.” Emotionally, however, any product can generate the same traits depending on the consumer’s aggregation of objects such as skinny jeans, youth, and a given product. Not everyone views pizza, beer, coffee, or noodles the same; not everyone circulates the same technical images of artisanal goods. That is not to say that everyone has a right to her opinion, but that craft is a shifting aggregation whose network depends on an ever-­changing assortment of fac-

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FIGURE 10 Anticraft bag found in a Brooklyn shop

tors. When I w anted hand-­drawn noodles in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, my aggregation was greatly different than my son’s. Because of our commonplace grocery store aggregations, too often we forget: A noodle can be made in one’s kitchen and not just in a restaurant or factory. Pancakes don’t need to come from a box, and garlic bread does not have to be frozen. When sold in brown paper packaging and off of a grocery store shelf, noodles make me feel that I’m buying something handcrafted (whether or not that point is true). Artisan is as much an emotional state, or an aggrega-

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FIGURE 11 Eating at Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House

tion, as it is a consumption one. I feel that way because pasta and noodles are emotional for me in ways that packaged soup or ketchup is not. There exists an emotional terroir when it comes to noodles; I imagine them as connected to the handmade, the local, or the ethnic. Noodles in brown paper packaging engage me: this is not a box; it’s a brown paper bag. The brown paper bag can suggest something as mundane as a school lunch but, because of its simplicity and lack of commercial branding, can suggest artisan, originality, the way things were once packaged back in the day. Brown paper bags equate simplicity. Crafted. Noodles in brown paper bags are objects that affect me and my desire to buy—­contrary to Wendell Berry’s declaration—­“as much as possible.” I buy craft. I buy emotion. The technical image of brown paper–packaged noodles affects the same emotions as those we felt while eating hand-­drawn noodles in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Brown paper bag noodles do not feel like a commonplace brand such as Whole Foods 365 or Barilla. They feel unique. They suggest craft or the feeling of craft. Craft is a difficult concept to understand or master even as it circulates as a commonplace in criticism, popular writing, and advertising. Its familiarity should be decipherable and beyond cognitive mapping. Craft, though, can contradict. Despite a rhetoric of craft claiming otherwise, the handmade or artisanal is not always in opposition to the mass-­produced or industrial. In the nineteenth century, William Morris advocated for a return to the hand-

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made in order to reject the modern, technological, and overall capitalism driving manufacturing and production. This binary, though, seldom holds up to scrutiny. “Craftspeople content with the seemingly uncontroversial goal of making the world a more beautiful place,” Glen Adamson writes, “have had to contend with the marginality of their enterprise: very few people have seen fit to allow handmade pots and homespun cloth to completely displace plastic bowls and T-­shirts in their lives” (135). Craft, that is, has not become a more authentic experience than the industrial even when we may want it to be so. Recall Calvin Trillin accepting Arthur Bryant’s T-­shirts and merchandising; the craft of barbecue does not displace its commercial efforts (sell enough to make a profit). Craft beer, beer by breweries who produce under six million barrels annually and who use adjuncts only for flavor (not cost reduction), also suggests craft. Craft beer, like other beer, though, often makes its way across assembly line–style bottling lines; is sometimes sent across the country or world in distribution trucks and shipping containers; and, in a few instances, is produced by companies who operate or are planning to operate more than one brewery (Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas, New Belgium, Stone, Deschutes, Oskar Blues). Breweries, indeed, resemble factories. Whatever is crafted in a brewery is also crafted in an industrial or semi-­ industrial setting. Craft, while it may strive for the authentic handmade product that highlights the individual, as William Morris desired, is a m oment of fusion that does not allow the individual to remain separate from other areas of production or from overall aggregated experiences. “Craft affords an opportunity to ‘think otherwise,’ a f ramework for reflection and critique,” Adamson notes (136). Craft, in this “think otherwise” moment, is also a form of writing, or what Barthes calls the elementary character of writing. Craft is expression—­relying on stereotypes such as the handmade or small, or the independent versus conglomerate—­as much as it is product. In much of craft beer disclosure, choosing to buy a craft beer over an InBev Anheuser Busch beer is an expression of independence, rebellion, or critical action. David versus Goliath. The little guy versus the Bully. The local versus the franchise. These are craft narratives that emerge from the sale and consumption of an object: in this case, a beer. Beer produces belief, ideology, and politics (and noodles can do the same). Bogost calls this form of expression “carpentry,” where the object itself becomes the philosophy and not what is philosophized over (93). Academic writers, Bogost tells us, “aren’t even good writers” (89). Therefore, for Bogost, academics interested in food or beer should produce crafted objects, such as, I’d assume, hand-­drawn noodles or noodles in brown paper packaging or even craft beer, in order to express belief systems and ideology when academic/scholarly writing fails. With this point in mind, and as

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much as I agree that objects speak to me when I consume or shop, I still try to write about craft. Despite the ease in doing so, I don’t make noodles at home. My aggregation of craft noodles is based on consumption habits. “Writing about craft,” Adamson points out, involves “addressing the relationship between the traditional and the modern, between the genuine and the artificial. This is never a simple matter. Modern craft signifies authenticity, but authenticity at (at least) one remove” (137–138). That removal, Adamson suggests, always pushes us a bit further away from the original or authentic craft experience, the aura of eating or drinking as many believe such activities should be, or as anti-­Yelpists might believe. Modern craft, of which noodles and beer might be classified as being a part of, can never live up to its predecessor, however we might imagine that romantic handmade object or experience. Another way to understand Adamson, though, is not that his declaration reflects extreme nostalgia, but that the ideology associated with modern craft is less authentic than the original anti-­industrial, anti-­business ideology craft movements generated from the objects they produced. Those original thinkers—­nineteenth-­century arts and crafts artists or Shakers building their furniture by hand—­didn’t have hipster customers or cool taprooms made from reclaimed wood or abandoned factories. The Shakers didn’t live in Brooklyn. Craft is also, to paraphrase Barthes, the situation of writing that supports contradiction. Craft, as Barthes might argue, is the pleasure of the text. Artisanal and industrial never fully separate in craft ideology. Authentic and replication mingle. We eat hand-­drawn noodles and ride mass transportation. We sit in an “authentic” Chinese restaurant in a modern, urban city where the authentic Chinese neighborhood doubles as tourist attraction fawned over by Yelp reviews, and where our children play with our iPhones during the meal (as they also eventually did when we ate in various cities in China and Hong Kong). We are always once removed from our experience of authenticity and craft. Eating hand-­drawn noodles in Philadelphia’s Chinatown feels authentic. It feels genuine. Signs and menus are in Chinese. Notice the large Chinese Friendship Arch that welcomes visitors into the neighborhood or the restaurant signs in Chinese or the “authentic” Chinese locals smoking in doorways or shopping or yelling. It is as if we are thinking: In this place, I am experiencing Chinese food the way the Chinese experience this food. We have eaten in Philadelphia’s Chinatown and we have eaten in China. Did I feel more authentic on the streets of Chinatown, or did I feel more authentic in Zhuhai, Guangzhou, or Shanghai, where we have also visited? I experience the sense of authenticity (an emotional, aggregated, consumer terroir) the way Trillin experiences authenticity via the Chinese characters on a given restaurant’s wall that he feels are the real menu. The menu put in front

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of him, Trillin believes, is just for tourists. Trillin fears that the quickly written Chinese characters on the wall hide a gastronomical secret, the true and authentic Chinese cuisine, the craft of Chinese cooking, the food he believes is better than what Americans normally order. “The walls were covered with signs in Chinese writing—­signs whose Chinatown equivalents drive me mad, since they feed my suspicion that Chinese customers are getting succulent dishes I don’t even know about” (Feeding a Yen 111–112). Indeed, how many of us, when we are in a Chinese restaurant, wonder where the real menu is? Isn’t there a secret menu local Chinese get? When we ate in China, we could not read the menus. We do not speak Mandarin. Our authentic experience was determined by pointing at pictures on the wall, taking pictures with our phone and pointing to them, scanning the menus through WeChat’s translation feature, or simply guessing. There were no secret menus, but we still experienced Trillin’s suspicions. No matter what I ordered, I believed the true, authentic Chinese food was beyond my grasp. Whether in China or in Philadelphia, noodles suggest craft and authenticity. When Anthony Bourdain visited Xi’an Famous Foods in Flushing, New York, for his show No Reservations, it was a two-­hundred-­square-­foot stall in a food court. He sampled the hand-­drawn noodles and noted they had “all the marks of quality.” Workers were featured carefully and elegantly stretching noodles. After the show aired, the restaurant became successful and extended into a franchise of over a dozen restaurants across the city. Bourdain’s declaration of an authentic experience transformed the unique hand-­pulled noodles into a repetitive one. Aura, it seems, was not lost. Aura, though, was tied to personality—­Bourdain. Bourdain projects the concept of authenticity via his television claims and personality. In the No Reservations episode “Disappearing Manhattan,” Bourdain returns to New York’s Chinatown and nostalgically remembers the “exotic wonderland full of dragons, fortune-­telling chickens, and skeet ball.” That “icity,” Bourdain laments, gave way to becoming “more sophisticated” and discovering “more authentic dishes, but I think maybe we lost something.” What do we lose when we gain authenticity and give up on stereotypes? Emotion. It also turns out, Bourdain learns, that, indeed, there is an authentic secret menu in Chinatown. Yelp and Bourdain are media personalities. A Yelp experience aggregates multiple opinions into a decision regarding where to eat. A television viewer aggregates into Bourdain authenticity (“he knows what he is talking about”), and in turn, the viewer forms a decision regarding where to eat. That Anthony Bourdain ate in a hand-­drawn noodle restaurant in a food court was proof enough of the place’s authenticity. Future diners aggregated his TV show into dinners. They likely would not have done so for a food court or strip mall

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restaurant randomly discovered or driven past. Andrew Zimmern’s effect may not have been as strong. When Zimmern visited the “hole in the wall” Xi’an Famous Foods in 2011 for the show Appetite for Life, he half-­heartedly threw down noodles on the counter. His method did not seem authentic. I’m not aware of any increased sales from his visit. Bourdain’s rhetoric often revolved around authenticity. I experience a noodle-­based authenticity similar to Anthony Bourdain’s description of visiting Vietnam: “Every pot of soup or noodles over a few sticks of burning wood is fresher and better-­looking than any stuff in a New York market” (A Cook’s Tour 59). When we walked the streets of Hanoi, we did not follow Bourdain’s path, but we did notice large pots of soup out on the street, in front of stores, and adjacent to restaurants without air-­conditioning. I cannot say if the pho I ate in one of those restaurants was better than pho I could order in New York or Lexington, but I d id struggle to balance the steaming, hot soup fogging my glasses and the sweat rolling off my brow due to the July heat. Bourdain’s romanticism is a r eminder that whatever I e xperience elsewhere, it is more authentic than what I experience at home, except, I suppose, for what I experience in Las Vegas or in the supermarket’s freezer or any other restaurant I get sweaty in while eating dinner. Bourdain’s anti-­authentic “New York market” signifies the generic and widespread grocery shopping experience where soup, noodles, or other foods lined up on stocked shelves are not real. These “things” we buy in grocery stores are fake, replications, industrial products lacking aura, placed in opposition to real food. The real stuff, Bourdain argues, is abroad, in a local outdoor market, where pots of water are fired by burning wood. No gas. No electric. Wood, the most authentic of all compostable materials. Bourdain’s description, a stereotype, of course, also takes an object—­t he food or wood-­f ueled pot—­and uses it to express (or carpenter) an ideology of craft or the artisan. In this wood-­f ueled pot, we discover an image rich of embedded meaning: rusticity, local, handcrafted, natural, and low tech. I could take these same keywords I identify in Bourdain’s writing and apply them to the experience of eating hand-­drawn noodles at Nan Zhou in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. I saw the chef throw noodles down on a table with his bare hands! This feeling Bourdain expresses and many of us share, of course, is removed from a site of origin and becomes mapped onto how I emotionally or gastronomically situate myself when visiting a c ity such as Philadelphia. Because I enjoy craft, I identify with the handmade noodle tossed in the air in long ropelike strands the way I might identify with a wood-­f ueled pot of boiling water. The identification is mythical, romantic, and without any signification outside of a technical image I engage with. Even if I can make pasta (and I have

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a pasta roller I seldom use), this act of craftsmanship is far more authentic for me than my own efforts could ever be in Lexington, Kentucky, where I lack the ethnicity or even arm strength to throw down noodles. I am not alone in my authentic identification aggregated across social media and in restaurants. Sara Kay’s research on Yelp and authenticity reveals attitudes such as Bourdain’s to be dependent on racial stereotypes regarding so-­called authentic experiences. Topoi dictate our authentic experiences. Surveying twenty thousand Yelp reviews, Kay noticed that “the average Yelp reviewer connotes ‘authentic’ with characteristics such as dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-­white when reviewing non-­European restaurants” (Kay). In an interview with Mother Jones, Kay argued that when everyday patrons of “ethnic food” discuss their dining experiences, “our expectations and experiences are potentially less founded in what we have actually done or our actual experiences, and more founded in stereotypes or false perceptions. The implications are that we unfairly judge these cuisines and cultures based on false perceptions when we use language like authenticity to describe these cuisines and these cultures and peoples” (Vongkiatkajorn). A wood-­f ueled pot. Plastic stools. Pho cooking in a big pot on the sidewalk. Such items contribute to overall expectations regarding food authenticity. They are, indeed, stereotypes. If we don’t have these items within our experience, we may doubt the existence of authenticity. In a hand-­drawn noodle restaurant in any given Chinatown, I expect cooks throwing down noodles onto a stainless steel table to be visible. Their visibility confirms my false or realistic expectations. For Kay, this is problematic and racist because it reinforces a stereotype. For me, this is part of the process regarding the circulation and reception of meaning, food or otherwise. Even Jonathan Gold identifies with the hand-­drawn noodles made by cooks who “whirl great ropes of dough over their heads like nunchucks, and slam them onto these stainless steel tables as if they were trying to smash an enemy into pulp” at the Malan Noodles fast food chain in Hacienda Heights, California. Malan Noodle is a fast food restaurant. It is not authentic in the sense of a mom-­and-­pop place discovered in a nondescript strip mall where patrons sit on plastic stools; it is a franchise. But this particular kind of fast food, Gold argues, is the result of “the effort of hands, an element of craftsmanship” (“The Big Pull”). This kind of fast food, we assume, offers authenticity and is different from Subway where hands, connected to “artists,” fashion sandwiches from a variety of mise en place when customers watch a meal being crafted. For some reason, Malan Noodle embodies craft for Gold despite its mass-­production model (repeating the same eating experience globally) that is visible in chains

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such as Wendy’s and Subway. I see the sandwich artist make an Italian hero. I see a Malan Noodle cook throw down the noodles. Aren’t both hand-­based? How does one identify with the complexity of craft when it appears in fast food—­not just in a Domino’s “We’re not artisans” slogan or a (MillerCoors) Blue Moon “Artfully crafted” promotion, but in hand-­drawn noodles? Identification, in this technical image I locate in a hand-­drawn noodle, occurs even if it is an imaginary identification. Food fiction. Hand-­drawn noodles. Beer. Artfully crafted. Even the expression handmade evokes particular emotions and feelings that, for individuals fed up with mass-­produced food culture and soulless consumer culture, attract regardless of the object’s mass production. For my kids, though, the craft moment discovered among hand-­drawn noodles is merely another moment to play drums on the table with chopsticks.

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On January 17, 2015, Saturday Night Live aired a spoof of artisanal culture. On a street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, and Jay Pharoah discuss Martha’s Mayonnaise, an artisanal mayonnaise spot that charges eight dollars for a handcrafted version of the condiment. The overall message mocks all things hipster and artisanal associated: brunch, gelato, dog walking, wine and cheese parties, and life partners. With its mix of street and artisanal culture, the skit situates the artisanal movement as another commonplace, a topos, whose meaning no longer reflects elitism, hipster culture, or the middle class, but rather the everyday. When the skit concludes, and Kevin Hart shoots whoever it is he has a conflict with (while running his bourgeois dog-­walking business simultaneously), that point is clear. If these three Brooklynites are so-­called street guys who like gelato and artisanal mayonnaise, then the artisanal is banal and hardly authentic. Shoot a guy on the street and eat gelato? That’s more everyday than gangster. The artisanal becomes another commonplace narrative we tell to frame a given experience, and not a special condition of modern consumption. Such is Sandy Hingston’s contention when she declares that millennials 115

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have abandoned mayonnaise as an authentic condiment. Its cultural status is too commonplace, she argues, and much too associated with a previous generation’s commonplace idea regarding food. How can mayonnaise be craft when it is everywhere? Condiments, outside of mayonnaise, have become ethnic, and therefore more authentic to the average consumer. Still, Martha’s Mayonnaise does cost eight dollars. “Newer generations are refusing to meekly fall in line with a culinary heritage that never was theirs. Instead, they’re gobbling up kefir and ajvar and chimichurri and gochujang again.” The unfamiliar supposedly suggests authenticity. Mayonnaise is boring, common, and, for some, disgusting the way gochujang could never be. Some people, but not those in the SNL skit, hate mayonnaise. Notice Drew Magary’s complaint of “mayonnaise bullies” who refuse to accept his hatred of the condiment. “I hate mayonnaise itself, the way it festers all over my food like a blob of acrid pus. But what I h ate even more is the strange national insistence upon mayonnaise being a vital condiment, even though countless people hate mayonnaise and science explains why it can cause the human brain to register disgust. No matter. When I tell certain people that I don’t like mayo, they react as if they just discovered an alien life form.” Artisanal culture rebels against mass culture in order to pursue the authentic; young people rebel against their family heritages in order to discover overlooked authenticity, which is typically found elsewhere, such as Philadelphia’s Chinatown, a Flushing food court, or Brooklyn. When Anthony Bourdain visited Provence, France, on his show No Reservations, he identified tradition as an artisanal authentic state of being identified in a condiment. Aioli (which, despite Bourdain’s opposing belief, is mayonnaise) must, Bourdain dictates, be made with a mortar and pestle in order to transform its basic spreadability-­on-­bread status. “The real thing,” Bourdain narrates as he watches aioli being made, “the way people around here agree it should be made.” Aioli, Bourdain argues, is “magical.” Unlike Magary’s hatred of mayonnaise, Bourdain attributes to aioli properties beyond condiment. It is a traditional artisanal process. Within the mix of egg yolk and oil is something immaterial, something emotional aggregated into the emulsion. “You don’t whip it, blend it, mix it in any conventional sense. You slowly, with traditional stone mortar and pestle, and nothing else, incorporate olive oil into gently pulverized fresh garlic.” That is a great deal to express about mayonnaise, whether it comes in an eight-­dollar jar or is made in a French countryside with a mortar and pestle. Why does mayonnaise capture the public’s imagination, whether negatively or romantically? In ἀ e Simpsons episode “The Mansion Family,” Homer imagines the famed Mayo Clinic hospital as a “clinic full of mayonnaise doctors” who argue over who will save an incomplete sandwich. In Homer’s

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imagination, Miracle Whip (not really mayonnaise; it says “salad dressing” on the label) beats out Hellman’s and Best Foods—­which is a generic name for Hellman’s (“The Mansion Family”). None of these products are artisanal, but the reference to mayonnaise suggests the condiment’s larger placement within popular culture and eating habits: its authentic status. If ἀ e Simpsons finds mayonnaise worthy of commentary, then so should we. “If one argues for a m ore general available level of quality,” Patric Kuh writes, “is it still okay to feel a slight chill at hearing artisan bandied around like a catchall marketing term?” (95). With the increased perception of better products available for consumption also comes an increase in a particular terminology, such as artisanal or even mayonnaise. Notice how Elizabeth Greenspan describes Whole Foods’ offerings; out of all of the supermarket’s inventories and displays available at the grocery, she conjures up the hyperbolic image of “cage-­free, Sriracha-­spiced mayonnaise” in order to describe the Whole Foods experience. Mayonnaise anchors the shopping experience for her the way mayonnaise anchors Homer Simpson’s imagination, except one version is artisanal and one is sometimes treated as if it were artisanal. It’s not enough that Whole Foods stocks Sriracha mayonnaise. In Greenspan’s critique, Whole Foods’ Sriracha mayonnaise is cage-­free. Free from the constraints of industrialization, the eggs used to make this mayonnaise must be good, and they must be special because the chickens were “cage-­free.” Cage-­free is a rhetorical marker of the artisanal and the good. Cage-­free, like Bourdain’s tradition/ heritage trope, signifies value. Cage-­free means humane, anti–animal cruelty, healthy. Cage-­free, we are led to believe, separates Whole Foods from other supermarkets such as Kroger or Publix, who no doubt immorally buy eggs from chickens who live in cages. A 2018 report by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, however, found no substantial health difference between cage-­free eggs and eggs produced by chickens kept in cages (Jacob, Pescatore, Anderson). Such a point, though, matters little when specific words’ circulation triumphs authenticity. Homer depends on “sandwich,” and writers like Greenspan depend on “cage-­free.” ἀ e artisan. Craft. Tradition. Artisanal. Morality. Such keywords demarcate an approach that elevates the banal into something otherly. These terms also prompt the question Kuh raises regarding artisan culture when he ponders the intimacy and attention to detail associated with craft foods. “Was it studied, calculated to impress, or was it real and authentic?” (180). Does Martha’s Mayonnaise simply impress via packaging and branding, or is it really an authentic eight-­dollar mayonnaise? Does the price tag, in other words, transform the mayonnaise into an authentic product the way Hellman’s doesn’t? Does the presence of a mortar and pestle in a French country kitchen alter our

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perception of what an oil and egg emulsion is? Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek, which makes the eggless Just Mayo mayonnaise, exasperates all of these concerns as he conflates craft’s handmade aesthetic with a savior vision of “a bright future where [consumers] can eat better, be healthy and save the environment” via vegan mayo (Bosker). Vegan mayo, much like cage-­free eggs, possesses powers beyond price, the countryside, or gastronomic pleasure: because of its animal-­free identity, it will save us from our own immorality or poor life choices. For Kenny Shopsin, there is no doubt that mayonnaise belongs to the banal, and not the artisanal or savior category Tetrick proclaims. Shopsin dismisses anything food related that is elevated beyond the ordinary, making it clear that “I don’t use fancy cooking techniques” (Eat Me xxvii). Regarding mayonnaise, Calvin Trillin quotes Shopsin describing his early years in the food business as not being a chef, but a mayonnaise salesman: “Essentially, if anyone asked me what I did for a living, I said I sold mayonnaise—­ mayonnaise with chicken, mayonnaise with shrimp, mayonnaise with eggs, mayonnaise with potatoes. The key was that essentially you sold mayonnaise for eight dollars a pound and everything else you threw in for free” (xviii). The dividing line between the artisanal and everyday is, at times, confusing if not deceptive. Can a vegan mayonnaise save the world? Does cage-­free matter? Is Shopsin really not an artisan because he says he’s not? Is his chicken salad or egg salad really nothing but basic mayonnaise with superficial, additional ingredients? Is his mayonnaise the same as Hellman’s or Duke’s? Josh Ozersky notes, “But the truth is that artisanality has almost nothing to do with quality and everything to do with delivery. It’s the transaction that matters. Did you ever have an artisanal cola? Was it as good as a Mexican Coke? I bet it wasn’t. I can’t speak to bespoke suits, since I can’t afford them, but I k now for sure a neighborhood artisan can’t make a hamburger as well as Steak ‘n Shake.” Ozersky’s emphasis of transaction, or what we can also call delivery, may be read as an endorsement of packaging, marketing, keywords, hype, or fads, or it may be read as the circulation of all of these activities within a specific networked audience receptive to these meanings’ positivity. Artisan, of course, is a technical image once transmitted. It is layered with expectation and previous interaction. Dunkin Donuts sells artisan bagels. Blue Diamond sells “artisan nut thin” crackers. Dominos once proudly and playfully declared “We’re not artisans” while also calling its pizza Domino’s Artisan pizza, a pizza whose box was signed by the person who made it. Artisans craft. Artists sign their work. Artisans are not machines. They are humans who make food. These examples function via delivery—­what they publicly claim to be or mark on their boxes, wrappers, bags, and other forms of shelf or advertising identification. Delivery transforms the everyday—­a pizza or bag of nuts—­into a circulated

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commonplace. The commonplace eventually becomes authentic when its circulation reaches a specific point of audience reception. Condiments occupy a commonplace within the artisanal narrative. Something as simple as an egg-­and-­oil-­based sandwich spread (i.e., mayonnaise) transforms into a h andcrafted product when framed—­rhetorically delivered or transmitted—­as artisanal. “What else, besides being umbilically attached to little digital devices, do consumers need to make life worth living?” Mark Singer asks. “Artisanal ketchup,” he answers (“Obviously.”). Instead of ketchup, identity is a typical academic response to this question. Condiments, like an artisanal ketchup, provide an alternative identity concerned with the general relationship we maintain with what we eat, how it’s grown, if it’s real or fake, how much it costs. Condiments, whether mayonnaise or ketchup, offer additional value to our daily lives. From eating a sandwich to eating eggs, a condiment enhances or alters our brief moments at the dining table shoving food into our mouths. Artisanal culture hypes this enhancement by adding additional, cultural values to a jar of mayonnaise or a bottle of ketchup. These values might entail morality or the handmade. While some scholars trace ketchup’s origins, for instance, to China or Indonesia soy sauce, ketchup evokes for many the cultural values of America. Elizabeth Rozin declares that “ketchup is a uniquely American product and must ultimately be understood as a profound expression of American-­ness” (54). Ketchup, Rozin writes, embraces some sense of “icity” (or her aggregation of Americanness), whatever that Americanness might entail (ruggedness? Western expansion? masculinity? consumerism?). For Anthony Bourdain, the ketchup quality of Americanness is gluttony. “The rest of the world has a dimly-­perceived view of us as eating nothing but fast-­food hamburgers diving into swimming pools full of ketchup” (Hernandez). Without defining what she means by Americanness (unlike Barthes’ breakdown of Japan or Italy), Rozin claims ketchup does so by symbolically representing, of all things, blood. Ketchup, like any other food or sauce, allows us to “spend a good deal of energy and imagination changing foods ideationally” (46). Rozin argues that we fashion allegories for food, as Jameson does for popular culture, in order to comprehend historical and cultural relationships (e.g., food and humans) as something more than mere consumption. The ideal ketchup, Rozin explains in detail, or the eidos of ketchup, can be summed up as part of a larger allegorical story involving humans’ long-­standing conflicted relationship with blood and taboo. American culture, too, participates in this practice. “Visually, [ketchup] provides an unparalleled version of the blood-­red sauce—­but in this case it serves not only as a culturally transformed blood substitute to eat on vegetable foods, but also a blood enhancer to eat on meat” (54).

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Craft culture, however, likely views ketchup’s authenticity differently. Blood is seldom, if at all, included in the craft condiment narrative. Can a condiment be allegorical? Like eight-­dollar mayonnaise, ketchup is not supposed to be artisanal nor signify eating beyond the commonplace expectations of everyday grocery items such as industrial, manufactured products like Heinz or Hunt’s. In the TV show Mad Men, Don Draper pitches a “Pass the Heinz” ad to Heinz executives by showcasing the commonplace, banal foods associated with ketchup—­french fries, steak, a hamburger—­and the catchphrase “Pass the Heinz” without the word ketchup attached. No need to add ketchup, Draper insists, because of popular expectation. I grew up with ketchup (in our case, Heinz) as a ubiquitous condiment put on steak, eggs, meatloaf, french fries, and almost everything else my mother served for dinner. Ketchup was banal and everyday. Why say the word ketchup when Heinz was, indeed, what we passed around the table? We would never have imagined a c ondiment called “artisanal” ketchup. Anthony Bourdain dismisses the notion of artisanal ketchup, claiming that industrial ketchup such as Heinz, which I—­and I assume he—­grew up eating, conveys far more rhetorical power than a craft version. There, indeed, exists an ideal ketchup, Bourdain argues, only it is the mainstream, homogenized version that graces most homes’ dinner tables and most fast food restaurants’ condiment sections. Bourdain never mentions blood, however, as part of this ideal. “I think a good example would be homemade ketchup. Is it better than the Platonic ideal of ketchup that we all are emotionally attached to? How good do you want ketchup to be? I t hink the industrial product, in this case, has powerful emotional connections that cannot be replicated, or bettered” (Dadras). “I will eat homemade ketchup,” Tyler Kord writes, “when people figure out how to make artisanal high-­fructose corn syrup” (65). Homemade artisanal ketchup, Ben Robinson writes, “is dangerous and it has to stop.” Craft condiments, it seems, have boundaries. Mayonnaise can cost eight dollars a jar, but ketchup must maintain its industrial roots. The attraction of both industrial and homemade ketchup is not so distinct. Bourdain speaks of “emotional connections” to a product like Heinz, but the owners of the popular Country Cat restaurant in Portland, Oregon, write of a similar emotional connection to their homemade ketchup. “If you’d step into the kitchen, you’d see fluffy buttermilk biscuits getting nice and golden in the oven, housemade ketchup bubbling away on the stove, and half a cow waiting in the walk-­in for its turn on my butcher block” (Sappington 22). Fluffy biscuits. Golden in the oven. Head-­to-­tail butchering. A butcher block. This is the romantic language of craft culture that Bourdain, even as he dismissed craft, also embraced. If there is an allegory in this paragraph, it likely would be that the essence or ideal of American life can only be found

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in the homemade or farm-­to-­table movement. American ideals are, we could surmise, embodied in the homemade. Whether or not artisanal ketchup is allegorical, it projects the icity of exotic foods and elaborate dining that would have been foreign in my middle-­ class, suburban Miami home. Even a butcher-­block kitchen with half a cow waiting to be prepped would have been alien to us. My parents never would have accepted ketchup as anything more than a commonplace table item, an afterthought to the dinner itself. Ketchup, however, can elicit some of the exotic overtones mayonnaise does. Former Saveur editor James Oseland, for instance, comments on ketchup’s exotic trait, noting that he is “tickled when sitting in a posh, white tablecloth restaurant” and “a beautiful silver-­plated tureen of ketchup comes out. In fact, it doesn’t seem inappropriate at all. It seems, ‘At last ketchup has arrived,’ and rightfully so” (Locke). Ketchup has arrived. For some, such as Oseland, ketchup is now like bread, cheese, and beer. Ketchup has been rhetorically transformed by elevating its status from everyday into extraordinary. Consider, for instance, Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan’s decision to name their artisanal ketchup “Sir Kensington,” a fictional name inspired by the trope of royalty and prestige. “The company created a whole backstory for Sir Kensington, including an Oxford education and time spent hosting salons attended by Catherine the Great” (Dodson). Oxford. England. Salons. International relations! With such keywords backing its newly found status, ketchup indeed has arrived. Ketchup is not alone in this rhetorical food situation. “Man on Internet Almost Falls into World of DIY Mustard Enthusiasts,” reads a headline from ἀ e Onion. This mockery highlights the lure of artisan products to middle-­class Americans who grew up with the banality of mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard (like myself). ἀ e Onion continues the icity of artisanal culture, mocking the aggregation of emotions that, via the group mentality of shared beliefs, distorts the value of food and elevates something as basic as mustard to the level of food obsession. As the piece jokes: “There I was, a grown man, planning a trip to the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin, when suddenly I heard a voice deep within me say, ‘This is not what you want your life to be about.’” Mustard, as David Sax introduces his book Save the Deli, is a t echnical image of New York artisanal food. With mustard, we typically view a s pecific aspect of American culture: Brooklyn, German culture, hot dogs, Jews, steamed or smoked meat. Mustard, as a c irculated condiment image, is for many people Jewish and ethnic; mayonnaise, on the other hand, is gentile and white. New York sandwich shop owner Tyler Kord writes, “Beef with mustard is a diet rich in sodium and relatively low in fat that Jews like me have used to sustain ourselves on this planet for so long” (17). “My wife looks at me, a jar of

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mayo in my hand, with something very near disgust,” Rick Bragg writes. In my house, I am the only Jew who likes mustard. Mustard is too spicy, too rich, too exotic for my family. Mayonnaise, unlike mustard, is too plain, at times, for a general public. Bragg’s wife despises him for his mayonnaise love. When I dip fries in mayonnaise, my kids give me the same reaction. Still, despite its generality and connotations of “white trash” or of being bland, mayonnaise, like many other foods, suffers from narratives of authenticity. Debates exist regarding mayonnaise’s origins. Middle America? Exotic? French? Spanish? As Bragg writes, “There are many popular theories of its origin, that the Romans and Egyptians used some combination of oil and eggs to mask the flavor of spoiled food, but the most popular is, of course, that we blame the French. But unlike tight pants and pointy shoes, they got this right. It is believed the recipe was acquired from the town of Mahón in Menorca in 1756, after a victory over the British by Louis-­Francois-­Armand du Plessis de Richelieu. The sauce mahonesa in Spanish became mayonnaise. Food historians still fight over this, mostly in relative obscurity.” Mayonnaise, as bland as it is to many, is ethnic via an unknown origin debate. Mustard, on the other hand, is by nature ethnic on its own. Wherever mustard came from originally, if it isn’t Jewish, it is Belgian or German or from some other European nationality that is not our own. As Sax introduces his survey of Jewish delis, “[This book] is about rye bread, garlic-­soaked pickles, and mustard—­whether yellow or brown, but always mustard, because butter and mayonnaise do not belong in this book” (3). Mustard is the ethnic image of Jewish tradition, deli-­styled food, and, likely, New York. Mustard might be a craft product (mocked or not). Mustard, as well, is crafted by consumers bored with franchise mentalities. Mustard is a craft signifier: an experience and an object. Mustard should be spicy, grainy, and sometimes made with beer. We don’t just eat mustard; we spread it over another object (bread, meat, cheese, pretzels). Mustard can’t exist alone. We experience it as we simultaneously experience delis, Jewish culture, and New York. Noah Bernamoff, former owner of Brooklyn’s Mile End deli, which specializes in smoked meats, insists that certain sandwiches come with mustard as opposed to any other condiment. Bernamoff offers the following anecdote about his mustard policy. “One of the sandwiches was the Ruth Wilensky, which was the salami sandwich on the onion roll. And so, it’s a joke, because at Wilensky’s in Montreal, there’s a sign that says ‘No Mustard, 5¢ Extra.’ And so I put that on the menu, ‘No Mustard, 5¢ Extra,’ and people would say, ‘What kind of place charges you more to take something off?’” (Ferst). Craft aggregations require a sense of authenticity as they compile image upon image. For a purist (or the belief in a purist image), mustard goes on salami. Nothing else. Salami has to

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have mustard. If you don’t want mustard on what needs mustard, you have to pay extra. Mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard—­t hese condiments embody for me my childhood of sandwich eating: grilled cheese with mayonnaise, leftover meatloaf sandwich with mayonnaise and ketchup, a pastrami sandwich with Dijon mustard. But the condiments I recall were not artisanal; I, like most people, grew up consuming the commonplace condiments of Miracle Whip, Heinz, and French’s. If there is a c ommonplace narrative regarding condiment consumption—­whether during the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood or of today—­it would likely consist of these three condiments. I no longer eat ketchup, and I don’t eat as much mayonnaise as I once did. When I buy mustard it is typically stone ground or a collaboration with a brewery such as Sierra Nevada or Stone. I prefer Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise to most American brands. For this reason, maybe, my children don’t eat much ketchup and don’t eat any mayonnaise or mustard. Since they never go to fast food restaurants, they also don’t see others eating ketchup or mayonnaise. People, in general, consume what others do. We aggregate others’ habits into our own. Malcolm Gladwell attributes this commonplace behavior to happiness. “Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having” (Gladwell). The entire artisanal narrative depends on not having what everyone else is having (the handmade as a unique and often rare experience; the antifranchise action that can only occur in one place), yet for the artisanal to flourish and continue to exist, more than one person must have it. There are twenty-­six Subways in Lexington, but there could only be one artisanal mayonnaise place (if at all). When we went to Nan Zhou in Philadelphia, we were not having what everyone else was having in order to be happy (the hand-­drawn noodle as opposed to what is served in a Chinese restaurant chain, such as lo mein). But we were in Chinatown, a commonplace destination for tourists in major cities. We can’t be the only people interested in hand-­drawn noodles. We are but four of millions that have visited this particular Chinatown. Craft beer cannot depend only on beer nerds (like myself) to succeed. Repetition diminishes craft and artisanal ethos (the handmade becomes industrial) while simultaneously allowing it to flourish. We have to have what everyone else is having, or craft culture cannot exist. This point holds true for parents as much as it does for products.

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Instead of relying on commonplace narratives of craft or artisan culture that ἀ e Onion mocks but others celebrate, I w ant to call the moment we experienced at Nan Zhou “parental artisan.” While parental artisan is not what William Morris would have imagined or preached as the craft basis of socialism and nineteenth-­century anti-­industrial ideology, parental artisan is, as well, a form of craft. Parental artisan is the opposite of the dining/condiment experience I g rew up with in Miami, Florida, where, in addition to Heinz, my parents favored commonplace eating experiences at Bennigan’s, Domino’s, or a local Italian restaurant much like Barthes imagined Italianicity to be (its Italian stereotypes based on marinara sauce, red and green interior décor, and calzones). Instead, parental artisan feeds off of craft logics, and all they suggest but reapplies such logics to a specific kind of parenting that involves eating and drinking beer in a digital age informed by aggregation services as well as photo/information sharing among groups. Parental artisan is, among other things, the hands-­on parenting most of us engage with when dining out or visiting brewpubs. Parental artisan is din-

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ing out with your kids at a Yelp-­inspired restaurant where noodles are made by hand. Parental artisan is a fusion of eating (interest in the artisanal) and parenting (having kids) and technology (social media sharing of iPhone photographs). Parental artisan allows for obsession (eating, kids) to be the focal point of a rhetorical arrangement of experience. Parental artisan cannot exist without technology and the logic of sharing. Details’ Adam Sachs writes about consumption and craft: “What would all those people with niche obsessions do without the organizing power of the Web? It brings a nation of local crafters and consumers together, and intimacy, however far-­flung, is the glue of the artisanal community.” We are not, as Siegel insists, shlubs for participating in the aggregated group. On the contrary, we are artisans because of how our purchases and beliefs shape segments of contemporary culture as a form of intimacy. We are crafting our experiences, and the objects of our experiences, as Bogost might say, are generating a c raft-­like narrative that mere writing cannot perform. Food, mayonnaise, Yelp reviews, hand-­drawn noodles, social media–shared images, all of these items are, when aggregated, producing carpentry. Typically, the parental artisan, as carpentry, materializes as an image, a shared photograph placed on one or more platforms for immediate and unknown audiences. Parental artisan communicates the image of authentic experience. That carpentry becomes a shared viewpoint as well when expressed on Facebook or Instagram with whoever might follow my account. Via craft/ artisanal logics and my iPhone, I feel that I am brought together with other parent consumers whose intimacy, at times, might be based on purchasing too many hand-­drawn noodles during an evening out in Philadelphia. Or our intimacy might be simply based on any dining experience where kids provide the anchor of the shared photographic moment. Once expressed as sharing, we engage familiarity, recognition, or, if we do not have children, boredom, anger, compassion, or some other emotion promoted by yet another picture of a child eating. I gain pleasure from sharing online. I gain pleasure from the aggregation of my children into other shared moments, eating or otherwise. No matter how much pleasure I gained by watching the noodles thrown back and forth, through the air, and against the floured table, I a lso shaped this experience via my children playing drums on the table with their chopsticks or throwing their food on the floor or hitting each other. As a parent believing he is sharing artisanal culture, some part of that artisanal culture I share becomes shaped by what we eat and by bad behavior of children at the table. Others, too, share likewise. We are individuals, but we are a part of a larger social network, whether within the family or within a particular discipline or among

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foodies. Our commonality, as Gladwell notes, is our happiness. The first part of our social network is familial; the other part is digital engagement via social media. In turn, we are craft. A parent is a stereotype, a commonplace. To be craft is to be a part of an even larger network of stereotypes whose aggregation is the basis of specific cultural meanings far removed from William Morris’s craft imaginary but in line with its overall thinking. This experience is far removed from the parental eating experiences I grew up with, ones that, when traveling, often revolved around a Denny’s, the Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s we often stayed at, or a non–fast food chain such as Shoney’s Big Boy. But in this case, our commonality was not our happiness. No one could claim that we experienced happiness in these travels or eating moments. Beyond the yelling or complaining, no part of our travels communicated a s ense of craft or identification with craft culture. Our commonality, as any cultural critic could attest, was the nation’s commonality regarding eating. But we weren’t happy. Commonality reduced our experiences to insignificant events, barely remembered meals (if remembered at all) and a traveling experience as significant as spending forty-­ two days in one’s room. Eating at one Howard Johnson’s or another, was there a difference? Such experiences carried over into adulthood when, for instance, my parents arrived in Monroe, Michigan, one summer with their RV and RV touring group. Monroe, a f orty-­minute drive south from where I l ived then in Ferndale, offered no artisan or craft dining experience, but my parents insisted that my not-­yet wife and I drive down to Monroe, visit them in their RV and the RV park where they were camped, and have dinner at a local Italian restaurant with their RV group. One does not have to drive forty minutes to Monroe, Michigan, in order to have Italian food. Italian food is everywhere in America. While ethnic restaurants that embody the craft or artisan sentiment can, no doubt, be found in small towns throughout the United States, the Italian restaurant we ate at in Monroe was not one of them. The decision to dine at an Italian restaurant in Monroe reflects Barthes’ Italianicity, as my parents and their RV group typically default to “Italian” as the common, ethnic food of choice (their happiness). Italian food, on the other hand, is not my typical default (lack of happiness). Italian food, whether popularized via the stereotypical images Barthes identifies or by the circulated and repeated image of garlic bread, tomato sauce, pasta, and red-­and-­white tablecloths, captures for many Americans the technical image of “eating out.” When Billy Joel sings of “a bottle of white, a bottle of red,” he is indicating his desire to dine out at an Italian restaurant (“Scenes”). As Todd Kliman writes, this imaginary Italian restaurant Americans conjure when dining out can also be called “the red-­

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checkered tablecloth joint.” “This term stands in for an entire genre of Italian restaurant—­t he kind that features Sinatra on the jukebox, carafes of cheap red wine, and big bowls of over-­sauced pasta—­and is usually delivered with a smirk” (115). When I was a kid, eating out meant one of two options: Chinese or Italian. Even though most families prepare spaghetti in tomato sauce at home quite easily, to “eat out” often meant going to an Italian restaurant where spaghetti in tomato sauce is served and treated as unique. Think of modern, fast casual “Italian”-­styled restaurants, from Olive Garden to Fazoli’s to the Spaghetti Factory to even Noodles and Company, each offering a basic take on pasta that could be made anywhere by anyone. The fast causal pasta restaurant aggregates the small-­town American restaurant, which, in turn, aggregates its own technical image of a restaurant in Italy. Each iteration challenges a consumer’s aggregated sense of Italian or pasta authenticity. The air-­conditioning in this particular Monroe, Michigan, restaurant was broken the night we dined there, and the food was unspectacular at best. I can’t remember if I ordered spaghetti in tomato sauce, but there was nothing artisanal about this parental experience. My parents simply extended the commonality of my childhood to a restaurant outside of an RV park in southern Michigan in order to maintain their own internal aggregations of eating out. It is that easy to foster a common experience over time and space. Reproduction allows Italian food to taste the same in Monroe, Michigan, as it did in Miami, Florida. I grew up without parental artisan and remained without parental artisan until I had kids. With pasta, Italian food can be considered craft when it is handmade or sold in brown paper bags. Even more so, craft/artisan imagery circulates not just by the object itself but by the reaction to the object and how that reaction either becomes obsession or habit. Response makes an object craft. Obsession is one type of consumer response. Obsession translates culinary objects into authentic objects that trump mass-­produced objects. If I am an obsessed craft beer drinker—­as I have previously written—­I am because of my reaction to what is, in fact, a product made using industrial equipment (a mash tun, a fermenter, maybe packaged on a canning or bottling line). I make beer authentic in ways not too different than my parents’ RV club does with Italian food. I participate in a common (happy) experience, in person with others and online with others. Mayonnaise, as I first noted, is another example of this process of transformation. The Martha’s Mayonnaise storefront in the SNL skit I previously mentioned is, in fact, Empire Mayonnaise, which was a real Brooklyn shop that specialized in eight-­dollar (for a nine-­ounce jar) artisanal mayonnaise made by “happy cage-­free pasture raised eggs” (as described on its no longer existing website).

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In December 2013, we took an artisanal research trip to Brooklyn, though we never visited Empire. Brooklyn, in many critics’ minds, has become the focal point of a craft renaissance, a place transformed from its early twentieth-­ century image as a refuge for Jewish immigrants from Russian and Eastern Europe into hipster, urban culture, a place where even banal everyday food such as porridge is associated with craft (Morabito). Brooklyn’s contemporary aggregation of hipsters and craft products is far removed from its 1940s–1950s aggregation of Jewish culture or ethnic clashes. In film, Brooklyn has provided the backdrop to classic movies such as Annie Hall, Do the Right ἀ ing, and Dog Day Afternoon, and these texts generate a technical image of what Brooklyn should be or is. Today’s Brooklyn, on the other hand and far distinct from Woody Allen’s image, with all of its artisanal products, represents what Benjamin Wallace calls “the daguerreotype stereotype of the bristly hipster, in newsboy cap and tweed britches, pedaling his penny-­farthing to a north Brooklyn industrial space to make handcrafted nano-­batch sweetmeats.” As Kuh writes, “Brooklyn artisans are on their own, finding and developing a skill that eventually, maybe, will grant a greater meaning to their lives” (191). When we visited, we were a week too early for the opening of Brooklyn’s first Whole Foods, a somewhat artisanal-­focused store within the franchise that features sixteen craft beers on tap and “over two hundred products from bakers and food makers from the borough, including . . . chocolate-­peppermint almond milk” (Greenspan). It’s difficult to believe that Brooklyn could have survived for so long without a Whole Foods or chocolate-­peppermint almond milk. The Brooklyn Whole Foods supposedly has a record store inside. Our Whole Foods in Lexington, with its thirty-­t wo craft beer taps, does not sell records. Vinyl equates hipster culture. Authenticity, though, is not necessarily a Brooklyn trope. Consider the story of the hipster, bearded Mast Brothers, the Brooklyn chocolatiers whose ten-­dollar handcrafted bean-­to-­bar was discovered to not be artisanal but rather “remelted, mass-­produced chocolate” (Shanker). Yet, Mast Brothers conveyed the most authentic rhetoric possible in the promotion of their brand, from their beards to their carefully constructed narrative of “bean to bar.” Mast Brothers packaging features slick, minimal, artistic designs with simple typeface announcing one-­word flavors such as smoke, maple, and olive oil. The projected image is obviously craft. The Mast Brothers scandal confirmed what the doubters suspected: artisanal is a commonplace rhetorical term used to foster trends and fashion, to appeal to young, urban professionals interested in only superficial culinary experiences and not to taste or authenticity. “Are you a sucker if you like Mast Brothers chocolate?” an NPR headline asked. Yes and no, the article responded. Yes, if one “be-

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lieved that what they were getting was some of the best money could buy.” No, if one wants to live a food fantasy or belong to a lifestyle brand. “If you have $10 to spend on chocolate, you’re likely going to feel good about that decision. The price sends a signal to the brain that it’s top-­quality chocolate, so you may experience a high level of pleasure when you eat it” (“Are You a Sucker?”). For some, the Brooklyn aesthetic involves a negotiation between these two points of value and fantasy. Brooklyn projects a specific fantasy of authenticity centered on how its cultural objects are aggregated or internalized by patrons. That negotiation is often based on authentic image. In 2015, Wired featured Kristy Chatelain’s photographs of Brooklyn before and after the hipsters took over the borough. The essay begins with an ode to Brooklyn’s artisanal stereotype, an image that takes the most banal and everyday products and transforms them into something special via the commonplace terms of “artisanal” or “craft.” Chatelain’s photographs feature storefronts, windows, and doorways, all suddenly transformed into craft because of change in ownership. Chatelain visually documents craft shifts in space. “Brooklyn, like Oakland, was a great place to live before the hipsters took over and brought their fixies and crappy beer and artisanal donuts. Think about that for a moment: Artisanal donuts” (Mallonee). The phrase “artisanal donuts,” whether made in a Brooklyn shop by hand with local ingredients or made by a massive fast food chain such as Dunkin Donuts, suggests hype over substance, the inauthentic over the authentic, image over thing itself. Fried dough, regardless of whether it’s topped with maple syrup and bacon, will always be fried dough. “It’s always Brooklyn, isn’t it, doughnuts?” Kate Krader and Chris Rovzar sarcastically ask. Yelp lists more than three thousand doughnut shops in its “Best Donuts Brooklyn, NY” aggregation for users. At Wylie Dufresne’s Brooklyn-­ based Du’s Donuts and Coffee, customers can pay forty dollars for a dozen doughnuts, including a saffron-­coconut ice cream doughnut with caviar and poppy seeds (Sparks). The doughnut is the great signifier of craft and hipsterness. Doughnuts provide one way for Brooklyn to carpenter the meaning of artisanal. A great deal of Brooklyn’s artisanal roots are, though, in Jewish culture, the many Jews, such as those from my family, who settled in Brooklyn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after fleeing the pogroms and anti-­Semitism of Russia and Eastern Europe. Once, those bearded individuals who today make craft chocolate and overpriced doughnuts were Hassidic Jews. Thus, the problem with artisanal doughnuts might be the same problem raised by a typical internet game and title of a blog that mocks Brooklyn’s craft leanings toward black suits and beards: Hassid or hipster? The game is easier with doughnuts: gas station doughnuts or Wylie Dufresne? No contest.

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Which figure does a black coat and long beard signify? The challenge is more difficult. Is there an authentic black coat and beard image, and if so, to whom does it belong? ἀ e New Yorker asked the same question when it featured on its April 11, 2016, cover a hipster and Hassid standing side by side on the train to Brooklyn. “You know you’re in hipster Brooklyn,” Henry Alford writes, “when someone who looks like a 19th-­century farmer tells you that his line of work is ‘affinity marketing.’” Sometimes, the lack of authenticity regarding food or place is comforting despite knowledge of the contrary. I may know that my experience is not authentic (this doughnut is just a doughnut), but I may not care (I just paid forty dollars for twelve doughnuts at a famous chef’s restaurant). Authenticity does not equate perceived value. Kenneth Rosen, for instance, cannot visit relatives in Israel so he comforts himself by eating Israeli shakshuka (eggs poached in tomato sauce) at the Brooklyn Artisan Bakehouse in the Hassidic neighborhood of Crown Heights. In this particular instance, value cancels authenticity. “For a moment I feel that I have come for more: there is little to remind me that I am somewhere in Brooklyn. Inside it feels like Tel Aviv, sans ocean view.” Brooklyn or Tel Aviv? Which is more authentic when one is eating shakshuka? Indeed, with the increased popularity of Israeli food in New York via restaurants such as Taïm, Nur, and Balaboosta, the question of food authenticity surfaces and complicates these narratives for many journalists and writers. Hassid or hipster also becomes real Israeli or fake Israeli? Frank Zappa once asked if someone was wearing a Sears poncho or a real poncho, as if it mattered. Aura is irrelevant. Similar questions are asked of Brooklyn cuisines, such as the popularity of Israeli food. As Sierra Tishgart writes in Grub Street, despite New Yorkers’ love for Israeli food, there lacks consensus, even among transplanted Israeli chefs, regarding what Israeli cuisine actually entails. This debate is mostly because of the Middle East’s continued territorial conflict, itself bogged down by questions of authenticity, whether that authenticity is a question of the right to live in a homeland or what is the origin of falafel and humous. Israelis, even when transplanted to Brooklyn, may still struggle with the notion that their country has its own cuisine. They haven’t internalized value yet. “Keep in mind that the country of Israel isn’t even 70 years old, and the very topic of what constitutes as “Israeli cuisine” is contentious, as politically complicated as it is culinary. Cultural sensitivity is a larger issue than it is with typical restaurant trends” (Tishgart). The question of cultural sensitivity, which is nonexistent among artisan mayonnaise eaters who care little for which ethnic group invented the condiment, prompts Liel Leibovitz to question New York’s and Brooklyn’s rise of Israeli restaurants because such restaurants tend to shy away from projecting any sense of being Israeli. They aren’t

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even trying to be Israeli, Leibovitz laments, and thus these establishments do more harm than good, much as the Mast Brothers have ruined, for some, the notion of artisanal chocolate. If one hides authenticity, the argument claims, one hides quality. But one also projects an inaccurate image of the cuisine (much like eating Chinese food in a mall’s food court does for China). Leibovitz wants Israeli cuisine to own up to authenticity. “In Park Slope, amid colorful glass lamps and terracotta plates that could’ve worked in Rabat or Rehovot or Rome, we were fed shakshuka that could’ve doubled as salsa and a schnitzel crusted with panko, a flaky departure from the humbler, more finely ground, and more delicious variety you’d eat anywhere in the Holy Land.” Is that really what shakshuka tastes like—­t he Proustian reminder of childhood in Tel Aviv—­or is it just eggs in tomato sauce? Is the chocolate really made by hand or merely melted down from factory-­made products? Narrating his weeklong journey through Brooklyn, Alford name-­drops the famous eight-­dollar mayonnaise mocked by SNL and—­prior to the scandal—­Mast Brothers chocolate, whose practices he believes exemplify an exaggerated Brooklyn logic. If there exists an exaggerated Israeli food logic in Brooklyn for Leibovitz, there also exists for Alford an exaggeration of everything Brooklyn in general. Even before being exposed as fake, the Mast Brothers, Alford writes, depended on imagery relevant to the craft foods movement: wind-­sailed cacao beans (as to not damage the beans), hand-­sorting, and a rest time before hitting the shelves (to restore their flavors?). “This company makes it a point to wind-­sail its cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn, then to hand-­sort these beans, then to let its chocolate ‘rest’ 30 days before sale. Only Leona Helmsley’s dogs have ever been so cosseted” (Alford). Brooklyn is hype. Brooklyn is hip. Brooklyn is, sometimes, fake as well. None of these claims dissuade me from liking Brooklyn or wanting to visit. Part of my family came from Brooklyn, the part that eventually became the larger wave of New York/New Jersey Jews who moved to South Florida after World War II. Brooklyn’s Williamsburg is the capital of the Chabad movement; the Lubavitcher Rebbe lived at 770 Eastern Parkway. Chabad, like any organized religious group, claims to be the authentic Jewish orthodoxy. Walking outside of the Rebbe’s home, I was immediately approached by Chabadniks asking me in Hebrew to put on tefillin (Jewish phylacteries—­a mitzvah to put on and pray with) because of how I look. I look as if I belong, I look as if I am a real Jew; I apparently do not look like a Brooklyn hipster. I have authentic Jewish features. Because of this vague Brooklyn family/ethnic connection, I have either associated with or been associated with New York, despite never having lived there. In other words, a p ublic aggregation of New York, Jewishness, and Brooklyn places me within the items that supposedly make up

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the borough’s traits: facial appearance, pushy, loud, so-­called swarthy color. Even my wife calls me a New Yorker. I have been asked many times if I a m from New York. My supposed New York accent and attitude (which could just as easily be called “Jewish,” sometimes a synonym for New Yorker) serves for some as an authentic marker of being from Brooklyn genetically. Hearing me speak, people sometimes associate my voice with the authentic New York experience of hearing loud mouths in the city. Once, in Kansas City, I did yell “I’m walking here” and hit the hood of a cab that drove through the crosswalk we were crossing. Besides that moment and my family’s past, however, I feel no connection to New York or to Brooklyn other than what other foodies feel when given the opportunity to eat well in popular locations. I don’t see myself as a New Yorker. I grew up in Miami, after all. Miami, my wife tells me as well, is really New York. Despite this connection, and despite its commonplace as a site of artisanal production, Brooklyn is unfamiliar to me as an actual place or entity. Its stereotype is real for me, but only at the level of what I cite here, or what Barthes teaches me about image aggregation, and what I trace or pseudo-­cognitively map through popular culture and food culture. Via my textual encounters, I understand Brooklynicity as a type of New York presence or maybe as the type of New York we expect when visiting the city. If one travels to Brooklyn, one will encounter artisanal doughnuts and a Whole Foods that sells records, and one will meet tall men in black coats and hats, and one may even eat shakshuka. One has to. All of these items contribute to the essence of a space or idea called Brooklyn. Brooklynicity is not a novel idea to food writing. For that reason, we traveled to Brooklyn as parental artisans. We traveled to experience and write a form of Brooklynicity. Nobody said parental artisan is easy or even fun; my kids did not welcome the trip in the middle of winter. Nobody said Brooklyn tourism is best during the winter, either. During our trip, the daytime temperatures rose to only twenty degrees, and it snowed on our final day. My daughter, who we asked to walk in half-­mile spurts to places such as Polish bakeries or craft beer bars that served artisanal sandwiches, meats roasted on premise, and local cheeses, expressed exhaustion from the cold. My son threw food on the floor and insisted on riding in a stroller. These two notations frame a d esire to visit and enjoy artisanal culture while two children demand something else entirely. We find ourselves in a locale that calls out to our interests, we desire to share those interests, and our kids complain that it is too cold. The pleasure of the text is a parental artisan act. During the trip, I anchored each moment—­accompanied by complaint or not—­with a photograph of our kids, taken with my iPhone. Four and Twenty Blackbirds: my daughter in front of one of the three pies we ordered. Mile

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FIGURE 12 My sad daughter in the cold Chinatown winter

End: my daughter eating matzoh ball soup; my son sleeping in his stroller. Bagelsmith: my kids sitting on their jackets at the counter, picking the cream cheese off of the bagels, leaving the bread behind. Roberta’s: my son eating the cheese off his pizza. Just the cheese. I imagine, at some point in the future, one of my kids will begin a piece of writing—­for school or professionally—­w ith the statement, “My parents were the kind of parents who had no problem being tourists in the middle of the winter in Brooklyn. They also were the kind of parents who didn’t think twice about taking two subways to check out a pie shop.” On the trip’s third day, we took the subway to Manhattan and got off at Essex Street. There stood the Essex Market, a typical indoor market of restaurants, produce, and packaged foods. In a far corner of the Essex Market, we stopped at Shopsin’s general store for breakfast. With Shopsin’s, we took two subway rides as well so that we could eat at the final incarnation of the famous New York location Calvin Trillin offhandedly called “eccentric.” No longer as

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FIGURE 13 Taking two trains to eat pie

vast and crowded with merchandise as Trillin once described Shopsin’s when it was located at its original location, the small restaurant now takes up a very small portion of the market, hidden away from most of the market’s stands, practically ignored. Four or five tables are available. One table, when we visited, was occupied by a bubble blower wand that Kenny Shopsin’s granddaughter was using to blow bubbles. No one else was there but us. Trillin once noted his trepidation regarding writing about the temperamental Kenny Shopsin without permission as being “spooked by the fear of a l ifetime banishment that might not even carry the possibility of parole” (148). The famous menu of more than nine hundred items is still used at Shopsin’s, indicative of the craft of fashioning as many different meals as possible out of a handful of ingredients but also indicative of Shopsin’s artisanal personality, which seemed to scoff at attention or value. “I put the menu [in the front of the restaurant] to dissuade people from coming in,” he says (11). Indeed, looking over Shopsin’s menu, one might feel overwhelmed. What to choose? Shopsin’s menu has served as

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a focal point of its destination status. People visit not just for the food, but for the menu as well. Christine Muhlke describes the menu accordingly: “Shopsin’s menu is another ejector seat. With more than 900 items—­including 300 soups—­it sends the indecisive, the health-­conscious and the humorless running. It’s a window-­slash-­rabbit-­hole into the 66-­year-­old’s mind: 75 riffs on pancakes, from Post Modern to Lemon Ricotta; 100 made-­to-­order soups, from Cream of Any Vegetable to Cheeseburger; and countless other dishes, like the Nuclear Melt Down sandwich and burgers with mac-­’n’-­cheese sauce.” Saveur’s Jacqueline Barba demystified the menu for the magazine’s readers by providing annotated summaries of some of its many highlights. She summarizes the famous Pecan Chicken Rice Enchiladas as a memorial dish as well as a fictive one. “This was the favored dish of Kenny’s late wife, Eve. Shopsin laments that it is rarely ordered now that Eve is no longer on the floor to guide customers toward it. Admittedly, there’s nothing Mexican about this dish other than the word enchilada, but the finished product is no less appetizing for the misnomer.” In addition to Pecan Chicken Rice Enchiladas, some of the items you can order off of the vast Shopsin’s menu include: • • • • • • • • •

Slutty Cakes Mac and Cheese Pancakes Taco-­Fried Chicken Jewboy Egg Sliders Blisters on My Stuffing Lenny and Squiggy Southern Meat on a Bun No Rice Burrito Bags Chili Potato Boats

Shopsin’s variety reflects a lack of interest in perfection or in authenticity. By that, I don’t mean that the cooking does not strike to be the best it can be, but rather, Shopsin’s menu is an argument against eidos. Value does not come from the ideal. The Shopsin’s menu resists ideal gastronomy and favors alternative notions of what food might entail, something outside of perfected imagery. In one scene in I Like Killing Flies, a documentary on Kenny Shopsin, Shopsin is driving in his car and talking to the camera. He pontificates on the state of being worthwhile or a piece of shit. “Being a piece of shit and then occasionally doing something that’s good and true, it’s a much easier place to be,” Shopsin says. He continues, “And I a lways tried to raise my kids to understand that they’re not that terrific.” Being a piece of shit is preferable to the ideal. The ideal demands an authenticity that, in reality, is not obtainable. But if one accepts being a piece of shit, then there is no need to fret over a food’s

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aura or originality. Being a piece of shit offers its own take on parental artisan. The food does not equate shit in taste; instead, it projects the metaphoric shit of hybridity and lacking exactness. There is no need to worry if my kids truly enjoy sitting in a brewpub or eating in an upscale Brooklyn Thai restaurant like Pok Pok. In a space of banal writing, nobody or nothing is that terrific. Not even craft culture. Everything is a piece of shit. Being a piece of shit, as a hybrid moment, indicates a state of fusion. Trillin quotes Shopsin’s overall philosophy of cooking, one that speaks to fusion and aggregation, though it does not recognize that such terms exist in a culinary vocabulary: “There’s no unifying philosophy. I do a lot of things special, and not only do I do a lot of things special but I commingle them” (155). At Shopsin’s, I made an exception to the family rule of “no chocolate for breakfast” and allowed my kids to order the S’mores pancakes: two pancakes covered in marshmallow and chocolate and finished with a dusting of cocoa powder. I ordered The Bastard: eggs, pastrami hash, and cheese served on a soft ciabatta roll. Even with this fusion-­based (piece-­of-­shit) breakfast in my belly, seeing Kenny Shopsin in person, where he was sitting on a chair in the front of the tiny restaurant, marked, for me, a moment of culinary authenticity. ἀ at is Kenny Shopsin, I said to myself. The person I had read about. The person Trillin had eloquently described. The star of the documentary I Like Killing Flies. The person who embodies an attitude I admire. I am standing next to Kenny Shopsin. As Barthes notes that the punctum—­t he moment of the nonobvious meaning contained in one’s interaction with an image—­is formed by time, sitting opposite Kenny Shopsin, my punctum was formed by presence. I was struck (Barthes’ “pricked”) by food presence. Normally, one would attribute such feelings to being starstruck or even to the sense of aura (presence of celebrity), but I felt differently. I didn’t want an autograph or a signed copy of his book. I didn’t want to discuss food. I didn’t want anything but to eat The Bastard I had ordered. I merely felt a sense of presence outside the denotational or connotational meanings of being in Shopsin’s restaurant in New York. I have my own technical image of Shopsin’s, and I was now inside of it. When our breakfast was finished, and trinket plastic flashlights had been given to our kids as gifts, Kenny said to me, “You have a lovely family.” The supposedly grumpy, eccentric, nobody is terrific, it’s ok to be a piece of shit cook used the word “lovely” with me. On the one hand, there is an overall sentimental and warm feeling to hearing Kenny Shopsin, who I have admired from afar, tell me that I have a lovely family whether he meant it or not. On the other hand, would I have preferred the stereotype, the commonplace image of a grumpy restaurant owner telling us not to copy each other’s order or no parties of five? After all, I was visiting Shopsin’s not because of Yelp reviews or

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FIGURE 14 Shopsin’s General Store, 2013. Shopsin in background in chair.

the food, but because of the public projection of Shopsin that writers like Trillin have created and that have generated a technical image for me. As James Felder writes about the experience of eating at Shopsin’s, “But one did not go to Shopsin’s to be served. One went to Shopsin’s to spend time in the life that the Shopsin family was living.” To use the bathroom at Shopsin’s, one has to go down the hall into the market, past a cheese shop and grocer, up a flight of stairs, and then enter the market’s general restroom. I had to take both kids

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there. I stood quietly while they urinated and unrolled the toilet paper rolls. I further experienced parental artisan. One aspect of parental artisan is not only taking one’s children to a hand-­ drawn noodle restaurant in Philadelphia’s Chinatown or Shopsin’s in Manhattan, where they can play with the owner’s granddaughter, but also balancing two children in a restaurant—­in Philadelphia’s Chinatown or elsewhere—­ when one of them has to go to the bathroom, or if I have to go to the bathroom. When they are very young, you can’t leave one child or both at the restaurant table while you head to the restroom. And you can’t leave your bag with all of its stuff (diapers, wipes, books, toys, old food, uneaten food, fruit squeezers) at the table out of the fear that someone, for some reason, may want to steal all those unused diapers. Often, in a small, one toilet bathroom, like the one at Serious Pie in Seattle, I have juggled the two children while I use the urinal and they unravel toilet paper rolls or turn the sink faucets on and off. While this inconsequential moment might reflect frustration or parental anxiety (how to balance the situation amid the confusion; the poor, unprepared father), it returns to me as an anecdote situated among other stories I am telling about travel and eating, anecdotes that map my writing. Parental artisan involves more than food. The food at Shopsin’s is, indeed, good. The visit to Shopsin’s, however, reflects the parental artisan moment more than the food does. When the bathroom is involved in a food experience, I am reminded of de Certeau’s comment that “only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system [of travel]. They are a lovers’ phantasm, a way out for the ill, an escapade for children (“Wee-­wee!”)” (111). Restrooms typically offer a break, a space where one gets away from either the road (car), the street (foot), or leisure (drinking and eating). Bathrooms are an endless source of amusement to young children (peeing in front of others, the humorous sounds of farting, the paper towels that can be endlessly unrolled, the air dryers’ power). Bathrooms are meant to be private, sometimes are divided by gender, and can be either comfortable or uncomfortable depending on the situation. A bathroom with kids is another matter entirely. Our escapades to the bathroom are quite different. Amid all of the bathroom confusion, is going to the bathroom with two young kids, too, a moment of craft? Isn’t craft the “making” of something relevant to daily life (a chair, a beer, a table, a quilt, piss)? I felt a sense of craft when I urinated on a side road amid a cornfield in Iowa. Toppling Goliath beer had caused me to have to urinate. The Iowa corn, thanks to me, was being exposed to quality craft beer. I made (carpentry) a craft moment in Iowa. Going to the bathroom with two children seems to reflect an aspect of daily life where a type of making dominates the rhetorical situation. Barthes enjoyed urinating

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in his garden. If I a m enjoying samplericity in a brewpub, at some point, I will enjoy urinating as well. Going to the bathroom with two children offers a moment of making or even a less than precise version of Bogost’s carpentry: memory, frustration, bodily function, bonding amid the turned-­on faucets and unraveled toilet paper, yelling to stop turning the faucets on and off and to finish up. The moment is craft because it is a networked moment among father and children. We make these “things” when crowded together in a restaurant bathroom; otherwise, we would be relieving ourselves in private moments without the rest of the ambiance that allows this particular moment to exist. Our network of meaning is shaped by more than daddy peeing. It is shaped by our various parental artisan interactions occurring in a very cramped space. If I have no sense of craft parenting, then I would have no experience. And if I have no experience, I have no moment to map or write about here. The bathroom moment is a m etaphoric “hand”-­drawn moment, trying to craft an engaged moment toward the always ambiguous moment of “good parenting.” It is the moment where we may be tricked into believing success (“Taking my kids to the bathroom with me is a moment of success! I’m a responsible parent who did not leave them alone at the table with a bag of diapers and fruit squeezers!”) or being parental artisan (parenting as I determine parenting should be and not how a three-­hundred-­page advice book tells me how to parent). Parental artisan, then, might be another version of craft (as we find with bread, cheese, olive oil, and beer) that goes unnoticed as we, the parents, spend our time shopping for the artisanal. Within the shopping moment (for beer or cheese or pasta) is a layered craft moment. Shopping is often posed in opposition to the artisanal; shopping represents the consumerism that the artisanal is meant to object to and to counter. Craft is a r evolution against consumption. Shopping for eight-­dollar mayonnaise, the SNL skit suggests, is not something to be proud of; it should be mocked. We shop, however, with our kids as much as we travel with them. With both activities, we go to the bathroom. Showing two kids what hand-­drawn noodles are or how we all go to the bathroom together might reflect the artisanal as much as an expensive, handmade condiment might or a sense of being in Brooklyn might. With parental artisan, I have become “hands-­on.” Parental artisan may be the writerly exigence far more difficult to pin down than that of digital rhetoric or pedagogy, topics whose exigence comes easily to me since these are my areas of study and expertise. Parental artisan might express what my writing cannot. Parental artisan, as a c raft experience, offers a p unctum to my daily life of what is a fairly banal activity: parenting. Parental artisan affects how my children think about the restaurants we frequent. Craft, in this sense, aggregates for my children a sense of homemade

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or handcrafted without such language or artisanal ideology being disseminated. Their technical image comes not from the discourse of craft but from, among other things, interactions with Lexington, traveling, food served at home, their father’s rants against candy, eating hand-­drawn noodles, visiting breweries against their will, and other sources. This network of activity allows them to carpenter their own versions of craft. My daughter, for instance, is obsessed with restaurants that were once houses. She has aggregated this obsession into our outings around Lexington and her overall understanding of restaurant dining. Two particular restaurants that capture her attention are Bombay, an Indian restaurant on Limestone in Lexington, and Wallace Station in Midway, a restaurant that specializes in sandwiches and local fare. Both restaurants were once houses. When we visit these places, my daughter notices that they were once houses because in each restaurant there is a bathroom, and the bathrooms still have showers. The existence of a shower in a restaurant bathroom strikes her as odd, out of place, a meaning that she can’t pinpoint exactly, a space outside of her technical image of what restaurants look like, but that has substance for her. The restaurant bathroom shower is, in some ways, her punctum. As she is sitting on the toilet in one of these two restaurants, while I stand around waiting for her to finish, she likes to point out the showers. The presence of a shower suggests something local, or homelike, to her (i.e., craft). The shower suggests the opposite of the commonplace bathroom you might find in a S ubway or a Sh oney’s Big Boy. Restaurant bathrooms are repetitive in their appearance or even locations; they speak to a commonality that should comfort, not surprise (as with having a shower). When I am in a restaurant—­ whether fast food or local—­t he space’s design should intuitively point me to a restroom, and the restroom should resemble any other restroom I have used. There exists something akin to a restroom genre, a set of rhetorical expectations and framework. The presence of the shower, on the other hand, suggests a space outside of that genre, what I am calling craft. When we encounter a shower in a r estaurant’s bathroom, we might think: this place still demonstrates its nonindustrial origins. This place still evokes the home. Apparently, as my wife tells the story, my daughter recently saw a house for sale on the way downtown and pointed out that it was the perfect location for her own restaurant, The Mad Lamp. I am not sure if she would leave the shower in place once her construction plans begin. I hope so. These bathrooms anchor one type of craft experience. But the anecdote of my daughter’s future plans in restaurant management, as I continue to relay it, suggests authentic craft experience as a legitimate representation within a culture of common bathroom and dining experiences. Local—­as The Mad

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Lamp imaginary suggests—­exists within a p opular and well-­circulated discourse, craft. Local signifies, as a commonplace, craft consumption. When we write craft, we write the local into the places we visit, shun, or romanticize. We ignore Subway in favor of a local restaurant—­a lbeit a twenty-­minute drive through horse country to Wallace Station—­t hat also makes sandwiches and has a shower in its restroom. I have to think about that last point: I am willing to drive twenty minutes over narrow, windy roads in order to eat a sandwich, which I c ould make at home with minimal difficulty. Am I b etter than an average Subway eater? As with Shopsin’s, the experience of being in a particular location can override the experience of eating food at that location. Within parental artisan, the logic is to frequent the local. If the aim of consumer culture is to buy as much as possible, as Berry attests, then the aim of the parental artisan might be to make as many eating or traveling experiences as authentic as possible by staying local. Local anchors experience as the most authentic one possible. In this process of “making,” we are distancing ourselves from the less authentic experience of ordering processed, fast food hamburgers at McDonald’s or at an overadvertised two-­for-­one dinner at such upscale fast food restaurants as Ruby Tuesday or Chili’s. As a parental artisan, I tend to publicly project an image that states: We’re better than parents who patronize such places. We’ve been to Chinatown and eaten hand-­drawn noodles. We took two subway cars to eat pie in Brooklyn. We would never order a McRib or a t wo-­for-­one $15 steak dinner. In that manner, I c laim, we are authentic. The picture below, however, which represents one such parental artisan experience, is deceptive. Indeed, most parental artisan experiences, in bathrooms or in restaurants or in hipster New York boroughs, will eventually deceive. Craft, in all of its efforts to avoid the industrial or homogenous, will inevitably deceive because it is a p rojected image within an image within an image. Parental artisan, as a moment of craft making, is also a representation. It is a technical image. Technical images do not make claims to authenticity, only to the ideological process of layering. Heirloom, located in Midway, Kentucky, is a restaurant Least Heat-­Moon might have considered indicative of the local. Heirloom is located in a small town near Lexington and serves locally sourced food. The actor Sam Sheppard was known to frequent Heirloom (and we, too, saw him there). Just one celebrity appearance grants a restaurant an aggregated Yelp-­like special status of culture. The photograph shows my son and Heirloom’s menu juxtaposed in the same space the way I have juxtaposed beer samplers and my children into the same photographic space. The photograph makes a statement. The boy reads the menu, the photograph claims. Food will then be ordered. The

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FIGURE 15 My son at Heirloom, Midway, Kentucky, 2012

boy will enjoy the food. With such a photograph and the implied narrative it tells—­I more than likely shared it on Facebook once taken—­t he public suggestion is that our kids, too, decide what they will eat, and they are capable of reading the available—­and always local—­options. If there is an aggregation of parental artisan here, it includes the photographic suggestion (punctum in approach) that children opt for crafting the local as well. When the photograph was taken, however, my son was only seventeen months old. He couldn’t read. He didn’t know what local meant. And even if he could read at such an age, it wouldn’t matter. Most of my son’s experiences in restaurants at that time involved throwing food on the floor or calling the waiter or waitress “stupid.” Little has changed in the past six years. “We’ll make up for it at dinner,” my wife assured herself during this particular meal where he ate very little and where he threw food on the floor. Of course, at dinner at home in Lexington, he threw food on the floor as well. The photograph, then, does not tell all it should. One could say that all photography lies, or as Barthes suggests, photography limits meaning to what the viewer of the image brings to her reading. In “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes writes about the image’s “kind of natural being there of objects” as if what one views in the image depicts the “having been there” becoming a “being there” (45). But it is also possible, as Barthes also argues, that nothing was ever there or is there; we experience

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connotation or references in place of an actual “thing” in itself. We experience posing. What the parental artisan moment offers, then, is a posed idea. The posed idea is a moment of writing where my kids are a part of a food experience and are not just a situated piece within a photographic moment. Even if the photographic suggestion is not accurate or authentic, my kids were at Heirloom. The aggregation of the local eating moment did include them as well as us. Still, as Barthes attests, the text is not without its contradiction. Within the photograph, I pose the idea that something is happening when it likely isn’t, whether or not that is my real motive. Sharing this moment or image on social media creates an ethos that may or may not be true: we are parents who have taught our kids how to eat well. This visual moment is one of authentic writing, where authentic merely represents the aggregation of hope (“please,” I say to my son, “eat local”) and reality (food thrown on floor and I would settle for just “please, eat”). Whatever it is I want to do with these photographs (put them in a blog post, use them as part of an academic book, make myself look like a forward thinker or champion of local eating, or otherwise), they have to be more than mere posturing or posing. When my daughter declares that a building near downtown Lexington will one day house her restaurant, The Mad Lamp, she, too, is posturing or posing. When I tell this anecdote, I am posturing or posing. When I share the image of my son in front of a menu or my daughter in front of a sampler, I , too, am posing. What is cognitive mapping anyway but a series of poses and postures, declarations of how to explain the world for those unable to do so on their own?

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I explain the world, I explain writing, and I explain authenticity by posing. My experiences in various places with my children are posed online with the assumption that others will be interested in my digital mapping of these places. Among our travels and digital mapping, we visit Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv borders issues of authenticity. As the first major “Jewish” city, it is not considered the capital of Israel by the state of Israel (Jerusalem is), but instead is the de facto capital according to the foreign embassies located there and public opinion, which demands it be the capital. The image of Tel Aviv, for political discourse, is posture. Those who refuse to recognize Israel’s naming of its own capital posture themselves according to various diplomatic protocols and concern over angering the Arab world, while Israel postures itself as the sole agent able to declare its capital. Such a point frames larger and smaller issues related to Israel, food, politics, rhetoric, writing, and authenticity. These issues, as well, affect us in our travels. Tel Aviv is, in fact, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, a combination of two cities, one historic and mostly Arab and one modern and mostly Jewish. Indeed, Tel Aviv was originally a suburb of the now much smaller Jaffa. One can easily walk from 144

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FIGURE 16 Tel Aviv graffiti

the beaches of Tel Aviv to the entrance of Jaffa in less than an hour. Tel Aviv is one part Mediterranean and one part European. Along its boulevards and neighborhood streets one finds restaurants and cafés, bars that do not open until early evening, shops with never-­ending “sales,” and a mix of high-­rises, the contemporary modern and cool, and the 1920s Bauhaus architecture that inspired a great deal of the city’s facade. Most of Tel Aviv is covered in graffiti. Stenciled sayings. New York–style spray-­painted exclamations. Imaginary

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portraits and images. Mockery of its politicians. Calls for marijuana legalization. In Tel Aviv, there are cats everywhere. Cats in garbage cans. Cats in alleys. Cats in humous shops. Cats in outdoor cafés. Tel Aviv is called the White City because of the white Bauhaus buildings throughout the city; white paint reflects the often oppressive Israeli summer heat. Every summer, Tel Aviv hosts “White Night,” an elaborate city festival and party that lasts all night and features street performances, massive crowds, food, and alcohol. Israeli singer and songwriter Arik Einstein romanticized Tel Aviv in “The White City” (HaIr HaLevena). “From the froth of a wave and a cloud I built myself a white city,” he sings. The Bauhaus balconies peering out from many of Tel Aviv’s apartment buildings evoke Israeli rock band Girafot’s song “Mirpeset,” a lament for a woman who climbs one only to jump off. Designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2003, the White City was originally designed as a “garden city,” a late nineteenth-­century concept in urban planning that fused city life with surrounding green belts for agriculture. Nitza Metzger-­Szmuk credits Sir Patrick Geddes, who designed Tel Aviv, with taking into “account the totality of factors affecting the natural environment—­ climate, wind direction, topography, historical background, approach roads, sources of livelihood, as well as the social structure and material and spiritual needs of the local population” (33). According to Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv, as the “first Hebrew city,” was born out of a rhetoric of mythological language, where early press coverage of the city and early visitors used a vocabulary of mystique and wonder to describe the city built on sand dunes. Where there previously had been nothing, that narrative claims, now there was a city. And even more so, this city was built by the marginalized and oppressed Jews, discriminated against in Europe, Russian, and throughout the Middle East. As if magical, the city was born by the most oppressed and alienated populations, those considered the least authentic urban planners or designers of urban life. “References to ‘magic,’ ‘wonders,’ ‘hidden light’ and ‘mystery’ ascribed a transcendental dimension to the city. In this context, the commentators’ self-­imposed task was to expose the city’s ‘hidden light’ and the ‘secret glow,’ which those people focused on the everyday and mundane could not see” (40). The wonder and magic of Tel Aviv might be apparent in the daytime when one strolls down the elegant Rothschild Boulevard or the more retail-­based Dizengoff and King George Streets, but it is even more apparent at night when most of the city’s young, urban residents come out to stroll, drink, and eat. Tel Aviv, Azaryahu argues, has always been a city associated with nightlife, where one visitor, as early as 1938, proclaimed: “Tel Aviv attracts me. The thought about sleep disappeared because sleep is the last refuge from boredom. And who, unless he is entirely lacking sensitivity, can be bored in Tel Aviv? And

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FIGURE 17 My daughter and Tel Aviv graffiti

thus, at midnight, to Ginati, Tel Aviv’s Café du Dôme” (70). Duran Duran’s demo version of “Tel Aviv” reveals little about the city and surprisingly says nothing about the popular and alluring nightlife. The group does mention the beach and trees, but concludes with the depressing line, “On my own in Tel Aviv.” The last place I would want to be alone would be Tel Aviv. That’s not because I love nightlife; I don’t. It’s because Tel Aviv, even without its history of being built from nothing, is a mystical city for me, a place of urine, good

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FIGURE 18 Tel Aviv public bathroom, Caramel Market

food, bus exhaust, cats, falafel, cafés, ice cream, boulevards, and modernity. I want to share that aura with others. I love Tel Aviv. But the city has few, if any, public restrooms, with or without showers. Many times I have seen adult men urinating in alleys, or in one case, an orthodox man peeing out in the open in front of Tel HaShomer, the military’s large army base located in the middle of the city. The most offensive urine smell I may have ever encountered was in the city’s Old Central

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Bus Station—­a maze of outdoor bus stops scattered over an industrial zone of wholesalers, cassette sellers, falafel stands, and prostitutes on the south side of the city. In the center of the bus station, in an isolated building, a small men’s bathroom stood. The long trough-­style urinal thousands of men must have stood over and urinated in everyday was completely stained with the stench of cat piss, putrid rot, and vomit. As Simone Wilson described the entire bus station’s area, “The stench of urine is so strong that even the Tel Aviv street cats seem to avoid it.” When Haaretz compiled its list of the best bathrooms of Tel Aviv, it unsurprisingly left the bus station off (Shahaf). In 1993, the Old Central Bus Station was replaced by the sprawling, several-­ story behemoth New Central Bus Station, which took more than thirty years to complete and is now as bizarre and, in some places, urine-­smelling as the bus station it was meant to improve. Indeed, the two bus stations beg the question: which is the most authentic way to travel throughout the city and the country? The old or the new? The last time I remember urinating in the Tel Aviv’s New Central Bus Station—­an indoor maze of shops and bus stops designed as if by a lunatic architect who didn’t understand the need for level floors or actual navigable halls—­t he toilet was broken and urine and feces were all over the floor. Urine followed one bus station to the other. Whichever station represented modernity—­t he old station meant to unite travel across the new country or the new station meant to modernize its architecture—­both reek of urine. Piss is unavoidable in the White City. Joachim Schlör summarizes his impressions of the Old Central Bus Station accordingly: “Filthy, noisy and crowded, frequented by beggars, black marketeers and fanatical propagandists for every conceivable political and religious viewpoint and hobby-­ horse, with shops emitting deafening Oriental music, businesses both official and unofficial, drinks stands, and newspaper stalls where orthodox travellers are pleasurably shocked to see hard pornography on sale, it has also become the haunt of groups of drunks—­a novel sight for sober Tel Aviv” (214). Even if not as filthy as its predecessor, the New Central Bus Station is hardly a shining beacon. Most of its promised shops are now abandoned; illegal immigrants call it home more than native Israelis, who seem to avoid it; and sightseeing tours have been designed to explore its empty and abandoned interior, the way a tour of the ruins of Detroit might. In his descriptive history of the station’s construction, Eran Neuman observes that “today, half of the station’s 700 stores are vacant and only about 40 per cent of the building’s floor space is in use” (222). Naomi Zeveloff calls the New Central Bus Station a “dime-­store megamall” that is the “most reviled place in the country.” Twice in her narrative of spending eighteen hours in the bus station, she mentions the smell of urine. Urine

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crafts the city’s spaces. Unlike the old bus station, the new station was meant to be a major shopping and cultural center, designed as ultramodern and chic in the despondent Neve Sha’anan neighborhood. Daniella Cheslow describes the station’s current state as a mostly abandoned monolith with more in common with desolate Detroit than the modern complex it was meant to be. “The cinema is shuttered; as I walked up a dust-­coated stationary escalator, a statue of Charlie Chaplin stood eerily in the darkness. One level up, by light of cell phone screens, we shuffled through the darkened second floor, peering at a row of glass-­fronted shops that were completely abandoned.” Armin Rosen suggests that, because of the New Central Bus Station’s emergence during the time period when Israel shifted from a largely socialist economy to a capitalist one, “it is tempting to think of the Tel Aviv Central Bus station as a metaphor for Israel as a whole.” In that sense, socialism would be the mythology Israel moved away from, only to embrace another economic mythology with separate problems. Unlike the negative national feelings publicly expressed, I have fond memories of the new bus station. I was living in Tel Aviv when it opened, and I remember the public anticipation regarding its final completion and replacement of the old station. I took the bus to Sinai from that station. I often traveled to Jerusalem from that station. I bought falafel many times from a stand near the Jerusalem platform that let you pile in your pita as many greasy fried eggplant slices and french fries as you wanted. I lived in Tel Aviv for a short time in my early twenties, and both the old and the new Central Bus Stations were focal points of country-­w ide travel for me. To go anywhere outside the city, I t raveled first to the Central Bus Station; old and then new. In Israel, the bus is a p rimary means of transportation, more so than in the United States, where bus travel depends on urban location and often class. Suburban America seldom takes the bus. Where I live in the Lexington suburbs, there is no bus I can take from my home to anywhere in the city. The bus is not an authentic means to travel in my city. There are two main bus companies in Israel: Dan and Egged. The bus’s status for transportation in Israel as primary travel for a significant part of the population, unfortunately, made it the target of suicide bombings during the First Intifada. The easiest way to strike at civilians was to target their main mode of daily transportation and thus strike panic in the most basic element of urban transportation. In his novel Almost Dead, Assaf Gavron treats bus suicide bombings as both satire—­t he protagonist who survives multiple attacks but continues to ride—­and as a d aily threat where the banality of everyday life is destroyed by wanton murder. “It took a few minutes until we realised that there had been a suicide bomb and that it had happened in the

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centre of Tel Aviv. We turned on the TV in the kitchen and saw the map with the little flame-­t hing that shows the location of the bomb, and saw it was up the road, at the south end of Dizengoff Street, near the Habima Theatre, and they were saying it was probably a bus” (8). Buses are everywhere in Tel Aviv, and for a time, it felt as if bus bombings were as well. Waking up in Tel Aviv often meant waking up to the trepidation that more people had been killed in a bus bombing. The bus, with or without the threat of danger, is not, however, always my preference; I enjoy walking. On their first trip to Tel Aviv, my kids spent the first day complaining about a fifteen-­minute walk. We awoke at noon (thinking it was still morning) with the intent to check out the Shuk HaCarmel, which I hadn’t visited for eighteen years. The nice early afternoon walk down Rothschild and then the hipster Sheinkin Street took us to the entrance to the market. Where I had hoped my kids would find excitement in the early afternoon crowd of tourists and locals moving and bumping into each other as they passed through a Middle Eastern market of stands, food, trash, a few cats, yelling, some urine odors, and an occasional elbow or errant bicycle, they mostly complained about walking and repeatedly asked for candy and ice cream. If there was one way to define our first twenty-­four hours in Tel Aviv, then, it would not be defined by their first trip to their ancestral homeland or the fascination with being in the Middle East for the first time (the authentic experience). Instead, it would be defined by the continued request for ice cream. Lucky for us, an ice cream shop, Allora, was directly across from our rented apartment on Marmorek Street. After that first trek to the market, a lunch of humous in the market at Magen David, and the walk back, my kids quickly turned on the TV and watched kids shows in Hebrew. They couldn’t understand a word. Via my own aggregations (what I read, what I imagine, what I have once experienced), I romanticize travel with my kids more than I romanticize travel itself. That romanticization does not resemble reality. Long airplane flights or car rides. Constant worry about running out of cash. Trying to remember how to say things in other languages. Not always knowing the protocol of everyday life that everyone else knows (when the bus comes, do you need exact change, where is the recycling, do we tip). During our month in Tel Aviv, my major hope was that my kids, while watching TV, would pay enough attention to Arthur or Transformers in Hebrew to pick up some words and phrases. At least that’s how the kibbutz kids did it; or that is how I remember them learning English during my kibbutznik years. At least that’s how other children supposedly pick up foreign languages without formal instruction. Craft language learning, I tell myself, comes from the industrial product television. After an eighteen-­year absence, I returned to Israel to write. I wanted to

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write about traveling with kids, scholarly writing, a successful academic career that had turned into a lack of interest with traditional academic writing, and a desire to write like all the food writers I had come to admire, writers who seemed to experience food travels with their children in romantic and successful ways, where new foods and places open up a world of experience, adventure, and bonding. Television, too, had crafted my image of food and travel. Most of us experience global food (when not eating it) via Netflix (Chef ’s Table), the Travel Chanel (No Reservations, Bizarre Foods) or the Food Channel’s various competition extravaganzas. Media craft food and travel realities. “The people here make food like it was meant to be made, like their ancestors made it hundreds of years ago,” I imagined Anthony Bourdain proudly proclaiming on any one of his televised food tours where local, supposedly indigenous cuisine is framed in the most hyperbolic language possible, a longing for a s upposed time when nose-­to-­tail was quotidian and comfort food was nothing more than daily sustenance. “They eat all the parts,” I hear Bourdain saying over and over. “This is how it used to be.” Watching Ethiopian villagers prepare all the parts of animals for eating, for instance, Bourdain waxes romantically to fellow chef Marcus Samuelsson, “It all goes back to the first fire.” Fire signifies tradition, the land, original artisan food culture where commercialization had yet to emerge and Viking gas ovens were nonexistent. Fire is primal. Meat on fire is even more primal. The primal suggests an origin, and many origin food stories, such as the ones Bourdain replicated, begin with poverty or eating less than desirable parts because once there was nothing else to eat. John Paul Brammer dismisses these narratives, whether they emerge from the outsider (the TV food host) or the insider group. “Marginalized groups often police themselves, waging our own authenticity wars. Pain is, in the end, an heirloom of sorts, one there is a certain pride in holding. For Mexican Americans, or at least for me, these battles play out in the theater of the mind: Do I speak Spanish well enough? Can I cook enough of our foods?” “These are not signifiers of true legitimacy. They are fetishes,” he adds. These mantras—­from Bourdain’s vocalized “this is how it used to be” to my imagined “they eat all the parts”—­are, indeed, fetishistic romantic markers of food travel broadcast by satellite and cable TV, and for some reason, I wanted my kids to believe in it as well. “We eat all the parts.” By eating all the parts, as Bourdain often intends, you are re-­creating tradition. You are re-­creating representation. You return to the “first” moment, which, we believe, is always the most authentic moment. In the Middle East, tradition always includes conflict. During our stay, war broke out with Hamas and Operation Protective Edge began. Iron Dome bat-

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teries shot down Hamas missiles over the skies of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Sirens wailed in the early morning, late afternoon, and early evening, warning us to take shelter in a sanctioned miklat (shelter) or the hallway of our apartment building. My wife enjoyed taking pictures of the kids in the hallway and posting them on Facebook. My kids let us drag them, still sleeping, out of their beds and into the building’s hallway, where we patiently waited for the all clear. The reason for congregating in a hallway—­beyond getting to know your neighbors—­is to avoid shrapnel if a missile strikes and spreads window glass everywhere. While sirens wailed at night, the café across from our apartment remained full of Israelis drinking, talking, and smoking cigarettes. No one budged. Once, at Rina and Zacharia, a small Yemenite restaurant just outside of the Shuk HaCarmel market within the Yemenite quarter, the sirens went off while we were eating lunch. We couldn’t take shelter in the bathroom since it was being used as a storage closet. Our kids stood near the restaurant’s wall of newspaper clippings and Jewish saint photographs, about five feet from the entrance, where, if there were shrapnel from a falling missile, it could do serious damage to someone having lunch. Without noticing the sirens, the owner threw uneaten food into the street for pigeons. A few people stopped by to wait out the sirens. Then we all went back to our meals and our days. Zacharia handled all the serving and cooking, bringing us chicken and cow leg soup as well as complimentary lachoch (Yemenite sponge bread) and schug (spicy, Yemenite pepper spread). A customer ordered the special rice. “If you don’t like it, don’t pay. If you do, pay,” Zacharia told him. The customer made clear that the Diet Sprite he ordered had expired. When we left, noticing we were from somewhere else, Zacharia asked from where. Then he asked how we found him. When I s aid online via Trip Advisor (not Yelp, which does not cover Israel), he said “THIS IS THE BEST RESTAURANT IN TEL AVIV.” The soup was very rich and fatty. No missile landed on our street while we ate. “Are you learning any Hebrew,” I a sked my three-­year-­old son as he sat transfixed to a particular episode of Transformers. My wife was out running. “No.” He shook his head as if I were an idiot to make such a suggestion. Why, in the first Hebrew city, would my son, who has Israeli citizenship, be learning Hebrew by watching a c artoon produced by an Israeli? My seven-­year-­ old daughter had spent the previous year asking almost every day about our upcoming trip to Israel. She checked out books about Israel from her Montessori school library. She constantly identified the country on maps for us. She perked up every time she heard “Israel” on NPR in the morning in our Lexington home. She gave little presentations in her Montessori class on Israel. Yet, the moment we touched down at Ben Gurion Airport, she seemed

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uninterested in actually being in the place she had been discussing for almost a year. She was bored. She did not want to walk anywhere. Romantic imagination did not match whatever reality she now encountered. Her first night in Tel Aviv, as we tried to find something light to eat, was marked by crying about walking. Children do not recognize de Certeau’s claims for walking the city. We had arrived on a S aturday. Most Tel Aviv restaurants are closed on Saturday. My time in Tel Aviv when I w as in my twenties was spent always walking. I o ften walked from my apartment on Ben Yehuda Street to the city of Jaffa. I w alked to the market. I w alked to the beach. I walked across town to the public library. I walked to other people’s apartments. I walked when I was bored. I didn’t walk to work. I took the bus. I worked in Ramat Gan, too far to walk. I assume, like de Certeau, that walking is the best way to experience a city, to discover the small details and stories overshadowed by the grand narratives of urban space whose focus on topics such as gentrification, discrimination, overcrowding, and so on are not false or unworthy of study, but limit the other daily experiences we might discover. A bus passes over the city; walking engages the city. Passing over, as in a bus, allows for the individual to experience grand views from a distance—­a glimpse of a s torefront, the blur of a p ossible park, the back of individuals’ heads. Or passing reflects de Certeau’s grand view from above (injustice, class difference) symbolized in his reflection of the tourist atop the World Trade Center. The view allows for only a “giant rhetoric of excess” (91); walking allows for participation and contact, those items excess denies. Walking can be emotional. Reflective. Observant. “When I walk with a fast pace,” Erling Kagge states, “it feels like many emotions are held at a d istance and when I slow down they return” (37). In Tel Aviv, I attempt to slow down. When I first lived in Tel Aviv and found myself in the Old Central Bus Station, I w ould walk. Not just from bus stop to bus stop, but through the winding and dirty South Tel Aviv streets, passing time, breathing in diesel and urine, always on the lookout for a new falafel stand that, I believed, secretly served the best falafel in the city and maybe the world. It was my job to discover such a place. On such a quest, one cannot be fooled by dirty awnings, shops with no seating, or an angry guy at the fryer who becomes even angrier if you don’t want add-­ons for your pita sandwich. Somewhere, one has to believe, is the best falafel stand in the city, and only by walking will one discover it. Walking, romantically or not, promises secret discoveries that a bus passing by misses. “The ordinary practitioners of the city,” de Certeau writes, “live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk—­an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers” (92). The walkers, I believe, not the bus riders, can discover falafel. “Places are

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fragmentary and inward-­turning histories” (108). Such fragments turn outward with engagement. The walkers shape city experience as spatial history turns from its invisible hidden state (“is there falafel here? ”) to an outward expression (“it is the best”). My daughter, though, was having none of this theoretical exploration of falafel and the Tel Aviv streets. She cried that first night and many after. We spent a lot of time walking in Tel Aviv, and she never discovered falafel or any aspect of its history or present situation. Over three trips to Israel since, she has been given many opportunities to taste falafel, but in her imagination, she never discovered it. “People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper’” (105). Is falafel nothing or proper? Falafel, for many, may amount to nothing more than fried chickpeas and pita. That so-­called nothingness, however, orients my positioning within Tel Aviv. Falafel is a sandwich. A sandwich, regardless of contents or bread, Subway has taught us, should be something substantial, yet where or how does Subway orient? Can Subway orient me toward a Tel Aviv food epiphany the way I believe falafel can? Subway, as I n oted earlier, transforms the almost nothing—­a tasteless meat or veggie combination on a r oll—­into something proper, transforming minimum-­wage employees into artists and having as many as twenty-­six restaurants in my city of 330,000. Subway, though, still amounts to nothing for me, particularly when I compare it to an Israeli sandwich. Subway lacks history, inward or outward, whether I drive by in my car or walk by its storefront. Subway’s ubiquitous status makes it both something (a place for a s andwich) and nothing (a nonplace). Subway is a v ariation of Marc Augé’s nonplace—­a transition space with no culture or history. People move through Subways. They do not inhabit them. A Subway, unlike a falafel stand on a c rowded Tel Aviv street, does not have a c ultural history. Unlike my fascination with falafel, I am not in search of the best Subway sandwich in Lexington. To me, they are all the same, a repeated “artisan” creation without aura. Subway entered the Israeli market in 1992, expanded to twenty-­ three locations, and closed all of their franchises twelve years later. The Israeli Subway did not offer falafel. McDonald’s, on the other hand, tried to market the McFalafel in its Israeli restaurants, but in 2011 it pulled the item from its menus. “Who on earth would go to McDonald’s and order a falafel?” Tracy Levy asked in Haaretz regarding this fast food play on authenticity. The McFalafel’s authenticity complicates Levy’s native eating experience. A McFalafel is not authentic, yet it doesn’t taste bad, she reports, and it follows all of the tropes one would expect, more or less, from a falafel. “The McFalafel comes in

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FIGURE 19 Falafel from Falafel HaSharon, Tel Aviv

a lafa a thick fluffy round piece of bread that you stuff and wrap, like a burrito. The actual McFalafel falafel balls were more like patties, with a flat cylindrical shape as opposed to the typical round falafel ball.” Flat versus round. Fast food versus local stand. Similar taste. None of this mattered in the end to Levy, who did not find the appropriation distasteful or an example of cultural theft. Even if it tasted similar, though, to its more authentic street food opposite, it sold poorly. Falafel, it seems, remained more proper in the Israeli diet than a tasteless, artist-­made sandwich or fast food copy.

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“Frequently,” Tony Naylor writes, “something is lost in the translation of falafel from Arabic or Hebrew.” Naylor describes the nonauthentic fusion falafel appearances making their way through London: falafel burgers, falafel salad, and variations that include mayonnaise and avocado. Action Bronson, who does not hide his love of marijuana, states that he prefers his falafel “a little herbaceous” (Fuck ἀ at’s Delicious). In 2008, as part of his popular Food Network TV show ἀ rowdown! with Bobby Flay, Bobby Flay challenged Israeli chef Einat Admony to a falafel throwdown at her New York City restaurant Taïm. Admony’s falafel were bright green, perfectly shaped, and very likely herbaceous (though from parsley). As Admony told ἀ e New Yorker in 2007, her intent is to take “street food, and make it gourmet” (Collins). When Dan Pashman hosted Admony on his video series You’re Eating It Wrong, to her initial dismay he wanted to deep-­fry big falafel patties and put it on a bun, like a burger. Despite Pashman’s counterauthentic falafel, Admony declared “it’s not bad” (“You’re Eating Falafel Wrong”). He then made a waffle falafel in a waffle iron, which I was not comfortable with, but customers at Taïm enjoyed it and possibly considered it gourmet. Falafel, the placeholder of cheap Middle Eastern food available on almost every street corner, seems the furthest thing from the gourmet label Admony desires. The origins of Israeli falafel could be traced to 1950s Yemenite immigrants, who, upon arriving in Israel via the famous Operation Magic Carpet airlift, popularized the chickpea as the basis of falafel (as opposed to the Egyptian version’s usage of fava beans). Shaul Stampfer argues that for Jewish residents of the young state, “Yemenite falafel was regarded as the most original and tastiest version” (189). Or the origins of Israeli falafel might be in an eighteenth-­or nineteenth-­century interpretation of Egyptian or Syrian versions of the dish. “There is no reference to falafel in ancient Egypt,” Stampfer claims (183). Stampfer believes that a lack of cheap frying oil prevented ancient Egyptians from making falafel. Israeli sociologist Liora Givon understands falafel as Palestinian, a culture whose cuisine, she notes, is, like all other cultural cuisines, not gastronomically monolithic. Yet, she also claims, Palestinian falafel still publicly maintains an identity of estrangement when it comes to claiming this particular food as its own: “The consumer interprets and creates the cuisine, leaning on the cultural context from which he derives significance. In this way, falafel becomes, for Jewish Israelis, a distinct dish served with tahini and salads, and, for Americans, a vegetarian substitute for hamburger—­both modes of serving estranged from the Palestinian serving of falafel” (165). Yael Raviv dismisses the Yemenite narrative, noting that “contrary to what many Israelis believe, falafel is not native to Yemen; the Yemenites had learned how to prepare it from the local Arabs” (22). Whatever falafel’s origins may be,

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Raviv argues that Israeli falafel cannot be dissociated from Middle Eastern cuisine because of politics, ethnic difference, or claims of authentic origin. Israeli falafel, authentic or not, is still part of an overall falafel conversation that extends from Brooklyn to the Middle East and beyond. Spatial reality overpowers ideology. “If Israel is part of the Middle East, then its citizens have as much right as those of any other country in the region to love falafel. Israelis’ choice of falafel or hummus as markers of identity should perhaps be perceived as a reflection of their wish to become part of the Middle East. Would their motives not be more questionable had they insisted on gefilte fish or hamburger as the ‘national’ snack?” (25). Despite the arguments surrounding it, falafel is fairly simple to make. “The recipe becomes the excuse for the narrative,” Sharon Jansen writes (69). Falafel’s origin narrative is one kind of recipe (how to frame food as authentic or as having regional aura). My recipe for cooking falafel at home sounds (and is) fairly simplistic. • Buy dried chickpeas and soak them overnight. • Pulverize chickpeas in the food processor with garlic, salt, coriander, cumin, black pepper, onion, and parsley (unless I am making yellow falafel, then omit parsley). • Form small balls by hand and fry in canola oil in a cast iron pan or a Dutch oven. Einat Admony adds mint and cilantro to her falafel. Rap star Action Bronson’s recipe is similar to mine except for the additional ingredient of “a lot of weed for munchies.” Joan Nathan’s recipe for falafel, which she learned from “falafel mavens,” resembles my own approach and includes the following comment: “Egyptians omit the cilantro and substitute fava beans for the chickpeas” (71). Nathan prefers the falafel at Ha Gingi in Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem, and Dr. Sa’adyah on King George Street in Tel Aviv. Israeli celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi, known for vegetarian dishes and his close relationship with Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, does not include a recipe for falafel in his celebrated cookbook Plenty or in its sequel Plenty More. I imagine, however, his falafel following a similar recipe to mine. Roland Barthes argued for food as “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior” (“Toward” 24). Falafel, as one such system, circulates throughout a v ariety of textual and media-­ based references. Food “transmits a situation; it constitutes an information; it signifies” (24). This signification builds a network of meaning, a network I trace across my own interest in falafel as well as various media moments that circulate falafel. Jonathan Gold, for instance, discovers what he calls “Brook-

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lyn” in Los Angeles’ Madcapra, but notes that the restaurant avoids authenticity when it comes to the question of Israeli or Middle Eastern food. “Instead of pita, the sandwiches are constructed on floppy, za’atar-­dusted rounds of flatbread patted out and grilled to order. Where you expect lettuce, diced cucumbers and tomatoes, there will be handfuls of fresh herbs, probably including marjoram, cilantro and mint, as well as various greens and tart, crunchy bits of pickled things. There may be jolts of spiced yogurt or labneh supplementing the traditional sesame paste tahini. You will run into the occasional leaf of pungent Thai basil, which is not a typical Israeli or Lebanese touch” (“Madcapra Wraps”). In 2012, a widely circulated internet joke claimed that Michele Bachmann called for school lunches to ban falafel. The 1995 film Party Girl features Parker Posey wanting to order falafel in an unconventional way. She asks, “Can I have a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ghanoush, and a seltzer, please?” In the episode “Falafelosophy” from the children’s show Arthur, a falafel food truck owner preaches to Binky that the circular shape of the falafel, pita, and planet teaches that “roundness is oneness.” Later in the same episode, writer Neil Gaiman appears in Sue Ellen’s falafel in order to offer her advice on her writing. At Shopsin’s in Brooklyn, one can order falafel latkes. In ἀ e New York Times, Jodi Kantor traces the Israeli/Palestinian debate over falafel’s origins and the narratives of originality and cooption that accompany this debate. “Perhaps,” she concludes her overview of this controversy, “Palestinians will grow more tolerant of Israeli enthusiasm for falafel.” With falafel, the question of authenticity, at times, trumps the question of flavor. Many Arab commenters bemoan: Is falafel Israeli? Is it Arab? Did it come from Palestinians, Yemen, or, as Stampfer suggests, maybe India? “It should be noted, though, that the Cochin Jews of Kerala and the Jews of Calcutta, along with their neighbors, commonly ate a food known as parippu vada or filowri—­fried balls of ground chunna ka dhal (split green peas). This food is striking similar to falafel; the term filowri is also reminiscent of falafel” (184). Falafel’s origins have long been challenged and debated. Did one group steal falafel from the other? Can one ethnic group actually steal another ethnic group’s food? Is there an eidos or essential state of falafel that we rely on in order to believe in food authenticity? Can the “real” owners of falafel reclaim their title as “authentic,” or does it matter? Claudia Roden traces falafel (called by its Alexandria name ta’amia) to the Christian Copts of Egypt: “During Coptic religious festivals, and particularly during Lent, when they are not allowed to eat meat for many weeks, every Coptic family produces mountains of ta’amia for their own daily consumption and to be distributed to non-­Coptic friends and neighbors” (61). Roden remembers sitting with her family in Alexandria: “A basket would be lowered

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to the café below and pulled up again with a h aul of fresh ta’amia.” Writer André Aciman returns to Egypt after thirty years away and discovers that his memories of Alexandria—­not unlike Roden’s story of eating at her aunt and uncle’s house in the city—­are tied to falafel. “The odor of falafel brought to mind a falafel hole-­in-­t he-­wall on Broadway and 104th that had frequently made me think of the tiny summertime establishments in Alexandria, whose falafel now, ironically, smelled less authentic in Egypt than the falafel on Broadway” (197). “The Egyptian ta’miyah is rather different from the Lebanese/Syrian falafel,” food writer Anissa Helou writes, “softer and starchier” (152). I once visited Egypt, but I didn’t order falafel. In these brief, circulated passages, Jewish authors (Roden, Aciman) recall their Egyptian (mostly Muslim) falafel memories. Who is an authentic storyteller here? Falafel demonstrates a cultural presence. While falafel is not consumed in the United States on par with hamburgers, hot dogs, or pizza, it has earned some notability within popular culture and popular writings to the point that it serves, to some extent, as a cultural anchor or franchise within experiences and writings. The co-­op in my town serves falafel sandwiches with sprouts. The seafood place inside of Lexington’s West Sixth Brewing serves falafel inside a w rap. Whole Foods sells premade falafel balls and something called “kale falafel.” In Copenhagen, I could buy a bag of premade falafel balls from the freezer section at the Irma grocery store. In Copenhagen’s West Market, a few blocks from our rented apartment, there were two stalls that sold falafel. I found the Turkish falafel stall and its gregarious owner the better of the two. We also found one stall that made grilled cheese sandwiches. I ordered one for my son who won’t eat falafel. Just Falafel is a United Arab Emirates fast food chain with almost sixty branches worldwide. They plan to open outlets in America. ἀ e Simpsons mocked falafel as fast food in “The Twisted World of Marge Simpson” episode. As she considers investing in a Fleet-­A-­Pita franchise, Edna Krabappel asks the franchise representative how to explain falafel to finicky and unknowledgeable customers. “Crunch patties,” he responds. Even Subway has offered its own version of a f alafel sandwich. It’s mostly available in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and comes with a “zesty cucumber sauce.” On Instagram and Facebook, I once claimed that I invented the falafel taco, several yellow falafel balls served with humous, feta cheese, and cucumber in a leftover cheap store-­bought tortilla. I was immediately challenged for this claim. Falafel is both singular (one ball) and plural (I have never heard someone say in Hebrew falafelim; the im suffix in Hebrew signifies an object’s plural status). Falafel is a sandwich. Sandwiches, in general, hold significant meaning for me. All my life I have eaten sandwiches. As a child, I ate cheese sandwiches for

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FIGURE 20 The falafel taco

breakfast. My daughter asks me to buy her turkey and cheese but refuses to eat it as a sandwich. I hold dear memories of challah and egg sandwiches; lamb bacon sandwiches; Saturday morning fried egg, sharp cheese, and challah sandwiches; homemade steak sandwiches with roasted peppers and Japanese mayonnaise; grilled cheese sandwiches on challah or soft white bread; and soft-­shell crab sandwiches served with a homemade ancho mayonnaise. “The memorable,” de Certeau writes, “is that which can be dreamed about a place” (109). I d ream of sandwiches. I a lso dream of Falafel HaKosem in Tel Aviv, walking distance from Dizengoff Center, and a frequent spot to eat at when

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we are in the city. At HaKosem, they hand out samples while you wait in line. They make an almost magical falafel, crunchy on the outside and smooth on the inside. They also make a deep-­fried sabich called haborik; when you bite into it, the egg, not cooked all the way through, runs a bright yellow yolk all over the fried sandwich. Sandwiches demonstrate how disparate items might be cajoled into one space for a temporary moment in time so that we can engage pleasure. “It’s important to achieve balance in sandwiches,” Tyler Kord writes, “because who really knows how to achieve it in life?” (184). Who, indeed, can craft their lives the way we craft food combinations of vegetables, meat, and sauce between bread? “The sandwich is not just food,” Bee Wilson claims, “it is a piece of engineering” (Sandwich 36). Falafel and sabich (which I will discuss shortly) require engineering of ingredients within a still warm pita; one does not want the pita to bust open or become soggy. At Pita Palace in Atlanta, Georgia, I once made the mistake of ordering a falafel sandwich on a Sunday, and because the restaurant is kosher, the pita was from the previous Friday. My falafel broke out of the stale, two-­day-­old pita and crumbled over my plate. I was very upset. There is no balance to a broken pita. In a pita, one wants the placement of sauce and egg or eggplant and falafel ball to be proper and in sync. When I was a kid, my grandmother made me grilled cheese sandwiches as part of our ritual of getting together on the weekend. They felt perfect in their placement of cheese, mayonnaise, and butter between bread. I often search out unique sandwich shops, which, in America, there are few of today; shops that don’t serve Boar’s Head meats and actually make their own bread or buy freshly baked local bread. The sandwich is artisan at its core. Part of our trips to Israel are framed by sandwiches. Not long into our first trip, I stood in line at Sabich Frishman for a sabich sandwich, an Iraqi concoction of potato salad, harif, various greens, eggplant, amba, hard-­boiled eggs, and all kinds of goodness in a pita. In some ways, a sabich sandwich is a type of pasta salad in a pita, only without the pasta. Israeli chef Einat Admony defines sabich accordingly: “There are two speculations about where the name sabich comes from: some people say it’s the name of an Iraqi immigrant who brought the recipe to Palestine in the 1930s; others think it’s derived from sabach, the Arabic term for ‘morning,’ because this originated as a morning sandwich” (Balaboosta 216). For Tablet writer Dana Kessler, “The credit for this ingenious development is usually given to one Sabich Halabi, an Iraqi immigrant who opened what is believed to be the first sabich stand in Ramat Gan in 1961.” Or sabich is merely an etymological play on words. “Some claim,” Neal Ungerleider states, “that the word is an acronym for the Hebrew words for salad (salat), eggs (baytzim) and eggplant (chatzilim, with a hard ch).” Sabich, like Tel Aviv, is mystical and mythical. I’m not sure if An-

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thony Bourdain ever ate sabich or wondered about its indigenous origins as a food of the people and marker of the traditional, “the way people once ate.” Since he spent little time in Israel on his show Parts Unknown, and since he only focused on the expected commonplace of Palestinian/Israeli conflict/reconciliation that dominates most cultural stories of the region, I doubt he did. “There are many ways to eat sabich,” a Saveur video proclaims, but it offers only the option, “head first” (“Hall of Fame”). Sabich Frishman is on Frishman street. This should, no doubt, differentiate it from any other sabich place in the city, which, logic prevails, would be on a different street. Next door to Sabich Frishman is Falafel Frishman. Rather than cause conflict or reflect an ownership undecided on what it wants to emphasize, sabich or falafel, the proximity of one stand to the other reflects the overall importance of the sandwich to Israeli street food cuisine. Israelis love sandwiches—­whether in a pita or Tunisian style on a baguette. While I can easily move from sabich to falafel and vice versa without any hint of regret or indecision, the editors of the website Secret Tel Aviv believe that anyone who settles for Falafel Frishman over Sabich Frishman is a “simple soul” (“Sabich Frishman”). These are harsh words for sandwich preference. Israel is a culture of sandwiches. Sandwiches are mobile; they can be eaten while walking, driving, yelling at strangers, telling someone that what they are doing is wrong, avoiding incoming missiles, or engaging in other activities. Sandwiches allow multiple ingredients to occupy one space. Sandwiches join childhood to adulthood, uniting age experiences via bread and contents placed within bread. In line at Sabich Frishman, I c onvinced myself that I had made a deal with my daughter that she will eat this particular vegetarian sandwich. I wanted the sandwich badly, and I was sure, this time, so would she. She agreed to eat the sandwich. But she didn’t really eat it. It remained wrapped up in its pita bag (which, unlike Subway, does not include the name of Sabich Frishman on the bag) for some time after I had finished mine. Lunch for her, instead, was pasta and a c hocolate croissant I b ought at the corner bakery. During our first trip to Israel, my kids lived off of pasta and defrosted schnitzel. They said no to anything I offered that was Israeli or Middle Eastern. The authentic Israeli eating experience was lost on them and their heritage. The one exception was the dolmas and lavash with eggplant and salad I bought from a Druze woman at the Food Fair in Dizengoff Center. Out of all the Middle Eastern food she could enjoy and sample in Israel, the nation of her people and second citizenship, my daughter was pleased by Druze food the most. My favorite sabich in Tel Aviv can be found at Mifgash Osher, which translates into Happiness Joint. Eater recommends Mifgash Osher for sabich, and I

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FIGURE 21 Mifgash Osher sabich

concur. The only other sabich-­oriented place Eater mentions is Sabich Frishman (Brown). Mifgash Osher owner Bentzi Arbel prepares two kinds of sabich, the traditional sandwich with its expected contents and a deconstructed version in a bowl. He also makes falafel without parsley, which translates into a yellow ball, far different from the traditional parsley-­infused chickpea fritter that turns falafel green. At Mifgash Osher, I convinced my son the falafel was a chicken nugget and he ate a bowl’s worth of yellow falafel. Such was his

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FIGURE 22 Bunny Chow

authentic experience. I tried this trick again five years later at Mifgash Osher, and it failed. Sabich is pronounced with a hard Middle Eastern ch sound at the end, as in the Hebrew letter het. When my wife orders sabich, she tends to pronounce it sa-­beach. Usually, no one knows what she is ordering. During most of my travels, I suggest food to my kids. In Israel, these suggestions are sometimes narrowed down to falafel, humous, shawarma, and sabich. Other times, I attempt to broaden this window of an assumed culinary Israelicity to other foods. That is, the expectation of food in Israel can

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be overcome in order to eat other foods. There were no hand-­drawn noodles in Tel Aviv to suggest, but there were many kinds of Israelicity offerings to suggest: pickled foods and fish, local cheeses from the Galilee, falafel, humous, spicy spreads, vegetarian and vegan meals, dragon fruit, Bamba, ice cream, and grilled meats. Bunny Chow, once located in Tel Aviv’s Shuk HaCarmel, served South African street food—­curry in a wonderfully rich egg roll—­t hat was spicy and comforting and outside of what Israelicity might entail. No one expects South African sandwiches in a Tel Aviv market. My kids sat on the high stools in the tiny market stall and drank a soda instead of joining me for lunch. “Great humous must never be taken for granted,” Jonathan Gold wrote (“At Middle Eastern Restaurants”). “One would be a fool to think that there is no notable difference between one style of hummus and another,” Orly Peli-­ Bronsthein argues. “There is thick and sweet hummus, one that is tart and velvety, and there is hummus that is pureed warm, with a light fluffy texture. These differences stem from variations in the rations between the chickpeas and tahini, as well as the various pounding techniques and other culinary subtleties” (132–133). Abu Hassan, located in Jaffa, takes nothing for granted and offers the warm, light variation. It is often cited as the best humous in Israel and thus offers a prime example of Israelicity, the canonical chickpea spread wrongly mispronounced outside of the Middle East as hummus (ha-­ mus), but exemplarily of cultures devoted to spreads on bread: Israeli, Palestinian, Turkish, and Arab in general. As an Arab-­Israeli restaurant frequented by Israeli Jews, Abu Hassan’s Israelicity expands further; Arab humous is stereotypically valued more than Jewish humous as authentic humous. That stereotype provides a topos for eating; if you want the good stuff, the narrative explains, search out the authentic Arab humous before the Jewish one, the proper to the improper, the original to the copy. On the Israeli food blog ἀ e Hummus Blog, writer Shooky Galili notes, “Many Israelis, and many people around the world, believe hummus to be an Israeli food. On the other hand, when they seek to eat good hummus, most Israelis will go to an Arab hummus place.” After all the energy I put into grabbing a table in the tiny Jaffa restaurant where seating is first come, first served and diners rush and bump into each other in order to grab a vacated space, my kids would only eat the pita. The stereotype was lost on them. How one can eat in another country without engaging the stereotypes that accompany that country (sushi in Japan, hamburgers in America, pasta in Italy, humous in Israel) baffles me. My children’s rejection of a stereotype of Middle East cuisine runs counter to Palestinian Nuha Musleh’s account that humous is a dish based in the tradition of fathers and their daughters. “The father wakes up in the morning, makes hummus,

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makes food, invites all his daughters and daughters-­in-­law and sons” (“Give Chickpeas”). My daughter couldn’t care less if I make the humous or if Abu Hassan does. She’s not eating either. When Ellie Tzortzi visited Abu Hassan, she commented on the line and wait as well, noting that, as an anomaly, Israelis—­Jewish and Arab—­are willing to wait in line when it comes to this particular food. Normally in Israel, no one wants to wait in line. Israelis crowd around whatever they want (bus, store opening, market stall) and just enter at once. “They queue and eye with envy those too sly or impatient to wait for a table, who just grabbed their loot from the tiny takeaway window and sat down on door stoops and fence edges along the street with their plastic tubs and handfuls of pita, content like cats in the sunshine” (Tzortzi). Tzortzi, though, prefers Abu Hassan’s version of masabacha, a variation of humous often found in humous restaurants. Masabacha, to me, only slightly drifts away from the original humous, depending on lemon, spices, and tahini added. When she eats masabacha at Abu Hassan’s, Tzortzi waxes poetically: “Silky tahini blends with velvety hummus and the brilliant sheen of the olive oil, the perfect cushion for the barely-­t here bite of the whole chickpeas. They perch daintily on the edge of the pita, resist for a moment on the teeth and then melt into a rush of spiced warmth inside the mouth, small parcels of surprise and delight. If hummus is that cool, wise-­cracking buddy you used to hang out with in your teens, then m’sabbha [sic] is his older, sophisticated sister—­t he one you couldn’t help but fall in love with.” When food writer Mark Wiens visits Abu Hassan, he tries all of the options: humous, masabacha, and ful (“Tel Aviv Food Tour”). He somehow manages to easily find a table. In Eran Vered’s short satirical film “The Hummus Enforcement Agency,” humous has been outlawed by the Israeli government. In back alleys and far away from law enforcement and government surveillance, black marketers sell fifty grams of the chickpea spread for fifty shekels in secret exchanges. As the film narrates in mocking tone, conspiracy theorists claim the humous ban is a move by the tomato industry in order to take over the Israeli condiment market. When one foodie is caught with humous and interrogated, he gives up “this guy in Jaffa in the alley.” An authentic humous, the film suggests, is a d angerous humous. “Do Americans know what humous is? ‘I remember a time,’ Francis Lam writes, a younger, sheltered time, when I impressed friends and pretty girls by serving hummus. It seems almost absurd now, but yes, back then, hummus could be unexpected—­an unusual Middle Eastern purée of chickpeas, sesame paste, garlic and lemon—­and not automatic neighbors with the chips and dip on snack tables.” Humous has become everyday. John T. Edge recognizes this ubiquity, describing how chickpeas have become

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inundated with a myriad of flavors far beyond the authentic base of tahini, garlic, and salt. Each newly introduced flavor (roasted red pepper, avocado, sun-­dried tomato, chocolate) challenges humous’ authenticity while simultaneously making it less exotic, or, at least, less Middle Eastern exotic. “In Somersworth, N.H., the Crazy Camel company makes six varieties of dessert hummus, including a blend of chickpeas and cocoa it calls chocolate mousse hummus. In North Carolina, Good Health Natural Foods of Greensboro makes Humbles baked hummus chips in four flavors, including one with feta” (Edge). “You know what else does not belong in hummus? ” Marjorie Ingall asks. “Figs, pepitas and smoked paprika.” Humous aggregates a variety of tastes and desires, none of which would be called authentic. What is the proper or authentic way to pronounce humous? Hoo-­moose, I contend, is the only way to say this food’s name and not the Americanized hum-­mas or ha-­mass. Pronunciation reveals authenticity or, at least, the image or posing of authenticity as guttural inflections are stressed and words are not Americanized. Speaking a foreign language without proper pronunciation often diminishes one’s place in the culture or delegates one’s ethos (“I learned another language”) as inferior (“but you sound like an American still”). Learning another language is typically accompanied by the desire to pronounce properly. Yet, Americans, despite the question of authenticity regarding the chickpea spread and its accented pronunciation, still say hum-­ mas. When I try to correct colleagues and friends regarding how to pronounce humous, they roll their eyes at me as if there could be nothing more annoying than being told how to pronounce a spread by a professor. Authenticity does not trump being obnoxious, in their opinion. My kids mispronounce humous on purpose, hoping I will get angry. According to the travel site Matador, humous is the most hated food in Kentucky (Bulnes). Hated, that is, except for me. Humous is in my house all the time. The Whole Foods humous I buy, at times, is no match for Abu Hassan’s. But it does have a nice touch of lemon in the finish. On Wikipedia, Israelis and Palestinians argue over humous’ origins and not its pronunciation, each claiming responsibility for its invention or accusing the other of racism for co-­opting the food. Food, we are often told, can only be authentic when connected to its origins or spatial beginnings, as if food can be entirely traced or authenticated. Humous offers a version of terroir that is strictly ideological. The language of food is deeply connected to eidos or platonic states. No one I know will get angry if ketchup is traced to Chinese fish sauce, but Palestinians or anti-­Israeli foodies cringe at the notion of Israeli humous. Wikipedia hosts an intense war over the claim of humous authenticity.

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Hummus: they love it in Israel, so shouldn’t it be in Israeli cuisine? Or is it a purely Arab food that the Zionists have illegally occupied? After a related skirmish on Za’atar, the ingredients were listed in alphabetical order, but was this all part of a shrewd Zionist plot? Don’t be silly, came the response: and anybody who removes the Hebrew name from the first sentence is a racist vandal. Meanwhile, back at Hummus, an attempt is made to replace a mention that the Oxford English Dictionary says that the word entered English via Turkish with a reference to the Greek name for the dish. (“Wikipedia: Lamest Edit Wars”)

These types of debates play out elsewhere on social media as well; internet writers are eager to attack any pro-­Israeli or neutral Israeli position regarding Middle Eastern food when it is consumed in Israel or associated with Israel. On December 21, 2017, for instance, television personality Rachel Ray posted the following on Twitter: “Holiday Feast Highlights—­Israeli nite, meze stuffed grape leaves, hummus, beet dip, eggplant and sun dried tomato dip, walnut and red pepper dip, and tabouli” (@rachaelray). James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, angrily responded: “Damn it @rachaelray. This is cultural #genocide. It’s not #Israeli food. It’s #Arab (#Lebanese, #Palestinian, #Syrian, #Jordanian). First the Israelis take the land & ethnically cleanse it of Arabs. Now they take their food & culture & claim it’s theirs too! #Shame” (@ jjz1600). For Zogby, humous, falafel, or any food eaten in Israel or eventually labeled as “Israeli” is an act of “genocide,” an assumption that not only anchors authenticity to a g iven cultural identification but also argues that any move away from such an identification will extinguish the ethnic group in question. If humous as a commonplace becomes associated with Israel, Zogby believes, Palestinian identity will cease to exist (even though Palestinians and other Arab nationalities still eat humous and don’t associate it with Israel). Such hyperbole clings to authentic commonplaces, but does so in a way that there no longer are debates or disagreement (a normal focal point of the commonplace in argumentation and the basis of food rhetoric). Critique, in this case, is held hostage by a technical image so strong (the question of an essential or eidos of Arab food based on anti-­Israel sentiment, cultural purity narratives, racism against Jews, an inability to accept the existence of a Jewish state or Jewish nationalism) that food consumption transforms into unwavering ideological rhetoric. Zogby exemplifies Latour’s warning of the limitations of critique: “You have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusion of their real motives (“Why Has Critique” 229). The real motives for Israelis eating humous, Zogby believes, is to exterminate Palestinians. If you think

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otherwise, Zogby states, you are in an illusory state. Hyperbole works hard to destroy deviations from authenticity assumptions. Hyperbole, as Zogby exemplifies with his genocide allegory, does not offer insight into a situation or conflict; instead, it merely maps out conspiracy theories (Israelis appropriate humous in order to eliminate Palestinians) as given truths. Zogby’s hyperbole is a cognitive map–based allegory that ignores referentiality in favor of using one image (eating food) to tell another story (genocide). Food stories allow for the expression of identity. Ari Ariel outlines the humous debate as not Palestinian versus Israeli, but Lebanese versus Israeli, particularly as each country attempts to achieve the Guinness World Record for, what is also an act of hyperbole, the largest serving of humous created. The Lebanese, Ariel writes, want to claim a t ype of appellation d’origine for humous, limiting it to a Lebanese identity and preventing any identification as Israeli. In this incident, geopolitical difference extends to gastronomy. You are ideologically what you eat. That point, Ariel notes, is a problematic rhetorical gesture. “Authenticity, as both a product and producer of national pride, is a particularly significant claim given the diffusion of hummus throughout the region and its increasing commonness globally. Perceived threats to national distinctiveness give authenticity even greater currency” (37). In the end, Ariel concludes, food ideology, despite its insistence on place of origin or desire for national supremacy, yields to the banality of gastronomical practice. One can happily eat without worrying about a spread’s cultural authenticity or a fried chicken restaurant’s politics. In Israel, everyone eats humous. Practice is nothing more than the ordinariness of everyday eating. “Hummus is Israeli because Israelis eat hummus,” Ariel states matter-­of-­factly (41). He’s right. Israelis eat humous. Americans eat humous. Arabs, Palestinian or otherwise, eat humous. A lot of people eat humous. Eating humous will not eliminate a culture or ethnicity. Practice overrides ideology. Everyday consumption triumphs belief because banality offers its own iteration of authenticity: I eat it, and it tastes good. At Abu Hassan, among Arab and Jewish patrons, I don’t sense this narrated conflict between various Arab nationalities and Israelis. Whatever one feels about humous’ origins, patrons seem to keep it to themselves as they wait to rush for a table before someone else does. Humous comes before politics. “When push comes to shove,” Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write in their cookbook Jerusalem, “nobody seriously challenges the Palestinian hegemony in making hummus, even though both they and the Jews like to call it their own. The arguments never cease. And even if the question of authorship is somehow set aside, you are still left with who makes the best hummus now” (112).

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FIGURE 23 Abu Hasan humous to go

When Gordon Ramsay visited Zayna Flaming Grill in Redondo Beach, California, on the TV show Kitchen Nightmares, ideology played no part in his experience. Ramsay swapped the watery, poorly received homemade humous with Sabra, a factory-­made humous available in most grocery stores across America. Sabra won the battle. In Anthony Bourdain’s “visit” to Israel, he barely tours the country (sticking mostly to Jerusalem), and what he does sample and eat does not include humous. American-­Israeli chef Michael Solomonov’s Philadelphia restaurant Dizengoff is designed to evoke the feelings of an Israeli hummusiah (a humous joint), where a meal consists of a plate of humous, a hard-­boiled egg, pickles, and freshly made pita. The faded posters along the walls create the feeling of being in the urban atmosphere of Tel Aviv, where peeling and plastered posters envelop the city’s urban atmosphere and can be found on every street corner, layered on top of one another in a caked display of event promotion. Solomonov does not appear to be concerned if a hummusiah can only be found in Tel Aviv or in another Israeli city, or if humous is Arab or Jewish in origin. For patrons of Dizengoff, the message

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is clear: Tel Aviv equates the generic hummusiah because the stereotype is a powerful technical image for Tel Avivians and those who have eaten humous in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv humous eaters, like me, bring their technical images to the table and recognize the aggregations surrounding them. Sitting in Dizengoff, I wanted to believe I was in Tel Aviv (though I knew I was not). Solomonov wants Philadelphians, as well, to believe that they are eating authentic humous in the city of brotherly love. I don’t know if arguments over humous’ origins ever occur at his restaurant, and I doubt Zogby would eat there. When I ate there, five minutes after it opened, I was the only one present. Opening a hummusiah called Tel Aviv in Philadelphia is like talking with a bad accent. There’s a feeling something is being mispronounced. Accents, like a Philadelphia restaurant’s décor, affect authenticity. At Rahmo, a small Kurdish restaurant located on Ha-­Eshkol Street, just outside the fringes of Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, Mohamed is upset with me the minute I place my order at the window. He doesn’t like my accent. “You don’t understand me?” I ask in Hebrew. “No, I don’t!” he says in disgust. He won’t serve me the food I repeatedly try to order. We are both speaking Hebrew; I speak in an American accent, and he speaks in an Arab accent. The owner comes over and apologizes. “He’s new,” he tells me. “Very emotional.” “He’s mad at me,” I say. “No,” the owner says, wanting to make sure I a m not upset. “It’s ok,” I say. “It doesn’t bother me.” The owner laughs and brings my kids lemonades. He checks in on us every other minute, offering to refill the kubbeh soup or bring another kubbeh nablusiah. Rahmo feels authentic. It is Kurdish. It is within the heart of Jerusalem, a city whose ethos speaks to religious and cultural authenticity, depending on which point of view one accepts. Here is the site of the Holy Temple. Here is where Mohammed rose to heaven. Here is where Abraham sacrificed Isaac. Here is where Jesus was crucified. Here is where tourists have meltdowns believing they are Jesus. The guidebook DK Eyewitness Travel Guide calls Rahmo an “institution” and claims the restaurant serves “authentic Jerusalem humous prepared according to a secret recipe from the owner’s mother” (272). Secrets. Old mothers cooking in small kitchens. Ancient cities. Proper and not-­appropriated accents. All authentic places must be accompanied by authentic language. These are the Anthony Bourdain fantasies of authenticity, though he did not eat at Rahmo when he visited Jerusalem. Yotam Ottolenghi lists Rahmo as one of Jerusalem’s best restaurants, noting its kubbeh soup as the menu’s highlight. “Choosing between the beetroot and onion, the root vegetable and turmeric and Swiss chard and spinach is so tough that you’ll have to go three times,” he writes (“Ottolenghi’s Restaurants”). While we dined, kids rode through the small restaurant on toy bikes. A m an came in, found no one attentive at the front (Mohamed had

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vanished), swiped a falafel ball from behind the order window, and left. My daughter cried because my wife called her a goofball. For the second time on the trip, my son actually ate his dinner—­a plate of schnitzel without anything else added. The next day, outside of Mahane Yehuda, thinking we’ve hit gold with schnitzel again, I ordered it for him from a shop. He wouldn’t eat it. At a nearby ice cream shop, however, my daughter ordered two scoops and immediately threw up all over the cobblestone street. The next day, we went back to the market to buy herring for the return trip to Tel Aviv. I avoided that section of the market where she threw up. Who knew if anyone had washed it away by then, or if it remains as an authentic marker of our visit in the holy city’s largest outdoor food market. In Jaffa, we walk to 94 Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) Boulevard to eat at Malabi Dajani, a small shop run for sixty years by first the family’s grandfather and now the grandkids. Malabi (in Arabic, muhallabia) is a rich milk-­based custard typically complemented with rose water, sugar, and vanilla. It is often experienced as a s treet food. Indeed, Malabi Dajani was originally a s treet vendor before opting to open up a storefront along Jaffa’s busiest commercial street. Einat Admony’s recipe for malabi calls for adding orange marmalade and brandy (Balaboosta 199). Michael Solomonov adds mango (Zahav 350). At Malabi Dajani, I b uy three malabis—­one for me and two for my kids—­ but I end up eating mine and most of my son’s. Along with malabi, one can buy carbonated fruit drinks—­lemon, cherry, and pineapple. I end up buying two lemons after my son drinks all of my daughter’s glass, and, in response to him drinking hers, she cries. One can take the glass container the malabi comes in, stroll around the area, and it is assumed you will return the glass when finished. The woman behind the counter seems uninterested in these Americans who have somehow found this little custard place along the fairly busy boulevard of shops. A group of young Israeli late teenagers approach the counter on this hot afternoon. I hear one chide the other: “You mean you’ve never had malabi? What is wrong with you?” How, indeed, can one be Israeli and never have tried malabi? Are these authentic food experiences with my children? Do my anecdotes create a sense of travelicity? In Tel Aviv, I was embarrassed when we bought a bag of Hello Kitty pasta at an AM:PM grocery store. Hello Kitty pasta, the kids informed us, tastes like any other pasta. The benefit, they also told us, is that it is shaped like Hello Kitty. Its authenticity, it seems, resides in its representation of a popular Japanese cartoon character whose image can be affixed to almost any object or food the world over. There is little that is more embarrassing than being in Israel or any other foreign country where a world of food experiences and Anthony Bourdain–style bragging of “food the way it was

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once made” awaits you; yet you feed your kids Hello Kitty pasta. Once, in Tel Aviv, my son asked for “juicy” hot dogs because the package of hot dogs in the AM:PM grocery said “juicy” on them. Since he felt that the hot dogs he ate in Kentucky were “juicy” (his gastronomical definition determined by a child’s memory; juicy embodies his Proustian moment), he believed that these hot dogs, too, would be juicy. The hot dogs, though, were chicken, not the beef he was used to. Even that was too foreign for him. Tiv Taam is the supermarket we frequently shop at when in Tel Aviv. Compared to the socialist-­looking throwback Super-­Sal groceries scattered throughout the city, which exist in a variety of sizes ranging from large supermarket to convenience store, Tiv Taam is more like a Tel Aviv version of Whole Foods, but without the aesthetic or charismatic appearance. Tiv Taam comforts my shopping experience via its “upscale” feel and selection of products not available elsewhere. It is mostly known, though, for catering to Russian immigrants, which means it is not only open on Shabbat, but it also sells pork. Kosher, too, provides a stereotypical marker of Israelicity, but it is among the least authentic markers that write food in the country. Most places I visit in Tel Aviv, whether they sell pork or not, are not kosher. Most Israelis do not eat kosher food. The stereotype of being Jewish, particularly in America, is that one is kosher (as if any other state of being is not authentic). Tiv Taam does, however, replicate Super-­Sal’s grumpy cashiers, who sit (unlike their American counterparts) and refuse to bag your groceries. Despite its history, and despite its cultural importance as the first, modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv occupies our time with food (day) and television (morning and night). Indeed, television frames many of our travels since it is the only thing my children really care about when we are away from home. Television, in Lexington or elsewhere, is their authentic experience. In Tel Aviv, a highlight of our television viewing occurs when our cable package finally gets the Israeli Food Channel. Many Israeli food shows feature chefs preparing salads, since most of the country eats salad on a daily basis. On the Israeli version of Master Chef, we watched Arab-­Israeli Nof Atamna-­Ismaeel defeat her Jewish competitors by cooking deep-­fried mullet and, thus, challenge the “authentic” stereotype of apartheid in Israel, as well as what Arab food might entail. In addition to watching local shows about making pasta salad and baking the Israeli version of focaccia—­a thin, narrow bread with some tomatoes, rosemary, or other items on top (which my daughter will eat)—­I get to watch the Heston Blumenthal show titled Heston’s Fantastical Food, a show I’ve never seen in America. I admire Blumenthal; he is the kind of chef who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out a basic

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cuisine challenge such as “what’s the perfect way to boil an egg” or “what’s the best way to make a French fry.” Blumenthal believes in authenticity. There must be an authentic way to cook what seems to be a basic culinary task. Or, we could say, cooking that seems banal and inconsequential—­such as making french fries—­t hrough study and practice transforms into authentic practices delivering the best flavor. In addition to such tasks, Blumenthal searches for the most authentic way to roast a chicken. Blumenthal offers the opposite of what molecular gastronomy poses, which is food no one can make at home or food that alters the aura of expectation by playing with one’s senses or memories. Blumenthal, instead, attempts to decipher the basics of banality, such as how to roast a chicken, preparation most families would recognize as a daily encounter with food. Few things are easier than roasting a c hicken, yet Blumenthal deconstructs the process like an engineer. “We like to think of our food preferences as individual—­an extension of our personality,” Blumenthal writes, “but in fact a lot of our food preferences are learned” (26). Thus, roasting a chicken must be learned; it cannot be taken for granted as is (which is likely what I do when I roast a chicken). In Israel, I wanted my children to learn my food preferences—­sabich, humous, falafel—­because these are extensions of my personality and memories. They, however, preferred pasta. Blumenthal’s logic is based on memory and culture. “So much of the eating experience, and the pleasure we drive from it, is down to perception” (27). Perception, though, is difficult to shape and adjust unless the eater wants to make that gesture—­t hat is, to perceive and to not take for granted. Perception without critique, for instance, is also a perception based on a specific desire (to discover another type of writing, to eat falafel without concern for ethnic origin, to merely eat). Eating roasted chicken, Blumenthal suggests, is part of such a p rocess. If I derive pleasure from endless critique or if I d erive pleasure from a r oasted chicken, they are both similar gestures. Perception anchors these gestures. Blumenthal prefers a poulet de Bresse chicken and requires a brine, rinse, and blanch, as well as an almost six-­hour roast at 140 degrees. My roasted chicken recipe, different from Blumenthal’s careful attention to detail, involves buying a nameless bird at Whole Foods, doing a t wo-­to-­t hree-­day brine in salt and brown sugar, stuffing butter underneath the chicken’s skin, seasoning with black pepper, oregano, thyme, and olive oil, and roasting at four hundred degrees for seventy-­five minutes. Israelis don’t eat roasted chicken from street stands or while standing up. Schnitzel is the Israeli version of breaded and fried chicken. Israeli schnitzel (my son’s preference), which replaces the traditional Austrian version of thinly

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pounded, breaded veal with chicken, signifies simplicity, frugality, and ease. Schnitzel, Flora Tsapovsky writes, “is widely available in Israeli supermarkets’ frozen-­foods sections; a 2017 survey by the Israeli Brandman Institute shows that 40 percent of the surveyed families rank chicken schnitzel as their No. 1 choice for a family meal.” “In a country known for Middle Eastern food,” David Sax writes, “schnitzel remains one of the lone culinary holdovers of Zionism’s Austro-­Hungarian roots” (“Taste of Home”). When I order schnitzel for my kids in Tel Aviv, the guy behind the counter slices open a pita, puts the fried and breaded chicken pieces in the pita, turns to me, and says, “What to add? Among the options one can choose from might be salad, humous, tahini, amba, potatoes, parsley, french fries, harif, pickled vegetables, and eggplant. “Nothing,” I say, which always causes an eyebrow to raise in confusion and slight anger. How could I not add to my sandwich? Who do you think you are? he seems to ask as if deeply insulted. The function of the sandwich—­whether it is sabich, schnitzel, or falafel—­is to add extras. This is the Israeli perception of a sandwich. Sandwich counters are always accompanied by an extras station. You don’t order a sandwich without extras. “It’s for the kids,” I add, as if that is a reason for rejecting this aspect of Israeli food culture. My explanation never satisfies the server as to why I am not adding any of his carefully prepared and sliced mise en place to the pita and chicken. No pita is complete—­falafel, sabich, shawarma, and even the seldom ordered schnitzel—­w ithout the add-­ons. “It’s for the kids” suggests that either we are foreigners or simply bad parents. “It’s for the kids” is the antithesis of parental artisan in Israel. How do you perceive food? As something your kids dictate? My kids don’t like humous? Or pickled vegetables? There must be something terribly wrong with my gastronomic parenting. At Jasmino’s on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, I ordered a kebab pita for my son, and the person behind the counter seemed to hesitate before handing it over because I didn’t want any humous or salad inside. It’s as if I’m being yelled at: “You obviously have no idea how to parent! Where is your parental artisan?” I ask that question of myself often as well. I may not only be a bad parent who yells “I SAID STOP!” when one child is hitting the other or throwing food on the floor, or dragging found sticks around the city for no reason, but I also may be a bad gastronomic parent. Being poetic about a concept such as parental artisan does not exonerate me from the actual eating habits my children sometimes convey, and particularly convey when abroad in a c ountry that they also are citizens of. Social media is my only tool for countering this disappointing reality. Shared photographs suggest I am a parental artisan, after all. I am confident, however, that one day my kids will embrace the add-­ons and not settle on the basic. I am confident that they will relearn the sandwich

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and make it central to their lives. One of the first things I did when I met my not-­yet wife, for instance, was to make her a sandwich on homemade bread and take it to her at the Detroit Metro Airport where she had a layover on the way to State College, Pennsylvania. For some reason, I thought I might impress her with a sandwich. I have few redeeming qualities. I trusted the sandwich would help me earn her affection. “You will be hungry,” I remember telling her when I said I would drive to the airport and give her the sandwich (I said it like a Jewish mom). I’m sure she thought I was as odd as the Israeli sandwich makers think of me when I say “It’s for the kids.” She returned to the airport fourteen years later on her way to a professional event, having just learned her father had terminal cancer earlier in the day, and texted me her memory of that sandwich. The sandwich anchored our relationship for her in a way no other food has. That sandwich has long symbolized my early attraction to her, my interest in being with her, and my ability to make bread (a craft aesthetic). At this low moment of her life, this recognition that her father would die from an inoperable cancer, she was, for just a second, comforted by the memory of a sandwich. That airport sandwich would eventually lead to our marriage and the creation of two kids who don’t give a shit about sandwiches.

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JUNK FOOD

While I regularly eat sandwiches, I hate junk food. I don’t eat candy. I don’t eat potato chips. I don’t snack during the day, and I don’t have a sweet tooth. Despite my aversion to these kinds of foods, I cannot avoid junk food at home, at work, and anywhere I go. Junk food is ubiquitous. I’m just as likely to encounter junk food at the grocery store as I a m at an arts and crafts store or at a pharmacy. When we are in airports, outdoor markets, grocery stores, or wherever else, the first thing my kids want is some sort of junk food that they have likely been deprived of but openly desire. “Junk food,” Laura Shapiro writes, “plain or fancy, stopped being a convenience a long time ago. Today it lives right in the house with us, greets us on the street, finds us at work, and raises our children for us.” Junk food is banal and ubiquitous. Junk food is blamed for obesity, depression, low fertility, children’s low test scores, and a host of other maladies. Companies, such as the Swiss-­based Givaudan, challenge junk food authenticity by producing artificial flavors that mimic cheese, lime, chili, and other items. By appropriating “natural” flavors though chemistry, flavor companies strive to tell stories, tap into consumer emotion, and create aura. “Studies have shown that when a flavor is marketed to consumers 178

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as a s pecific botanical type—­evocative of a p lace or a c ulture, or complete with some peculiar tale of discovery—­people are more likely to enjoy it. For instance, ‘Georgia peach’ is preferable to ‘peach,’ even if there is no real difference” (Khatchadourian). Junk food is an aggregation. It depends on certain “icities” (peaches come from Georgia) and on questions regarding representation. Junk food denies representation in favor of the feeling of something. This feels like a peach. This feels like lime. As one description of Givaudan’s work notes: “Much of their work was geared toward figuring out ways to maintain the tastiness of food that had been stripped of key ingredients. They experimented with molecules that make reduced-­fat foods taste creamy and full-­ bodied, or that fool the mouth into thinking that low-­sodium chicken soup tastes good” (Khatchadourian). Junk food’s proliferation emerges from science, daily interactions, lack of time to cook, desire, and childhood memory. “What makes junk food so dangerous,” Bee Wilson writes, “is not that it is unhealthy—­t hough it is. It’s that it is entwined in our minds with so many other memories that are good and true and pure” (First Bite 62). If your parents treated you to chocolates or if family picnics featured potato chips or if your mother snuck candy into the movie theater for you, then it may be difficult to separate junk food from other childhood or cultural activities that shaped our identities. Junk food’s technical image is, at times, embedded in childhood technical images. I can try, however, to impact those memories. Most of the people I work with at the University of Kentucky fear my mockery of their junk food consumption, as it is common for me to point out the health issues associated with the candy bar, Jimmy John’s, Sprite, or bag of Chick-­fi l-­A they may be enjoying over lunch. I hate Halloween because it brings candy into my house. Like many parents, I toss most of my kids’ Halloween candy in the trash while they sleep. Most critics of junk food, like myself, follow an ideology akin to Mark Bittman’s declaration that “the less junk food (especially sugar and the like) and the more fruits and veggies you eat, the better off you are” (A Bone to Pick 134). Foodies, like myself, rhetorically frame our hatred of junk food as being an interest in health or as a need to be healthy. We have convinced ourselves that the health food narrative is our authentic narrative, and it is the only narrative of value. Health food or being healthy, in other words, indicates an authentic food experience. Despite its ubiquity, this narrative declares, junk food is not authentic. “Eat all the junk food you want,” Michael Pollan writes, “as long as you cook it yourself” (Food Rules 85). Pollan’s rhetorical stance is that junk food, or any food, contains no inherently good or evil traits. Junk food, for him, is authentic if made at home and not industrial (a repetition of craft logic and

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some of Bourdain’s “origin” concerns). Whatever we attribute to junk food, we do so, I add, via technical images. My technical images of junk food, unfortunately, are strongly negative and mostly based on a layering of a junk food– neglected childhood experience. I rarely ate junk food as a child. Despite my own negativity, I ask if there is a rhetoric of junk food that goes beyond “bad” or “evil” topoi? That is, is there a form of communication, as Roland Barthes named food communication, expressed by junk food that neither embraces nor resists the health food narrative claimed as authentic? Critique is the obvious focal point of any food narrative or rhetoric. Any object of nondesire (politics, discrimination, or even food) evokes critique, as I have noted earlier with McDonald’s and related fast food restaurants. But I a m not interested in extending my dislike of junk food to a critique of junk food. I don’t want to write Junk Food Nation. Instead, I want to know: What does junk food say and what do we say about it that challenges or accommodates our sense of authenticity? What is the rhetorical framing of sugar and fat, for instance, and what does this framing’s circulation tell us about food and meaning? Sugar is one place to begin. “Sugar is killing us,” Jill Richardson writes in Salon. “Is sugar toxic?” Gary Taubes writes in ἀe New York Times. “The Axis of Evil: Fat, Sugar, and Salt,” declares a CBS News headline (Altschul). Killing. Toxic. Evil. Meanings scare. Sugar acts as a rhetorical focal point for critiques of junk food and the turn to health, including my own critiques and mockery. Too much sugar, we believe, is bad for us. Sugar is not authentic. Beyond the lure of sweetness sugar seduces with, we are told, we will find the cause of our health problems. Thus, if there is one villain in the typical rant against junk food, it is often sugar. “Sugar has become dietary enemy number one,” Ian Leslie writes. In ἀ e Case against Sugar, Gary Taubes writes that sugar has been traditionally described as a drug or as addictive. In such a framing, sugar is more than a food; it is a dependence. “Most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar, because we’ll never go long enough without sugar to find out” (34). Taubes elaborates on sugar’s addictive qualities: “Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the ‘reward center’—­technically, the nucleus accumbens—­as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Addiction researchers have come to believe that behaviors required for the survival of a species—­specifically, eating and sex—­are experienced as pleasurable in this part of the brain, and so we do them again and again” (40). Taubes is not alone in his analysis. One 2002 study found that rats undergoing sugar withdrawal showed signs of opioid dependence. “Are junk foods addictive?” A Smithsonian article asks (Ault). “Junk food turns rats into addicts,” a 2 009 Science News headline proclaims (Sanders). “It turns out,”

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a 2016 Scientific American article states, “that extremely sweet or fatty foods captivate the brain’s reward circuit in much the same way that cocaine and gambling do” (Jabr). Junk foods, therefore, are extremely dangerous. Headlines proclaim as such. If there is an allegorical junk food narrative, it must center on murder. Junk food is killing us. This tale of dependency, as provocative as it is, does not lack controversy or even doubt. Notably, in the rhetoric of junk food, sugar is pitted in a war with saturated fat. In this narrative twist, there are two actors in the rhetorical framing of junk food addiction: sugar and fat. Each blames the other for America’s poor health. In 2016, ἀ e New York Times reported that the sugar industry had hoodwinked the American public by paying off Harvard scientists to portray saturated fat as the culprit of heart disease and other ailments associated with junk food (O’Connor). As the Times reported, “For many decades, health officials encouraged Americans to reduce their fat intake, which led many people to consume low-­fat, high-­sugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the obesity crisis” (O’Connor). Sugar conveyed a coded message, it seems, that ἀ e New York Times decoded for the average consumer of junk food. Fat, the decoding claims, is not to blame. A sugar conspiracy is. The argument, with its binary pivot of guilt, does not alleviate concerns with junk food. Whether we blame sugar or we blame fat, most discussions of junk food point to the relationship between the brain and junk food’s chemical influence. Whoever is to blame, our brains are overpowered by the lure of this particular food. Addiction runs counter to authenticity because it is extra, not original. Michael Moss, in “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” promotes that cognitive narrative, noting the power of “sensory-­ specific satiety” as influence. “In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-­specific satiety also became a g uiding principle for the processed-­food industry. The biggest hits—­be they Coca-­Cola or Doritos—­ owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating” (Moss). Sensory-­specific satiety obfuscates. It masks. It veils. In a J ameson-­oriented pose, sensory-­specific satiety should, we might add, be cognitively mapped so that we can unveil this blockage and better navigate our tastes and desires. Along this line, Michael Pollan writes of our “inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt” (In Defense of Food 151). Even though he elsewhere declared we can craft our own junk foods at home, Pollan also suggests we cannot avoid sensory-­specific satiety or any other junk food allure. Inborn conveys an inescapable fate, or even an authenticity (it’s how we are). When Pollan gives his son sugar for the first time, for instance, he is

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taken aback at his son’s immediate reaction of pleasure, asking himself, “could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?” (Botany of Desire 18). Pollan’s narrative is a strong tale designed to answer a mysterious “why” of consumption. If sugar is the prototype of all desire, as he claims, why do I, then, not desire it? I do not desire sweetness. I desire falafel. I desire a good sandwich. Why don’t I need junk food and its promise of sweet and savory addiction? I pose this question not because I believe I am beyond the drug-­like features associated with sugar and some junk food in general, but because I identify in the rhetoric of junk food a larger issue regarding “junk” in rhetorical discourse and central to many of the questions of authenticity I have been tracing throughout this book. Which is more authentic, junk or consumption? Junk is the ambiguous enemy of consumption. Consumption, critique often tells us, is evil. But junk, we sometimes are told as well, is evil too. Junk, if inborn as Pollan claims, represents an authentic addictive experience. We expect addiction. We expect to be allured. Our desires have aura. The salty potato chip cannot be avoided because we authentically crave it and similar foods as authentic snacking experiences. Junk is natural. William Burroughs explained the Algebra of Need via the “junk” metaphor (only he meant heroin and not candy). In the Algebra of Need, “junk yields a basic formula of evil virus . . . the face of evil is always the face of total need.” Such a description should be familiar to Fredric Jameson or any critic of the McDonaldization of America. The evil virus that consumption encounters is typically franchised, repeated, and ubiquitous. At one point in Naked Lunch, Burroughs’s character Dr. Benway says, “The human body can live on sugar alone.” The narrative of junk food is “we need sugar and we need fat.” We live by need. Need is authentic. We need sweetness to overcome the oppressive taste of bitterness. The opposing narrative, like Burroughs’s concern, is the need for morality: it is immoral to need the wrong thing, such as candy and fat (or generic consumption). Morality, the narrative of the anti–junk food position, claims we need vegetables; we need fruit. Need, it seems, is a pivot point of junk food topoi. Need is moral or it is dependent on context. With narratives of need and opioids circulating throughout various critiques and writings, junk food could be categorized through another moral category familiar to scholarly writing, as class based. Thus, Kentucky writer Chris Offutt laments issues of class when he reflects on his upbringing in Eastern Kentucky, a part of the state recognized as low income and lower class. One food topos of Eastern Kentucky is junk food. “Within certain communities, it’s become popular to host ‘white trash parties’ where people are urged to bring Cheetos, pork rinds, Vienna sausages, Jell-­O with marshmallows, fried baloney, corndogs, RC cola, Slim Jims, Fritos, Twinkies, and cottage cheese

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with jelly. In short—­t he food I ate as a kid in the hills” (“Trash Food”). Elsewhere, Offutt draws attention to Marylou Whitney’s (who married into the Vanderbilt family) 1977 ἀ e Potato Chip Cookbook, published in my town of Lexington, Kentucky (“Moon Balls”). A meal of potato chips is a morality tale of class, a narrative of eating that pits the working class or families in the lower economic level of America (I mean, they eat potato chips for dinner!) against middle-­to-­upper-­class families who would never make dinner out of potato chips. I’m one of those middle-­class people. We don’t eat a meal made of potato chips. I never eat potato chips. My son, however, does. How authentic, then, is the anti–junk food narrative? I g rew up with Charles Chips, giant tin cans of potato chips delivered to our home on a subscription basis. My son won’t eat french fries, but he does eat truffle-­flavored sea salt potato chips regularly (purchased at a v ery non-­lower-­class Whole Foods). In the vocabulary of chips, conflation occurs. Chips covey their own meanings of value dependent on packaging, ingredients, and point of sale—­ elements that determine our need when shopping in a Whole Foods or a Tel Aviv Tiv Taam. Doritos are a t ype of junk food chip, even though Doritos, which my son loves more than truffle-­flavored sea salt potato chips, are not made from potatoes. Choosing Doritos as an essential junk food to study, food scientist Steven Witherly writes that “the addition of a familiar flavoring system in Doritos brings back or evokes past memories of all your favorite foods” (19). Doritos are a part of most American consumers’ childhood, though the name “Dorito” and the chip’s flavors were designed to mimic Mexican flavors, as Mark Schatzker writes. As Frito-­Lay executives initially considered the chip’s market potential, they wondered: “Doritos sounded Mexican, but they didn’t taste Mexican” (Schatzker 12). Junk food often relies on an “icity,” nostalgia, or affinity for survival, not exact replication or authentic reproduction. We don’t remember the calories or health issues associated with potato chips or candy; instead, we remember being a child and junk food being present during that time of our lives. As a 2018 Business Insider article reminds us, discontinued junk food brands still maintain consumer value because of their circulation throughout our consumption memories. On its lists of thirty-­one such lost brands, Business Insider includes Black Pepper Jack Doritos (Tyler). Doritos’ value is extensive. Foods that recapture our childhood might be ethnic, such as the Mexican stereotype Doritos were meant to evoke, or they might be similar to Offutt’s roll call of white trash party offerings. Those flavors simulate need. “Flavor is information,” Schatzker writes (106). What information does the Dorito convey? Witherly claims a number of reasons Doritos are addictive. Focusing on Nacho Cheese Doritos, Witherly draws attention to the fine cheese powder in

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the chip that activates sensory elements. “The blend of ingredients in Nacho Cheese is given one of the finest grinds in food processing: flour grinding, which creates a powder that fills every nook and cranny on the chip. This maximizes the amount that will contact saliva” (“The Nacho Dorito”). In addition to its physical interaction with the body, the Dorito depends on ethnic stereotypes. The Dorito was the American answer to the Mexican tortilla. Tortillas, a signifier of Mexican authenticity, entered the American gastronomic vocabulary partly via the Dorito. Doritos were originally Disneyland trash, a Business Insider headline reads (Frank). The park’s Casa de Fritos restaurant (a Frito-­Lay invention meant to simulate Mexican eating) rescued stale tortillas from the dumpster, seasoned them, and fried them. Need was created. The cheeseburger-­flavored Dorito is one of many discontinued flavors. Called Late Night All-­Nighter Cheeseburger, the chips were designed around the concept of late-­night snacking, a fairly classless activity that most people can appreciate as familiar or as nostalgic. Tacos at Midnight and Last Call Jalapeño Popper were two other flavors in Doritos’ Late Night series, likely targeted at teenagers or young adults of any class who would be drunk and/or stoned at midnight. When you are drunk or stoned, you feel like you need a snack. No moral judgment. Just eat a c hip. Wired magazine deconstructed the ingredients of the Late Night All-­Nighter Cheeseburger, discovering the presence of salt, onion powder, sugar, and “chemicals like 4-­hydroxy-­5-­methyl-­3(2H)-­ furanone, 2-­methyl-­3-­f uranthiol, and Bis(2-­methyl-­3-­f uryl) disulfide,” which simulate the flavor of a hamburger (Di Justo). Flavor conveys lifestyle: late-­night drinking, city life, guilt, weed, strangers confessing lost love, and the kind of regret that only comes the next day when one finally realizes what previously transpired. The Late Night Doritos series, so distinct from the average bag of Doritos one finds on a grocery or gas station shelf, is meant to evoke memories, the way many of the food examples I present do. Falafel provides me with memories; Doritos provide other consumers with memories. The Late Night Dorito is based on the feeling of being out late, two a.m., drunk, sad, lonely, and hungry. The Late Night Dorito is an admission to needing that feeling of despondency again. The Late Night Dorito is affective. It conveys feeling before taste. My son has none of these memories, but he wants Doritos every time we visit the Kroger grocery store around the corner from our house. I don’t have those memories, either. But I have other memories, such as the moral need to influence my kids. My most contemporary memory of junk food is a continuing one, based on our food shopping in Lexington, visiting ethnic food stores around the city, allowing my kids to pick out what they want from the snack aisle. Why do I think other countries’ junk food is better than American junk food? Do

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FIGURE 24 Durian cookies purchased on the Beijing Institute of Technology at Zhuhai campus

I succumb to the allure of junkfoodicity? I have no problem allowing my kids to grab snacks from the Asian market’s shelves—­chips flavored like shrimp or Haribo candy flavored like cola. I want them to eat the Israeli junk food snack Bamba (a peanut-­based, almost Cheetos-­like snack). In a Tel Aviv AM:PM grocery, I once bought them a b ag of zaatar-­flavored pretzels. If some kind of root vegetable is seasoned with sriracha, fried, salted, and sold in a bag, it seems ok with me. “The power of convenience foods to insinuate them-

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selves into some of our most precious memories—­of family, of happiness, of childhood—­should be a pressing concern for everyone who is serious about improving anyone’s diet,” Bee Wilson contends (First Bite 62). But will my children have Proustian memories of squid-­flavored potato chips when they are adults? I doubt it. When my kids went to a weeklong spring break camp at our campus’ Confucius Institute, my daughter came home with a giant bag of Chinese candy. I didn’t blink. When we were in China, I allowed my son to eat squid-­flavored potato chips and my daughter to snack on steak-­flavored Lays and ramen-­flavored chips. I, on the other hand, purchased durian-­flavored cookies and ice cream. We ate flavored, not real, food. Each night on the Beijing Institute of Technology at Zhuhai campus, where we lived, I allowed my kids to buy cheap, fifty cent ice creams from a local shop’s cooler. My son also bought candied chicken feet. Nothing among these selections were healthy or moral. All embraced sugar as their base. For some reason, artificial flavoring that matches our assumptions about a l ocal culture’s food preferences feels acceptable, while a bag of peanut M&Ms in the United States does not. My attitude reflects reverse xenophobic authenticity. Candy can be purchased almost everywhere we go and can be found within most representations—­t hose seen on TV, online, in magazines—­we consume. M&Ms. Snickers bars. Gummy bears. A shop outside of our apartment in Copenhagen sold bins and bins of candy. The motorcycle gang in Sons of Anarchy set up Scoops and Sweets, a candy store, to mask the immorality of arms dealing. When we return to the United States from Israel, we often bring back Israeli candy and junk food for friends, as if it is artisanal or even different from its American counterparts. Artisanal candy makers compete against artisanal chocolate makers to prove who is a better alternative to immoral conglomerate sugar-­intensive confectioners. An online search of “Food Network + candy” yields more than 1.8 million results, suggesting that the popular channel believes viewers need to watch shows about candy. Marc Summers’s popular Food Network show Unwrapped celebrates junk food, and in particular, candy—­season 2, episode 8 dealt with penny candy, season 14, episode 8 was about candy cravings, season 20, episode 9 was titled “Candy Counter,” and season 21, episode 11 discussed “wild and crazy candy.” None of these episodes, of course, explored the world of candy outside of America. A traditional critique of this lack of global representation would, no doubt, identify a cultural bias against non-­Western sugar-­based foods. We need to hear about the other, such a critique might argue. The hegemony of Western candyization, perhaps? Instead of that gesture, I wonder: Does Unwrapped merely convey a typical topos of American candy consumption, one where sugar represents

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FIGURE 25 Chinese junk food on a shelf in Shanghai

a more inborn flavor than rice, and where caramel is culturally needed more than shrimp flavor? Is Unwrapped’s obsession with candy communicating regional supremacy (West over East) or just a confirmation that food practices are banal, repetitive, based on pleasure over need, and based on the familiar (sugar—­as opposed to rice—­as a sweet treat)? We need what we already know. We need what is easily recognizable. This algebra stresses the known. The familiar, the topos, of need is not difficult to imagine. The familiar is our most

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readily available authentic experience. Burroughs may have considered junk food an algebra, but that mathematical equation, in the end, is fairly basic: recognition. A box of Japanese rice candy, like the Botan variety my kids sometimes choose from the shelves of a local Japanese store, sounds exotic because it is from Japan and based on rice, and via that feeling, it sounds better to me than its American counterparts (even Rice Krispies?). The Botan rice candy has citrus or lemon inside, but it is encased in rice paper that dissolves in one’s mouth. The Japanese Lotte Koala’s March cookies, often filled with jam or fruit, and which feature koalas on the box, is also a popular choice for my children. The peanut butter–tasting Chinese candy my kids brought home from their camp, and whose name I could not read, was a big hit for them. While they come from an imagined exotic elsewhere, these junk food items contain ingredients that match their American equivalents: Sugar. High-­fructose corn syrup. Oil. Artificial flavor. Fat plus sugar is what we supposedly need. Fat plus sugar is American and Chinese. How, then, do the junk products produced abroad differ from a Hershey’s, Nestle, or Mars product? Craveability and snackability are two widely used keywords for marketing junk food and serve as the basis of a foundational advertising rhetoric. We crave. We snack. We think we need. We critique. We think we need to critique. As an advertiser might ask, “Does the product fulfill these expectations?” Marketing identifies the additive element as the level of interest of craveability consumers bring to a p roduct before the product’s iteration or development. Burroughs understood that craving is an extension of need: an algebra, an addition. There is, however, a science to need. Marketing experts Howard Moskovitz, Jacqueline Beckley, and Julie Adams proposed “studying the algebra of the customer’s mind” in order to measure craveability (237). Emotion’s authenticity, thus, is mathematical. To understand the craveability of a hamburger, for example, the researchers divide desire into thirty-­six elements and form statistical conclusions based on how respondents list each element as a driving force in their need. “Fresh grilled,” “Chargrilled,” or “So juicy” serve as a few of the thirty-­six hamburger elements. The popularity of the elements supposedly shows marketing firms how to communicate to consumers the value of a given product. Use these terms and one can persuade or enhance desire. This is a rhetorical issue, not a moral one, and that, too, marks some of my serious mistakes when it comes to junk food and my children. Craveability explores the authenticity of need by focusing on the keywords that prompt yearning. In my own morality, I act as if such keywords can be easily manipulated or changed. They cannot. Need is descriptive.

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Definitions. Descriptions. Commonplaces. Recognition. These are rhetorical markers of need and desire. “Rice” may not be as persuasive to an eleven-­ year-­old and seven-­year-­old in my house as much as “sweet” (as in SweeTART) often is for them. But “Japanese” or “Israeli” may be the persuasive markers of my own algebra of need, my addictive desire to sway my children’s tastes to cultures I feel affinity for, cultures I may preform for my children as authentic, even if we are still talking about candy and not something else I want them to enjoy (falafel, sweet breads, fermented tofu, or tacos). If there is another element of my algebra of need far removed from sugar or fat, and one whose keywords are meaningful only to me, it might be salad.

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Every day for lunch, I eat a salad. The salad may include any number of ingredients. Lettuce. Arugula. Mustard greens. Tomato. Cucumber. Feta cheese. Maybe some nuts. Plantain chips. Hemp seeds. Bulgur. There may also be leftovers from dinner included. When we travel, we buy premade salads. A premade salad, like the candy that constantly irks me, suggests the opposite of the parental artisan ethos I try to promote and often fail at. Instead of promoting an authentic craft experience where locally foraged ingredients are assembled as a salad, the premade salad conjures the often-­hated imagery of industrial production, fast food, and homogenous culture. Anything premade runs counter to the imaginary and romantic ideals associated with the handmade. Premade salad, whether bought in the grocery store, corner store, 7-­Eleven, or airport suggests the salad’s construction occurred some time ago, assembled by underpaid workers wearing hairnets and plastic gloves, and packaged in a way to ensure shelf preservation over a p eriod of time (as opposed to the freshness most salads rhetorically convey through their ingredients, bright colors, and lack of packaging). Airports thrive on premade salads. So do fast food restaurants like McDonald’s or Wendy’s. While salad is not as popular 190

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as meat-­based dishes in America, there exist a number of American salad fast food chains, such as Saladworks and Sweetgreen. In Lexington, there are five locations of a local salad restaurant called Vinaigrette. The public considers salad healthy and handmade, even when its industrial and premade composition is grown on factory farms throughout Arizona and California, eventually packaged in clamshell containers and plastic bags, and often the root cause of food poisoning and E. coli outbreaks. Among the many groceries across America, one can buy a premade salad at Whole Foods or Kroger. Salad is reproducible, even when it is not craft. There is an aura to salad even as it barely differs from its repetitive counterparts. Buying a premade salad resembles, in some ways, buying a Subway sandwich. It is not difficult to make a salad at home. Why buy one from a restaurant or grocery store? Here is a quick salad recipe: • • • • • • •

Shred lettuce on plate Add arugula, kale, mustard greens or another green Add chopped cucumbers and tomatoes Add feta cheese Add cashews Season with salt and pepper Dress with olive oil and vinegar

Yotam Ottolenghi offers a recipe for “spiced chickpeas with fresh vegetables” that has a similar makeup to the recipe above, only he crisps seasoned chickpeas in a pan and adds them. Kenny Shopsin’s “Pita Feta Salad” “used to be called Pita Filia Salad.” As he explains, “It was a joke based on the sounds of the words, but after a while I decided it just wasn’t funny” (102). Still, his recipe involves little more than olives, feta cheese, some toasted pita bread, and lettuce. An Israeli salad, often eaten for breakfast as well as at other meals, typically consists of finely chopped tomatoes and cucumbers and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. I’ve never seen an Action Bronson salad recipe, but in the song “Ronnie Coleman,” he raps: “I’m eating salad, but I’m leaving off the croutons.” Salad is everyday. It doesn’t have to be premade. Given the ease of making a salad, Michael Ruhlman adds, “we have, in our constant quest for convenience, taken even the guesswork and choice out of composing this most simple of dishes, the salad” (Grocery 243). Which is more authentic, a salad made at home or one bought at Whole Foods? This, of course, is the same question asked of sandwiches. Many premade salads I find in American groceries contain cucumbers, a few tomatoes, some iceberg lettuce, croutons, and maybe shredded carrots. The American grocery store salad offers little variety or imagination. In the

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FIGURE 26 Premade Israeli salads on the grocery store shelf

Detroit Metro Airport, I once bought a $10 salad that consisted of a sliced cucumber, a few tomatoes, and some lettuce obviously moved from a prebought bag to the airport’s plastic container. Salad, in such a form, is convenient but not artisanal. Its authenticity is based on the notion of satisfying those who are “on the go” or simply “hungry” and away from home. “There’s one food,” the Washington Post’s Tamar Haspel writes, “that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.” That food, she tells us, is salad. Iceberg lettuce—­flavorless and mostly water—­is the worst thing to happen to salad. Yet Haspel swears, despite her disdain for salad, that she won’t give up her bacon and blue cheese dressing iceberg wedge. Despite her hatred for salad, she adores the worst and least flavorful lettuce of them all—­iceberg. Iceberg lettuce, as its name suggests, is 95% water. Kale, another common salad ingredient and one I often add to my salads, is often misunderstood, or its value has not yet been publicly learned. Bon Appetite’s Molly Wizenberg notes that “with its thick, unruly leaves, [kale] can easily seem intimidating, as though you’d have to wrestle it before it would agree to be cooked. People either love it, I find, or they fear it. The former approach it with a sort of evangelical awe, fingering the dark stems as though praying the rosary. The latter quickly scurry past, shrinking into their shopping carts.” Kale’s popularity does not depend on public knowledge of what

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it might offer to culinary enjoyment, but on simple reproduction in dishes. Its repetition leads to both pleasure and suspicion; neither, though, are based on its status as an authentic salad ingredient. Yotam Ottolenghi, introducing a recipe for braised kale with crispy shallots, notes that “if vegetables were strutting their stuff on the catwalk, kale would get the award for ‘exponential surge in popularity throughout recent years.’ Wherever you look, it’s being braised, blitzed, blanched, and seared. I have even seen a kale Popsicle” (Plenty More 121). “There’s too much kale now,” Leslie Knope says in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. “One place asked if I wanted kale in my milkshake” (“Save JJ’s”). Like the generic salad signifier often circulated by nutritionists or health food aficionados, kale’s stereotype is that of health, not flavor. For that reason, many eaters reject kale simply because they reject the stereotypical marker associated with it (being healthy does not resemble the authentic, satisfying experience of candy, fast food, and a giant piece of steak). One may reject kale without knowing its referent for taste; one imagines it tastes bad because it is supposed to be healthy or even a superfood. For some reason, health is not a dominant marker of food consumption for a significant part of the population who actively resists “health” as a persuasive trope. “I submit to you that our beloved kale salads are not ‘healthy’ and that we are confusing ourselves by believing that they are,” Michael Ruhlman writes in contrast to the belief in kale’s nutritional value (Grocery 100). Whatever Ruhlman’s concerns with kale are, he is not alone in his suspicion of the leafy green. “There are some restaurant dishes that I order because they sound better than everything else on the menu, and there are some I order because they sound worse,” Melissa Clark writes. “My reasoning goes like this: If a chef dares to offer something as unappealing as, say, a raw kale salad, chances are it’s fantastic.” Clark’s “adventure” with kale teaches her that kale is neither homogenous (there are many varieties) and that adding a flavorful Italian cheese like Pecorino Romano makes it taste good. Some cynics believe that the American health interest in kale can be attributed not to actual health benefits the leaf offers (its authentic contributions to health) but to publicist Oberon Sinclair, whose situation of writing was the fictive American Kale Association (which she made up) and who understood how to juxtapose kale into a massive technical image by promoting it via “music, fashion, design, food, art and literature” (Elliot). Combining these popular elements with images of kale made kale attractive to an audience focused on health. This combination altered the average consumer’s kaleicity, whose aggregation typically prejudices consumption. Sinclair, it seems, generated and circulated kale as Americans’ health savior, and with that health topos convinced millions to overcome their initial suspicions.

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“I can’t believe I ate all that kale for nothing” a New Yorker cartoon of a tombstone reads. Few understand kale more than the cartoon Bob’s Burgers, which repeatedly features positive representations of kale via the whimsical special burger of the day sketched on the restaurant’s blackboard. On the episode “Moody Foodie,” the burger of the day is If Looks Could Kale. On “Like Gene for Chocolate,” the chalkboard features the Citizen Kale Burger. And on “Tina and the Real Ghost,” Bob creates the Kales from the Crypt Burger. “If discovering a love of kale is the home cook’s version of finding religion,” Leah Koenig writes, “consider me one of the converted.” One finds religion in a Whole Foods or with kale because these items are topoi for pretentiousness, hippies, health fanatics, yoga, cost, or an imagined “religious” experience of discovering healthy living (I was lost with meat and junk food; now I’m found with kale). These items offer a “reawakening” or “rebirth” because eating and shopping as traditional habits—­steak, potatoes, chicken—­y ield to “new” discoveries such as kale. These items make such experiences authentic, much like religion does for spirituality. As Sweetgreen cofounder Nicolas Jammet told Bloomberg, “We weren’t selling just a lettuce leaf. We’re selling a set of values” (Elliot). Kale is an authentic health signifier of value, of life change, of positivity. For meat eaters, kale is a commonplace for everything wrong with eating (and not just salad). In many kale narratives, one doesn’t just discover kale; one is converted. Molly Wizenberg was converted from a bad Whole Foods experience tasting kale to one where it was cooked with salt and lemon. “I became a kale convert. Apparently, I not only like kale, but as it turns out, I’m also kind of crazy for the bitter leafy green.” Even Mark Bittman says he feels “virtuous” every time he eats it (80), as if kale cannot be banal and everyday. Virtuous salads, we tend to feel, should not be premade and available in the airport. Unless, maybe, they include kale. “I can talk myself into anything,” Bob’s Burgers character Gene proclaims in a n on sequitur moment. “I like salad now” (“Ain’t Miss Debatin’”). Gene persuades himself to be reborn, to eat salad (as if salad is an obstacle to overcome). He does not mention if there is kale in his salad. The salad mix owes its virtuous cultural status, Julie Guthman writes, to the late 1980s American interest in organic food as authentic food. California aesthetics, interests in healthy eating—­and overall counter culture attitudes displayed as an emerging lifestyle-­technical image circulated via popular culture and California’s specific cultural role in America—­led to the popularity of baby greens: spinach, kale, arugula, and other plant edibles assembled on a small plate or in a clamshell container. Salad, too, is a technical image, one often caught up in the counterculture movement and all it connotates. Salad, Julie Beck states, “evokes diets and weight-­consciousness in a way that no other

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entire category of food does.” Despite this positivity, salad’s meaning can also be conflated into a weak, feminine, or “pussy” technical image as well because health is sometimes translated as “weak” (meat signifies strength). Homer Simpson lectures his daughter Lisa: “You don’t win friends with salad!” The rest of the family borrows the phrase and breaks out in song (“Lisa the Vegetarian”). When Jerry orders “just a salad” on Seinfeld, his meat-­loving date asks him if “he’s one of those” and the waiter looks at him with disdain (“The Wink”). Salad, the episode suggests, is feminine and disgusting. How dare you order salad at a restaurant! It can be made at home. Order meat! “If we found out salads were bad for us,” Jim Gaffigan writes, “would anyone ever eat another salad?” (94). Is salad’s authenticity based solely on health claims or a well-­repeated trope that we have forced ourselves to believe is true? If any salad dominates America’s grocery stores, it is the salad mix. For those chasing healthy trends and who are interested in avoiding meat, the salad mix became a status symbol. “Introduced by restaurateurs in the early 1980s, salad mix also helped establish organic food as precious, a ‘niche’ product not necessarily representing a critique of industrial food” (Guthman 47). While counterculture in spirit, the salad mix, Guthman claims, is neither critique nor authentic experience, but it could be read as both. If I buy a generic salad mix, am I critiquing the massive, industrial meat industry that pumps methane gas into the atmosphere and floods riverbanks and fields with animal shit when container ponds break? Or am I just having lunch? “Organic salad mix was strongly coupled with—­indeed helped to animate—­t he figure of the ‘yuppie’” (52). Guthman’s counterculture yuppie is San Francisco–based—­ indicated by the organic movement Alice Waters launched in Berkeley—­as opposed to Brooklyn based (where the trope of the hipster/yuppie currently dominates in popular culture rhetoric). Raw, too, suggests health or “organic,” even when raw does not belong in either taxonomy. The kale in my salad, after all, is raw. As is the lettuce. When Julia Child hosted Alice Waters on her TV show Cooking with Master Chefs, the two made a fennel salad comprised of layered raw fennel and raw mushrooms. Waters’ choice of raw ingredients, no doubt, was meant to convey a specific cultural and health message. The yuppie or hipster who searches out unprocessed foods (e.g., raw fennel or a salad mix) does so in order to locate the most authentic, healthy food experience possible, one not tainted by industrialization or GMOs. Or even, it seems, cooking. Premade, though, is not necessarily inauthentic or bad. There are exceptions to this thinking, whether kale is the focus or not; there are regional cuisines and regional freshness that make pre-­made a preferable option to homemade. Being a tourist or traveler, for instance, means that premade offers a window into local eating habits—­a form of perception shaped around

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consumption—­t hat couldn’t be satisfied in one’s Airbnb rental or in a hotel room. Premade salad, therefore, can offer a localized authenticity. When traveling, I want to know: How does another country consume a variety of vegetables, fish, meats, mayonnaise, and other items in one aggregated space? For many cultures, salads are convenient and not gendered (as has been the case in American culture), or reduced to items served at picnics and barbecues (as potato and pasta salad are in American culture). The premade salad’s convenience diminishes the anxiety “being busy” prompts when one needs to prepare dinner and resorts to frozen garlic bread. Prepackaged salads are also a window into a given culture. One of the best ways to learn about a culture is to go to the grocery store. What foods are available for takeout? What do people like to eat that is easy to prepare? What is familiar? What is not? Salad can mean a dish with green leaves of some sort (the object of Haspel’s scorn; the public hatred or love of kale), but it also means any combination of just about any fruit, grain, and vegetable, or, as with the Danish salad skinke, meat. Salad aggregates. Salad combines. Salad juxtaposes. There is no real salad aura; only its perception. Salad creates its own authenticity. In Tel Aviv, we enjoy the premade salads of humous, eggplant, tahini, red cabbage, tuna, salmon, and, of course, eggs. Every supermarket stocks such salads, which are consumed so regularly that they seldom spoil before sale. A simple dinner can consist of these salads and pita bread. Indeed, there is no real reason to make humous at home in Israel when every supermarket has freshly made humous on the shelf. The culture eats too much for it to go bad or for it to be oversaturated with preservatives, as the American Sabra version or even the Whole Foods version I sometimes buy often is. In Copenhagen, we buy premade potato salad, mackerel salad, lox salad, chicken salad, tuna salad, and, once, a mistaken purchase of ham salad. It turns out, skinke means “ham” in Danish. I only discovered that point a day later, when I noticed the small tub of salad in the refrigerator and decided to Google skinke before eating it. Many Danish salads are fish mixed with mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, the condiment that represents both artisanal culture and bland Americana, encompasses a great deal of Danish salad cuisine. Most salads or sandwiches are made with mayonnaise. There is no mustard option; at least there is no mustard option in my stereotype of Danish cuisine experienced over a three-­ week period. Mayonnaise is dominant in my situation of writing in Denmark. Salads also help teach a new and foreign language, even if you still cannot pronounce the words. The image below demonstrates my ability to learn the word potato in Danish, even if I cannot pronounce it. In fact, I cannot pronounce most of the dozen or two dozen Danish words I now recognize when I see them on packaging, street signs, or websites. I know I cannot pronounce

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FIGURE 27 Danish potato salad

the words because when I s ay a s treet name or food item to someone who does speak Danish, they look at me as if I can’t even speak English. Recognition does not demonstrate fluency or authentic cultural knowledge, but it does provide access. When we make a foreign trip pedagogical, we ask those who accompany us—­students we lead, children who accompany us, partners—­to achieve access over fluency. My children watching TV in Hebrew or Danish never learn the language, but they do gain some level of access to the cul-

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ture via the images they see or the events taking place on the screen. They subtly build an “icity” in their minds of where they are and what they eat. A commercial for prepared salad, it seems, would allow them a g reater understanding of cultural food habits, such as why mayonnaise is important or why eggplant tastes good. Access suggests some semblance of understanding, but not the mirage of complete understanding. Barthes’ Empire of Signs, for instance, offers its own sense of access, performing the “icity” of semblance when studying another culture’s stereotypes. Barthes never claims that his Japan is the real, authentic Japan. It is merely the Japan he can easily access via stereotypes, that he can write. Barthes never addresses salad in Japan, but he does refer to its cultural counterpart, soup, whose “soybean dust or minced green beans” he calls an “elixir” and a “profound vitality” (14). I might say the same about an Israeli premade eggplant or red cabbage in mayonnaise salad. I think of the prepackaged salad—­such as this potato salad—­as one such stereotype. Premade salad offers semblance (not every member of the culture buys premade salads; every Dane cannot enjoy skinke as I imagine them doing so). While I recognize potato salad as an American marker of picnics, the Fourth of July, or lunch in general, I gain greater access to some semblance of Danishicity via potato salad as well. I don’t care how many Danes actually eat potato salad or this particular brand of potato salad. I c are only about semblance as access. Semblance is an assumption based on aggregated stereotypes within a specific technical image. Semblance is a type of cognitive map that does not profess truth or representation. Semblance allows me to believe I am engaging with a c ulture. Semblance allows me to believe my children are having an authentic experience in another country. Semblance, the notion of some degree of affinity or like representation, is my situation of writing. Semblance is mythical; it does not demand historicity (Jameson’s “always historicize”) nor accuracy (what is an authentic Danish potato salad? How does it differ from its American counterpart? Does its difference matter?). A cooking show contest such as Chopped, Top Chef, or Food Network Star propagates the semblance of actual cooking (as if we are all left with a basket of peppers, apricots, duck neck, and corn on the cob on a nightly basis and must figure out what to prepare) or time needed for food preparation (on TV, every meal is now a race). Semblance is the focal point of believing in representation as authenticity. TV may be the greatest semblance machine we know. During a monthlong stay in Zhuhai, China, where my wife and I taught at the Beijing Institute of Technology at Zhuhai, my children spent days playing with the television in our apartment, even though it had no service to channels or cable. Despite being unable to watch anything, my kids still fought over the remote control and

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spent hours playing with the TV menu (all in Mandarin) as well as typing out insulting statements to each other in the search function (“Vered you are stupid” or “Judah smells”). An unconnected television allowed them a semblance of entertainment within Chinese culture the way a shopping mall–based Chinese restaurant in America promoting General Tso’s chicken or lo mein might allow us a semblance of Chinese culture and cuisine. They did not learn any Mandarin playing with the TV. But I could pretend that they did. Marshall McLuhan focused on television’s ability to foster involvement and the semblance of engagement. His reading of the 1960s technology of television (broken imagery across a screen reassembled by the viewer’s mind) led to his conclusion that TV is a cool medium as opposed to print (a hot medium requiring minimal involvement because the text is static and requires no filling in). Cool is semblance. It is not an exact representation. The reader or viewer engages with the lack of exactness and fills in the needed details. Cool generates involvement. “If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-­programming in education” (Understanding Media 289). Participation does not mean actual, authentic experience where the body interacts with another body (I am not the image on the screen; I learn Danish by watching TV), but the semblance of such a moment. I relate to this point. “How could [the TV image] possibly pervade our lives any more than it does?” McLuhan asks (289). In my family, it appears it cannot. Within a cultural experience few children their age have the opportunity to explore, they become immersed in TV programming from their home country as a semblance of the authentic tourist experience abroad. In Copenhagen, my son discovered Doctor Who. My daughter discovered Full House. Neither, of course, are Danish TV shows. Netflix provided a magnet to their morning attention; every morning, each raced out of the bedroom as fast as they could to be first at the television. These are shows that were available on our Netflix account in Lexington, but in Copenhagen, where TV serves as a reminder of the familiar and comforting in a city where your parents make you walk twenty minutes to try out a Danish craft beer in a brewery that does not prevent kids from entering, TV is also a reminder that at least part of the day will belong to them and not their father. TV creates a s emblance of being back home. TV creates a semblance of one’s own culture when abroad. TV prepackages, like a salad, experiences in general, but when traveling in another country, it provides my children with a focused package of entertainment. The salad provides me with a focused package of what another culture might like to eat. Walking and wandering feel aimless to my children. TV feels focused. TV removes the exotic. TV eliminates tourism by providing

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another level of semblance. “Pervaded by the mosaic TV image, the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy” (Understanding Media 28). McLuhan suggests TV as not an antilearning experience, but as one offering an alternative sense of the world, another type of literacy practice such as semblance. For my children, this is not so much a conscious effort to avoid Danish or Israeli culture, but to have an experience as neatly packaged as I prefer my laxasalat when I am in Fotex or Irma, two Danish groceries. TV is the semblance of comfort. While I never found frozen garlic bread in either Fotex or Irma, I did find the semblance or packaging of Danish food culture. Hygge, the Danish concept of coziness or comfort, is absent from most grocery stores. Danish groceries do not feel cozy. Hygge, in one’s home, might be represented by lit candles, blankets, pillows, a rug, a French press, wool socks, and other related items that promote comfort. Hygge is a network of comfortable items connected within a specific space: living room, bedroom, café, taproom, lodge. “Feeding our senses with warmth, good food, touch, fragrance, or music adds to the ceremonial pleasure of hygge,” Louisa Thomsen Brits writes (178). “As a c austic verb,” Norman Berdichevsky notes, “(hygge om nogen) it relates to doing what it takes to make someone else feel confident, protected, safe and comfortable” (87). Israeli culture keeps you on edge (always the threat of war). Danish culture embraces hygge (breweries have lit candles on their tables in the taproom). Meik Wiking’s ἀ e Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living does not contain any references to grocery stores as exemplary of hygge or how groceries might make customers feel safe and comfortable. Whole Foods, on the other hand, operates on the premise that grocery shopping should be a cozy experience, from varied product availability to full bars, pizzerias, bakeries, housemade sushi, and at times, chocolate fountains. One is supposed to feel comfortable in a Whole Foods, as opposed to how one might feel in a Save A Lot or Safeway, where one might be uncomfortably surrounded by a drab white interior and stacks of canned goods. The Fotex on Vesterbrogade near our apartment in Copenhagen conveyed the opposite of hygge: Its space was split between groceries on the first floor and clothes and electronics on the second floor. Its layout was uninviting, its beer section populated only by cheap local beers, its bakery set apart from the rest of the store and unimpressive, its sushi stand empty each time we shopped, the sad escalator between the two floors cold and mechanical. Cashiers barely speak, and no one bags your groceries. If you don’t bring your own bag, you have to buy a plastic one. While expressing desire for the Whole Foods experience can be critiqued as privileged or bougie, whatever class position such a statement might project, it does reflect a desire for the semblance of hygge. Even if shopping is not a com-

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fortable experience, I want the semblance of that experience. Whole Foods may not be influenced by hygge, but it generates a semblance of the concept. The exterior and interior of a given Whole Foods are often warm and inviting. Sample stations are strategically placed throughout the store. Food is prepared on-­site. Displays are positioned in a w ay that entices consumption but also pleasure. Employees ask you how you are when you pass through the aisles. I don’t think there could ever be an Israeli version of hygge. Falafel comforts me, sabich comforts me, humous comforts me, but are these foods indicative of hygge? Can Israelis, known for their warm interior but rugged exterior, ever convey a sense of comfort when yelling at you to get on the bus already or brusquely asking what kind of toppings you want on your sandwich? An Israeli cashier, after all, barely recognizes you exist or are even buying something. If smoking were allowed in grocery stores, the cashiers would smoke. One might argue that Christiania, the hippie enclave within Copenhagen, signifies hygge. Christiania offers a packaged version of an idyllic past, a sense of 1960s-­icity from the perspective of its most blatant and nonhistorical signifiers: peace, love, and happiness. My own experiences in the Israeli kibbutz—­having lived on Yagur, Naan, and Masada, and having considered membership at Gezer and Maayn Zvi—­a lert me to many of the faults of socialist/communal living, the very living Christiana displays as an authentic alternative to modern capitalism. Communal living, for many, is a sign of coziness and comfort, of being taken care of, of shedding certain responsibilities, of the pleasure of equality, of togetherness, of the authentic lifestyle. Christiania, as its narrative tells it, responded to the pressures of late 1960s consumer culture by adapting the American hippie attitude of tuning out, and by building a communal culture around, among other things, marijuana. The residents of Christiania trace their origins to an abandoned Danish military base that they took over and made their own. In conflict with governmental laws, the Danish hippies opted to become squatters, to the point that the government, in its own projection of hygge, opted not to evict them in exchange for the hippies’ ability to provide for themselves. Hygge is abundant in the communal compound: No homeownership. No profits from locally established businesses. No restrictions regarding the sale and smoking of weed. No neglect of those in need. These form the basic tenets of the Christiania community and the generic icity of socialism. That ethos declares an authentic communal experience, as opposed to those that have failed or faded from their original intent, such as the French commune or the Israeli kibbutz. This type of ethos demands emphasizing the group over the individual. The group, in digital culture, is signified by Yelp and its counterparts: aggregated groupthink. In day-­to-­day living, the group signifies equality and fair-

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ness as opposed to individual selfishness. For this reason, many Americans in higher education idealize Scandinavian practices—­embedded in the technical image of free education for all—­as the most humane or beneficial to general publics. Humanities principles, often disguised as “social justice” or critical examinations, are supposedly the path to championing equality for the group. Capitalism, scholarly writing often demands, must yield to the communal and socialist. Capitalism corrupts to advance the individual; socialism benefits the group. In Copenhagen, we experienced communal eating at the Absalon community dinner, which is held each night in a renovated church on Sønder Boulevard. The dinner was started by the founder of Flying Tiger—­t he Danish franchise oddity shop that resembles a mix of Target and Trader Joe’s aesthetics and consumer choice. “As retail experiences go,” Molly Young writes, Flying Tiger “is like walking into a junk drawer that was blown up to theme-­park scale.” Flying Tiger challenges the authentic shopping experience by making pleasure or comfort (hygge) the heart of consumption. It packages the Danish experience. Young describes the experience of shopping at Flying Tiger accordingly: “You can buy a sack of glitter, for example. Or a Panama hat. Or a crochet hook. You can buy a fridge magnet shaped like a zebra’s butt, or a pig’s butt, or a tiger’s butt. You can buy a collapsible tunnel to crawl through, if that’s your thing. You can buy a ‘carrot sharpener.’ You can buy a ‘desk pot’ shaped like a hippo. What is a ‘desk pot,’ you ask? Good question. It’s either a uniquely Scandinavian concept or a novel way of saying ‘thingy’” (Young). Communal eating at Absalon conveys its own ethos of city togetherness (as hygge), where, congregated around long tables, one shares large omelets or bean-­based salads with bread and roasted cabbage. For fifty kroner, one eats, but one also gets to know someone else. If Yelp provides aggregation of dining choice via the semblance of expertise where one learns a n ew place to eat, a shared, communal meal provides the semblance of knowing and learning about who you are eating with. Community is semblance at the dinner since you will likely never see these people again. Meze and tapas, as well, enforce the idea of communal eating, but Absalon evokes more the tradition of group eating, where sitting together triumphs over all other aspects of dining as the authentic way to make food meaningful and original (a Bourdain-­inspired proclamation: this is how people once ate around a fire). That this communal event is funded by the mass, commercialized sale of trinkets and stylish kitchenware should not be lost, though, on any focus that heralds the communal over the capitalist. Absalon’s dinners are the product of capital financing. Communal eating—­we sit together and not alone. Communal writing—­ popular culture and theoretical works enter into my writing without representation. Communal mapping—­I move along these items and markers to better

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understand the situation of authenticity in my scholarly and personal lives. My experiences are both artisanal (I craft them) and prepackaged (they are aggregations). These food experiences I describe are postures, poses, many not unlike the image presented earlier of my daughter, in Revolution Brewing, holding up an iPhone, prompting a number of questions regarding why she is holding this iPhone in a craft beer taproom. Does she understand media’s shaping of experience and expression, or did I just capture her holding the phone up? Which is the authentic posture? All along, I have been posing the overall idea of authenticity as nothing more than a posture, a pose, a presentation of signifiers or stereotypes that are later aggregated into meaning. And with that final comment, I c onclude with a s mall narrative about the non-­ food, non-­travel-­based yoga posture.

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Bikram yoga teaches twenty-­six postures. Twenty-­six postures are taught the same way at every class one attends, whether that class is held in a studio in Lexington, Kentucky, or in a studio in Las Vegas, Nevada. Bikram yoga, like a Jewish Shabbat service, is the same no matter where you are located. This repetition makes no claim for uniqueness. The opposite, in fact, is true. Each yoga class must always be the same. These postures are repeated the same way each class, regardless of who is teaching or who is attending the class. The dialogue—­what the teacher says during the ninety-­minute yoga session—­is repeated every session as well. A B ikram session is built on repeated commonplaces, familiar expressions and instructions that are meant to anchor the experience of ninety minutes as the very same experience each time, in any given Bikram studio, for every participant. The authentic Bikram experience is one of repetition, not of aura. Bikram yoga is rhetorical. Bikram Choudhury founded the yoga movement in the early 1970s. It is best known for the twenty-­six positions Bikram isolated as essential and for the hot studios where one does the yoga. There are many types of yoga, but Bikram is the one that stresses being in a hot, sweaty room meant to repli204

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cate the sweltering Indian summers. After his arrival in the United States, Bikram’s style of yoga gained popularity first among celebrities who deemed it authentic (it came from India) and later among people interested in various types of fitness (it will cure your back pain). Bikram, and its teacher training sessions, are designed as communal experiences: the group preferred over the individual. As one former student stated about her training in Bikram, “It really felt like we were all a big family that all wanted the world to be a better place” (Larson). Yet, Bikram is based on an individual’s personality, a cultlike leader who equated a form of exercise with his name. In 2012, in Lexington, Kentucky, I b egan taking Bikram classes to ease chronic back pain. Next door to the Lexington studio where I w as a member was a Mexican sandwich restaurant whose aromas occasionally presented themselves in the studio during the summer. I only ate at that sandwich shop once, after a particularly grueling yoga class. I stood in the restaurant waiting for my takeout, dripping sweat on the restaurant’s floor. Once at a local sandwich shop is two or three times fewer than the number of times I’ve eaten at a Subway. The Mexican sandwich shop has since been replaced by a bakery whose aromas never make it into the studio. I have yet to eat there. For most of this book, I have written about food and traveling. In this last chapter, I shift to a situation of writing that is not about food and is mostly about posturing, or remaining fairly much in an assumed place while becoming exhausted. In my case, Bikram yoga settled my own algebra of need that focuses on exercise, weight control (one sweats away five pounds each session), and a desire to be flexible. In addition to the yoga movement he founded, Bikram Choudhury is also known for enjoying fast food. One instructor in our Lexington studio tells an anecdote about being asked by Choudhury to lead his 5:30 p.m. class so that he could go to In-­N-­Out. When Joshua Kurlantzick attended a Bikram session with Choudhury, he observed of the yoga teacher, “Halfway through class, he abruptly stops and takes a long swig of Coke.” Like In-­N-­Out and Coca-­Cola, Bikram franchises his brand of yoga throughout the country, charging a franchise fee for studios, like the one I attend, to use his brand name and set dialogue. “Just as McDonald’s franchises its branches, Bikram wants to franchise his style of yoga to the more than 900 studios around the world that were started by his former students. To this end, he has trademarked phrases such as ‘Bikram Yoga,’ ‘Bikram’s Basic Yoga System,’ and so forth. And he claims copyright not only for his books and videos (where copyright is anyway automatic), but also for his ‘dialogue’—­i.e., what is in fact the teacher’s monologue in a Bikram class—­and for the 26-­pose sequence itself” (“The Litigious Yogi”). I’m fifty years old. I drink too much beer, I eat too much bread, and I eat

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too much cheese. I never drink Coke. I gain weight at the age of fifty in ways I did not at fifteen. And I’m short. My lack of meaningful height doesn’t help with weight distribution, as I may fill out horizontally quicker than taller men. Like many people across the country, I exercise. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, but I have been working out since I was fifteen. At that time, my dad bought me a S ears bench and weight set and put it on the screened-­in back porch of our Miami home. The weights were plastic encased over cement. When the weights cracked, the cement broke out. Such weights were not the kind of weights real athletes used in real gyms. They lacked authenticity. Still, it mattered little to me at fifteen. I’m no longer fifteen. I’m a fifty-­year-­old man with beer issues. I’m also not athletic. I still go to the gym five days a week, and I still do my three-­day workout routine. Day one: biceps and triceps; day two: back and chest; day three: cardio and shoulders. Sit ups every day. The weights in my gym are not made of cement encased in plastic; they are professional in appearance. Although I am not one of them, there are members of my gym who look as if they could be professional body builders. In addition to weight lifting and gym cardio, I also try to do Bikram yoga two days a week. The easiest explanation I could offer as I make this observation would be to draw out parallels with the practice of Bikram and being a university professor. In that cognitive mapping gesture, I might locate an allegorical explanation for doing Bikram yoga two days a week that reflects on the three-­day or two-­day teaching weeks many of us in academia maintain. This explanation might identify the supposed stress of being a university professor or the need to escape from the triviality of academia a few times a week by doing yoga. As I have been noting throughout this book, these types of gestures do little for the overall experience I want to write about and share. But they provide a set of writing postures to work around and within. At her Montessori school, my daughter used to do yoga once a week after school. The school offers the program as one option among many after-­school activities. My daughter knows some poses, such as cobra pose and tree pose, which also are poses found among the standard twenty-­six Bikram postures. My daughter demonstrates these poses to me in the evening after we have eaten dinner. When my daughter does yoga, the basement room in her school is air-­conditioned. At the Bikram studio in Lexington that I attend two days a week, the temperature in the room is 105 degrees, and the humidity is around 50 percent. There are heaters in the corners of the studio. There is a humidifier in the middle of the room that, when ice water is dumped into it, pushes extreme humidity throughout the studio. The room is hot. One principal concept of Bikram yoga that sets it apart from other variations of yoga is the heat. The heat exhausts. In 2011, actor Jason Bateman told David Letterman that as

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a child, his father would take him and his sister to do Bikram. In a photograph he shares during his appearance on Letterman, Bateman shows himself as a child doing bow pose with Bikram Choudhury (“Jason Bateman Tells”). We have never taken our children to Bikram yoga despite my wife’s desire to do so. While they may be able to sit through a meal at Shopsin’s or Nan Zhou with minimal issues, I doubt that they could sustain 90 minutes in a 105-­degree room. My final writerly posture in this book about authenticity is a gesture that moves from the familiar topics of travel and eating with my kids to the solitary, and somewhat out-­of-­place, experience of Bikram yoga in a communal room with others performing the same repetitive postures I do. I am not sure how many academics do Bikram yoga beyond my wife, me, and a few people we are friends with on Facebook. Often, I pretend to encourage my colleagues to join me. I say “pretend” because I really don’t care if they join me twice a week in a hot, sweaty studio where I take my shirt off and drip all over a mat. The president of my university does yoga in the same studio as I do on Sunday mornings, but even though I have met him before and introduced myself to him again at the studio, he never says hello or recognizes me. Is Bikram yoga, like food or one’s children, too inconsequential for scholarly writing? Or is it merely too time-­consuming for academics; beyond the ninety-­minute session, one must spend at least a half an hour getting to the studio, showering, and then getting to one’s next destination. As an academic who does Bikram yoga, I feel more alone than collaborative, less among a j uxtaposition of various groups, as I note regarding Wayne Booth’s work earlier in this book, and more like an isolated person in a h ot, sweaty room. If this overall exploration of authenticity has involved the group dynamic of family and discipline, yoga reinforces for me the more likely authentic reality of solitude. In this final mapping, the gesture I make toward Bikram is another version of writerly exhaustion. How is it, I ask, that mere stretching in a 105-­degree room for 90 minutes is exhausting? By exhausting, I mean that often during a session, people have to sit down; they get so tired from stretching. Beginners are always told to “stay in the room” when they inevitably feel that exhaustion. By exhausting, I m ean breathing hard as you are told repeatedly to take “little sips of air” through your nose. By exhausting, I also mean the repetitive dialogue one hears while breathing hard and while stretching. After five years, this dialogue exhausts me in its repetition: “Pulling is the object of stretching.” “Elbows each other.” “Like a Japanese ham sandwich.” “L as in Linda.” “Legs twist like ropes.” With Bikram yoga, it is not as if the challenge increases or decreases each time one moves through the twenty-­six postures. In that sense, Bikram is unlike traditional exercise routines that progressively

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build endurance or feats of strength as minute amounts of weight or distance are added. With Bikram yoga, the ninety minutes are always the same. That feeling of sameness, too, can exhaust. When Esak Garcia (a major Bikram figure and former Choudhury protégé) taught a class at the Lexington studio I attend, bodies sat down on their mats more frequently than usual. People became exceptionally exhausted. At one point, I may have seen ten people sitting or lying down (and not doing the postures). And while I did not sit down (I would have felt embarrassed to do so), I was completely exhausted by the end of his class. I said to Garcia afterward: “I don’t get it. You did the same thing every other instructor does. Why was it even more exhausting today?” He just gave me a weird look. Hell-­Bent is Benjamin Lorr’s narrative of training to be a Bikram instructor and eventually joining Garcia’s back-­bending Jedi Fight Club. Lorr describes the initial breathing posture that begins every class by noting, “I was already sweating, and class hadn’t begun” (16). Many times before class begins, I’m already sweating, too. Pranayama Standing Deep Breathing, where one breathes deeply and lifts one’s elbows up while exhaling, is the first of the twenty-­six postures. “Good for the lungs; good for the respiratory system.” It does not entail much exertion. “Nose and throat are only the passageways.” There is minimal movement, and yet, before this first posture ends, I am usually already drenched in sweat. My yoga mat—­a plastic mat that we cover with a towel (because of how much we will sweat, and we don’t want to slip on our own sweat)—­smells incredibly bad. So do my clothes. I’m not sure if anybody in the studio notices how badly my mat and clothes smell. The carpet smells bad as well. During the floor series of Bikram, there is plenty of opportunity to smell the carpet and one’s own mat; we are facedown for several postures and savasana rests. My nose sits in the stench of my towel as sweat drips down the bridge and around my mouth. In the first year and a half I did Bikram yoga, I went through three pairs of underwear and two shorts. And the clothes I currently use should probably be thrown out as well. I cannot get the smell out of the clothes. Eventually, I throw them out. No matter how often I wash my clothes—­with or without vinegar, with or without the fancy enzyme thing my wife bought, with or without any extra-­fragrant item or soap we have purchased—­t he smell remains. It does not change. Homogeneity. Familiarity. Odor as another trope of sameness. Saying “I’m sweaty when I do Bikram” does little to describe the sweating that occurs in ninety minutes in a 105-­degree studio while you are stretching. When we are in postures, I can hear the patter of sweat drops on mats resonate throughout the otherwise silent studio, as if it is raining in the room. While lying facedown in a twenty-­second savasana, I glance at my back in the

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mirror and see thousands of beads of sweat piled up along the edges of my skin. Sometimes, the bottoms of my feet are so sweaty that I slip in standing positions like triangle. I take three towels with me to each class. One for the mat, one to dry off the sweat that never stops pouring into my eyes for ninety minutes, and one to put on the car seat for the ride home so that I do not soak my car’s seat with my awful odors. These towels can never be used again for washing. They are now yoga towels. They also smell bad. Sometimes in a ninety-­minute session, I look around (which you are not supposed to do since one must only concentrate and focus on oneself), and I see people sitting down. Lying down. Going out the door. And occasionally, picking up their mats and leaving. I also see people drinking furiously from water bottles. Some of my fellow yoga practitioners bring three bottles of water to each class. One person was asked to stop chugging so much water during the class; he typically would throw it right up. Another person drinks from an Igloo thermos that must hold more than sixty-­four ounces of water. Stretching for 90 minutes in a 105-­degree room exhausts people to the point of giving up, no matter how much water they drink. Exhaustion often yields to an uncomfortable surrender. I can’t take this anymore. I’m finished. Clancy Martin describes the rigor of camel pose accordingly: “On your knees, hands on your hips, bend back until you grab your heels with your hands, then thrust your chest into the air. Before the session is over, 50 or so students have rolled up their mats and left, overwhelmed. I hear what sounds like the chop-­chop-­ chopping of helicopter blades and realize it’s my own heartbeat. The ceiling spins. I roll over, open my eyes, and watch the ballet of it in the mirrors.” In the army, if I learned anything, it was: your mind gives up before your body wants to. Don’t allow your mind to dictate to your body. I also learned to drink an entire canteen of water in one shot. In Bikram, I h ave never left the room. I have never yielded to my mind’s weakness in yoga. During Esak Garcia’s special class, I convinced myself that I had to urinate and use the bathroom. But I did not. I remained in the studio. Stretching teaches me not to give up. Stretching teaches me a semblance of success; I am not flexible nor am I very successful at yoga, but I continue on with each class as if I am. I know which postures take the most air out of me: triangle, camel, standing bow, and bow. I mentally prepare myself for those moments as they approach in the sequence, but I end up feeling the same each time I complete each posture: exhausted. All of this may sound as if I am a Bikram expert after five years of practice or as if I am really flexible because of all the sessions practicing Bikram. All of this narrative likely makes me out to be an authentic Bikram practitioner able to bring along the rest of academia into this specific practice, to propose the salvation of stretching, the wonder of sweating, the beauty of exhaustion.

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The opposite is true. After five years, I cannot do one posture correctly. My best posture, toe stand, earns me a compliment here and there, but I struggle more with the right leg than the left, typically falling out of the posture before it concludes. I cannot get my arms to cross during eagle. Full locust has me laying on my belly rather than lifting up in the air. In standing head to toe, my outstretched leg is not “L like Linda.” It is more like a bent coat hanger shaking madly. Sometimes, when stretching, my legs shake madly. In this shaky leg, do I discover craft as well? Most authentic experiences I have traced in this book have relied on the topos of craft for their power or ability to persuade, whether or not such persuasion results in the authentic. Lorr, responding to the question of what kind of yoga Bikram might be and how it might fit within commonplace, popular yoga assumptions of “nonattachment,” “Himalayan caves,” and “righteous breathing”—­commonplaces that typically anchor discussions of yoga in a r eader’s or listener’s mind—­ writes, “An abstract noun like craft has no single pure meaning.” He adds, “Figuring out the most authentic form of craft wouldn’t let you know where the most aesthetically pleasing crafts come from, and it wouldn’t tell you which crafting discipline would be the most personally fulfilling” (49). The Bikram dialogue, I offer, is part of this personally fulfilling craft moment. Its repetition does offer an aesthetically pleasing moment of expression. Repetition, after all, comforts, even if it denies uniqueness or the existence of aura. “Lock your leg. Lock your leg. If your leg is not locked, posture has not started yet.” Even if repeated, the phrase’s meanings might differ as craft phrasings do: how spoken, how received, how interpreted, how realized. The phrase, in its repetition, does not need to claim authenticity (i.e., this is the only way to practice yoga) nor legitimacy (i.e., it is like a mantra that must be spoken for effect) for itself. The phrase merely anchors experience the way all topoi do, whether captured in a photograph, a moment of critique, a meal, a condiment, travel, or a yoga session’s dialogue. Topoi, for good or bad, do deliver aesthetically pleasing experiences depending on the audience for those experiences. I have no doubt that Wendell Berry is pleased with the rhetoric of his anticorporate/anticonsumption writing. I have no doubt that Jameson is pleased with the aesthetics of cognitive mapping. I have no doubt that millions enjoy Sammy Hagar’s restaurant’s decor and food while they are in Las Vegas. Each topos has its audience. While I have anchored a great deal of this book in a rejection of critique for its repetition, I also recognize the value repetition depends on in its personal and disciplinary moments. The Bikram phrases have value. They express meaning. Bikram yoga is an ultimate practice of repetition, and I hardly reject it even if I recognize that it is just repetition. I pay $100 a month to sweat

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profusely three days a week while stretching in a 105-­degree room the same way every time. Where is the aura of a repetitive, sweaty yoga? Where is the authentic origin yoga seems to posture for me? There must be some pleasure in this action. My back no longer aches. I no longer wake up stiff and barely able to move. I n o longer experience sharp pains reaching down my lower back and into my leg, as if someone is jamming sewing needles into me. I have obviously found some comfort in Bikram’s repetition. I suppose many critics find comfort in their own repetitions as well. My sister convinced my wife to try Bikram, and my wife convinced me. We may convince our children one day as well (my wife, wanting to emulate the actions of other members of our studio, is waiting until our daughter is a little older so that we can take her with us). Sometimes, it seems as if we are preaching the Bikram gospel when we tell people in person, on Facebook, or on Twitter to try this brand of yoga. Sometimes, it seems as if we feel obligated to persuade, to argue, to convince. I sometimes say I belong to two cults whose ideology I do not believe in: Bikram and the Montessori school where both my children attend for what costs me a g reat deal more than $100 a month. Somewhere, in these moments of posturing (Bikram and education), I have been persuaded. Posture is a craft form of persuasion. In their textbook, ἀ e Craft of Argument, Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb tell students that with craft and rhetoric, “thoughtful readers are likely to assent to a claim only when they see good reasons, and evidence, when they understand the logical connections among claims, reasons, and evidence, and when they see their own doubts and questions acknowledged and answered” (xvi). Did I assent to a claim (“do yoga”) in such a manner? What was the evidence beyond “you should do this, too”? What were the connections between yoga and other experiences I value, such as traveling or eating or even being an academic? Will a reader engaged with this writing find evidence, connections, and doubts answered and acknowledged or dismiss this project as rambling interludes, drifts between hopelessly disparate topics such as Tel Aviv and salad? I obviously hope a reader will engage as much as my wife likely hoped I would eventually join her in a 105-­degree studio for 90 minutes two to three times a week. After several months, I did join her, but I have no memory of argument or evidence. I merely agreed. I needed no persuasion. I adopted her posture. My situation of writing, as well, does not depend heavily on persuasion after all. It postures. There are moments when we shift perspective or belief or action without the pressure of persuasion. Authentic Writing, though, was never meant to be persuasive. That is, with this writing, I a m hopeful that my own repetitive aesthetic can generate an authentic sense of the scholarly and of writing

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and a questioning of that very authenticity. Can I c onvince an academic or other audience that there exists here an authentic writing without critique or explanation? Norman Mailer’s character Sam Slovoda in “The Man Who Studied Yoga” is obsessed with explanation and analysis. He wants evidence to support his daily and often banal activities. From marriage to pornography to his relationship with his children, everything, for Slovoda, must be analyzed. “As he sits in the armchair, the Sunday papers are strewn around him, carrying their war news, their murders, their parleys, their entertainments, mummery of a real world which no one can grasp. It is terribly frustrating. One does not know where to begin” (164). No one, not even Sam Slovoda and all of his analysis, can explain the world; there is nowhere to begin. The story within a story of Mailer’s piece, the man who studied yoga, is told as a joke. Part of that joke is the desire to explain everything. The other part comes from the joke told within the narrative, a joke that demonstrates the futility of explanation and knowing. The man who studies yoga engages in contemplation of the navel, the unscrewing of the navel, and even with this unscrewing, his ass doesn’t fall off. Explanation, too, can be a joke. The man who studies yoga is not a b eginning of Mailer’s short story. It is not an anecdote. It is a shared moment experienced among the story’s characters. It is a shared joke that some of the characters in the narrative’s friendly get-­together do not find funny. “It has been a most untypical story for Alan to tell,” Mailer’s narrator relates of the joke, “a little out of place, not offensive exactly, but irritating and inconsequential” (174). Sometimes, the stories we tell—­a llegories or exact representations—­need these inconsequential moments for writing to occur in repetitive and in nonrepetitive ways. Sometimes, inconsequential moments—­ like ordering beer samplers or eating hand-­drawn noodles—­are, in fact, the basis of the writing. In Hell-­Bent, Lorr tells an anecdote of having completed a fourteen-­hour session of yoga-­related activity with Esak Garcia. He and his colleagues head to a supermarket at one in the morning in order to replenish their sweaty and aching bodies. “I sat down on the floor in the front, my back eased against a stacked display of beer. There is only one register open at this time of night, and the sad-­looking man at the far end of the conveyor belt doesn’t even glance at us. I am sure we look utterly banal” (44). The moment is banal, and it is a j oke. What should these exhausted yoga devotees buy? What will Bikram yoga allow them to eat? One woman gets hysterical over the thought of purchasing a Coke. The inconsequential moment—­a visit to the grocery store—­generates meaning as it takes Lorr “out of place from my normal existence” (45). This movement through or away from expectation or commonplace (e.g., grocery shopping) is craft. It is the kind of academic book I have attempted here.

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Once on Facebook, my wife posted that she wishes she “could start an essay without telling a s tory.” I’d rather tell a s tory without writing an essay. For a long time now, I’ve taught writing as storytelling, as finding a way to demonstrate the “so what” aspect of writing (whether argumentative, informational, persuasive, etc.) vital to an audience’s concern for a piece of writing. The reason to express oneself is to get at that aspect of the “so what” so that an audience may care about the expression at all. The so what has been framed as central to the so-­called craft of writing. But sometimes, I’d rather just tell parts of stories, inconsequential jokes and anecdotes, and I’m not sure I care what the point of these parts may be. I a m more interested in samplericity than the totalizing gesture of the so what. So what informs me what ἀ e Godfather is really about. So what reminds me what fast food has done to our nation’s small, independent restaurants and diners. So what condemns the faults of capitalism. I know all of this already. But so what is also exhausting in its effort to make every narrative complete. I g o to Bikram three days a week. I sweat a l ot. I’m a professor. That’s it. That’s my story. These are my samples of this final section, a last final posture to aggregate within the rest of Authentic Writing. I’m exhausted with stories that try to do much more, that try to convey the meaning of complexity and global issues as allegories and so what gestures of “I have figured it all out.” I sweat a lot in yoga. That is enough to exhaust me. Even with the relief from back pain, I have not figured out all the reasons for my continued attendance in an exhausting 90-­minute session three times a week. For whatever reason, as I considered how to map this experience into my overall system of meaning, I felt the need to express one simple fact: I go to Bikram yoga three days a week. My back no longer aches. I sweat a lot. I’m a professor. I’m due at an event in half an hour. My kids need to be picked up from school today. What will we have for dinner? Should I o nly drink one twelve-­ounce beer tonight? When will I try that new taco place in town? The practice of everyday things. And so it goes. Writing as fragment. Writing as observation. Writing as a series of ideas and moments without grand narrative or larger picture or point to prove. Writing as cognitive mapping without allegory or critical, decoding gesture. “It seems to me that upbringings have themes,” Calvin Trillin writes. “The parents set the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately” (Messages 47). For my children, we have tried to establish a food theme as central to their upbringing. My academic upbringing was largely based on decodings and explanations. In this writing, I a lso attempt to establish a certain type of scholarly theme, one whose focus is the inconsequential, one who may or may not end up as a rhetorical upbringing, one

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who postures. Among colleagues who must argue every point and know everything about the world, the university, economics, countries at war, ideology, social relationships, new media, food, and so on, I wouldn’t mind reading more writing of the everyday and the banal. Maybe not my own. But someone’s. For when that moment occurs, when I encounter such writing in others’ works, I feel I have encountered authentic writing.

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INDEX

Adventure Time, 79 aggregation, 29, 64–66, 68, 72, 74, 83–85, 87–92, 94, 99–100, 103–5, 108, 110, 119, 121–22, 124–28, 131–32, 136, 142–43, 151, 171, 179, 193, 202–3 Algebra of Need, 182, 187–89, 205 allegory, 6, 14, 20, 22, 28, 53, 56, 62, 90, 120, 169–70, 213 artisanal, 64–65, 78, 105–10, 115–21, 125, 127–35, 139, 186, 192, 196, 202 aura, 9, 13, 21–22, 38–40, 57, 71–73, 90, 104–5, 110–12, 136, 147, 155, 158, 174–75, 178, 182, 191, 196, 204, 210–11 banality, 3, 6–8, 10, 15, 20–33, 35, 42, 48, 53, 55, 58, 61–62, 64, 73, 91, 97–98, 102–3, 115, 117–18, 120–21, 128–29, 136, 139, 150, 170, 174–75, 178, 187, 194, 212, 214 bathroom, 25, 28, 31, 35, 40, 137–41, 149, 153, 209 Barthes, Roland, 5, 18–37, 41, 54, 61, 64–65, 67–69, 92, 94–95, 99, 102, 109–11, 119, 124, 126, 132, 136, 138, 142–43, 158, 180, 198 beer, 8, 14, 21, 24, 29–30, 32, 34–36, 40, 44, 48, 63–69, 72, 87, 89–96, 100, 106, 109–10, 114, 121–24, 127–29, 132, 138, 140–41, 199–203, 205–6 Benjamin, Walter, 9–13, 21–22, 37–39, 71, 97, 128, 208 Berlin, James, 18, 20 Berry, Wendell, 58–59, 61, 69, 108, 141, 210

Bikram yoga, 204–14 Bob’s Burgers, 194 Booth, Wayne, 5, 45, 47–49, 207 boredom, 27, 30–31, 36–42, 57, 125, 146 Brooklyn, 11, 34, 62, 80, 110, 115–16, 121–22, 127–32, 136, 139, 141, 157–59, 195 Bourdain, Anthony, 111–13, 116–17, 119–20, 152, 162, 171–73, 180, 202 Bronson, Action, 78, 156, 158, 191 Burroughs, William, 182, 187–88 bus station, 148–50, 154 candy, 90, 140, 151, 178–79, 182–83, 185–86, 188–90, 193 ceviche, 70–71 Chang, David, 71–2 cheese, 29, 43, 71, 73–74, 77, 79, 83–85, 94–97, 99–100, 106, 115, 121–23, 133, 135–37, 139, 160, 162, 165, 178, 182–84, 190–93, 206 Chick-­fi l-­A, 59, 85, 91, 179 China, 24, 110–11, 119, 131, 186, 198 Christiania, 201 citations, 27, 32 cognitive mapping, 52–59, 73–75, 91 108, 143, 206, 210, 213 consumption, 14, 56, 69, 72, 75, 77, 81–82, 87–89, 98–99 106, 108–10, 115–19, 123, 125, 139–40, 159, 169–70, 179, 182–83, 186, 193–96, 201–2 Copenhagen, ix, 34, 81, 106, 160, 186, 196, 199–202 Corder, Jim, 11–15, 22

233

234

craft, 11, 21, 38, 57, 63–64, 87, 91, 106–14, 116–31, 134, 136, 138–41, 149, 151–52, 162, 177–79, 181, 190–91, 199, 202–3, 210–13 craveability, 188 critique, 4, 7–9, 14–15, 17–20, 22–23, 28, 30, 38–39, 48, 52, 54–59, 62, 64, 72–76, 90–91, 99, 102–4, 109, 117, 169, 175, 180, 182, 186, 188, 195, 200, 210, 212 cute, 45, 50, 62–63, 66–67, 108, 133–34, 137, 142, 147–48 de Certeau, Michel 27, 30–33, 48, 74–75, 154, 160 Davidson, Cathy, 13, 17, 35 decoding, 7, 16–17, 20, 54–56, 59, 62, 181, 213 Does it matter?, 73, 99, 159 Doritos, 98, 181, 183–84 durian, 186 “Eat fresh,” 76, 83–84, 88 eggs, 61, 70, 78–79, 81, 93, 95, 98, 117–20, 122, 127, 130–31, 136, 162, 196 Egyptian burrito, 93–94 Engfish, 19–20 enigma, 4–5, 7, 13, 28 exotic, 29, 51, 91, 94, 102, 121–22, 167, 188–89 explanation, 8, 25, 27–28, 35, 49, 51–54, 58, 61, 64, 68, 176, 206, 212 expressivism, 17–18, 20 Facebook, 9–10, 24, 26, 32, 37, 39, 49, 65–66, 69, 73–74, 80, 92, 105, 125, 143, 153, 160, 207, 211, 213 falafel, ix, 31–32, 51, 61, 72, 77, 81, 93–94, 130, 147–48, 150, 154–69, 172, 175–76, 182, 189, 201 falafel taco, 160 fast food, 55–59, 61, 64, 69, 71, 77, 81, 83–84, 87, 103, 113–14, 120, 123, 126, 129, 140–41, 155–56, 160, 180, 190–91, 193, 205, 213 fatherhood, 25–26, 54, 68 fathericity, 66–68

AUTHENTIC WRITING

Flusser, Vilém, 85–86, 91–92 food fiction, 94–95, 114 Food Network, 157, 186, 198 fusion, 11, 71–75, 90, 95, 109, 125, 136, 138, 156 Gaffigan, Jim, 83–84, 98, 195 garlic bread, 11, 98–100, 102, 105, 107, 126, 196, 200 Gold, Jonathan, 69, 99, 103, 158, 166 grocery stores, x, 31–32, 49, 77, 87, 96–99, 107, 112, 160, 170, 173, 178, 184, 190–92, 195–96, 200–201, 212 Hagar, Sammy, 90, 98, 210 Hall, Stuart, 7, 54, 80 hand-­drawn noodles, 104–5, 107–14, 123, 125, 139–41, 165, 212 Hanoi, 112 historicity, 67, 72–73, 198 humous, x, 51, 84, 130, 146, 151, 160, 165–76, 196, 201 hot dog, 78–79, 121, 160, 173–74 hybrid, 11, 13, 21–22, 71–72, 136 hygge, 200–202 icity, 65, 71–72, 75, 81, 85, 92–94, 99, 111, 121 ideology, 6–7, 14, 37, 56, 64, 70, 85, 109–12, 124, 139, 157, 170, 179, 211, 214 inconsequential, 20, 23, 25–26, 44, 47–48, 52, 63, 87, 99, 138, 174, 207, 212–13 Instagram, 10, 24, 26, 49, 105, 125, 160 interpretation, 4–7, 19–20, 35, 48, 68, 157 Italianicity, 65, 67, 81, 83, 105, 124, 126 It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 79 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 52–53, 56, 60–64, 67–68, 73–75, 90, 102, 119, 181–82, 210 Japan, 35, 92, 94–95, 119, 123, 160, 166, 173, 188, 198, 207 junk food, 173–85, 187–88, 194 kale, 160, 191–94, 196 ketchup, 79, 108, 119–21, 123, 168

INDEX

Latour, Bruno, 6–8, 11, 14, 62, 73–74 Las Vegas, 88–95, 97–99, 103, 106, 112, 204, 210 Lexington, Kentucky, x, 55, 59, 61, 71, 77, 82, 84–85, 91, 97, 103, 106, 112–13, 123, 128, 139 lists, 28–32, 35, 41 literacy, 44, 46, 199–200 lunch, 40, 43, 53, 60, 62, 64–65, 75, 77, 80, 83, 85, 100, 108, 151, 153, 159, 163, 166, 179, 190, 195, 198 McDonald’s, 55–57, 61, 69, 77, 83, 106, 141, 155, 180, 182, 190, 205 McLuhan, Marshall, 9, 65, 199–200 Macrorie, Ken, 18–21, 41, 47 mayonnaise, 31, 70, 77, 81–82, 115–22, 127–28, 130–31, 139, 156, 160–62, 196, 198 Miami, 121, 124, 127, 132, 206 Mast Brothers, 128, 131 Mailer, Norman, 212 Mile End, 61, 122 de Montaigne, Michel, 54–55 mustard, 77, 84 121–23, 196 network, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 24, 32–33, 37, 46, 49, 65, 68, 71–71, 92, 106, 118, 125–26, 139–40, 157–58, 186, 198, 200 Ong, Walter, 8 organic, 83, 98, 194–95 Ottolenghi, Yotam, 158, 170, 172, 191, 193 Pashman, Dan, 78, 157 pedagogy, 12, 14, 18–19, 24, 46, 139 pie, 132–33, 141 pleasure, 23–25, 28, 35, 48, 80, 91–92, 104, 106, 110, 118, 125, 129, 132, 162, 175, 187, 193, 201–2, 211 personal writing, 3, 5, 8, 11, 13–14, 17–20, 22, 47, 49 persuasion, 83, 210–11 photograph, 7, 9, 11, 24, 26–27, 36, 61–62, 65–66, 68, 71–72, 74, 85, 92–93, 125, 129, 132, 141–43, 153, 176, 207, 210

235

Pollan, Michael, 69, 96, 98, 179, 181–82 popcycle, 46–47, 52 postmodernism, 11, 61 postures, 143–44, 203–4, 206–9, 211, 214 professional, 5, 8–9, 11, 15, 25, 42, 44, 49, 80, 91, 128, 133, 177, 206 punctum, 136, 139–40, 42 Really Simple Syndication (RSS), 85–89, 91–92 repetition, 4, 22–23, 28, 37–39, 56–57, 85, 88–91, 97, 102, 104, 123, 179, 183, 204, 207, 210–11 representation, 3, 5–6, 28, 39, 53, 59, 65, 67–68, 71–73, 78–79, 94, 140–41, 152, 173, 179, 186, 198–99, 202 rhetoric, 12, 16, 21, 24, 30–31, 60, 99, 108, 112, 128, 139, 144, 146, 169, 181–82, 188, 195, 210–11 Ritzer, George, 56–57, 83, 91, 102 Ruhlman, Michael, 97, 191, 193 sabich, 51, 161–65, 171, 176, 201 sampler, 44, 62–68, 73–75, 91–93, 141, 143, 202 semblance, 6, 29, 80, 198–202, 209 shakshuka, 130–32 shit, 25, 135–36, 177, 195 salad, 11, 29, 31, 70, 77, 90, 117–18, 156–57, 162–63, 174, 176, 189–203, 211 sandwich, ix, 31–32, 43, 55, 59 69–70, 75– 88, 91–92, 98–100, 113, 116–19, 121–23, 132, 135, 140–41, 154–56, 158, 160–63, 176–77, 182, 191, 196, 201, 205, 207 Saturday Night Live, 79, 115 scholarship ix, 3–4, 6, 11, 17–20, 22, 43–44, 48–49, 72 Seinfeld, 26, 195 self-­expression, 9, 11, 18 ἀ e Simpsons, 116–17, 160 situation of writing, 24, 110, 193, 196, 198, 205, 211 social media, 9–11, 21, 24, 44, 49, 65, 67–68, 70, 103–4, 113, 125–26, 143, 169, 176

236

stories, 15, 17, 24, 30–33, 36, 58, 74–75, 138, 152, 154, 163, 170, 178, 202–3 sugar, 173, 175, 179–82, 184, 186–89 smørrebrød, 81–82 Subway, 55, 59, 61, 69, 76–78, 80–85, 87–88, 91, 100–103, 106, 113, 123, 133, 140–41, 155, 160 163, 191, 205 stereotype, 28, 32–33, 65, 67–68, 78, 80, 92, 94–95, 104, 106, 109, 111–13, 124, 126, 128–29, 132, 136, 166, 171, 174, 183–84, 193, 196, 198, 203 tacos, 71–72, 74, 80–81, 94, 98, 184, 189, 213 taproom, 200, 203 technical image, 85, 87–92, 94–95, 104–6, 108, 112, 114, 118, 121, 126–28, 136, 139–41, 169, 171, 179–80, 193–95, 198 Teen Titans Go, 79 Tel Aviv, x, 11, 24, 34, 50–51, 61, 70, 106, 130–31, 144–55, 158, 161–63, 165–67, 171–74, 176, 183, 185, 196, 211 television, 7, 21, 60, 111, 151–52, 169, 174, 198–99 text, 4–9, 12, 14, 20, 23–24, 31, 33, 35–37, 39, 54, 57, 68, 85–86, 110, 128, 132, 143, 199

AUTHENTIC WRITING

Tiv Taam, 174, 183 topoi, 55–56, 103–4, 113, 180, 182, 194, 210 travel, ix, 8–11, 15, 22–23, 28, 30–34, 37, 41–46, 48–57, 61–64, 72–75, 92–93, 98, 101–3, 126, 132, 138–41, 144, 149–53, 174, 195–99, 203, 207, 211 Trillin, Calvin, 12, 44, 69–70, 93–94, 103, 109–11, 118, 123, 134, 136, 213 Ulmer, Gregory, 46–47, 49, 52 University of Kentucky, 43, 60–61, 76, 82, 170 urine, 35, 147–49, 151, 154 vegetarian, 93, 157–58, 163, 165 Whole Foods, 34, 77, 80–81, 96–98, 100, 108, 117, 128, 132, 160, 168, 174–75, 183, 191, 194, 196, 200–201 Wilson, Bee, 78, 162, 179, 186 Yelp, 103–5, 110–11, 113, 125, 129, 136, 141, 153, 201–2 Zhuhai, ix, 24, 106, 110, 186, 198