A Bulimic Food Critic? You’re Darn Right!
by Spence Cooper on 27/07/09 at 7:19 am
by Frank Bruni
A bulimic food critic? I must confess, Bruni’s bulimia admonition struck me at first as being the epitome of comic relief in an otherwise serious role as a celebrated food critic. This is surely screenplay fodder, I thought, for the next Coen Brothers’ film. But as I read excerpts from Bruni’s engaging book, Born Round, I realized Bruni’s bulimia was more of a subplot to the much larger story of Bruni’s exquisite love for food.
Some people recognize their destiny almost from the moment they’re born. As a boy, Patton read classic military history believing he was destined to command an army. He later led Third Army to victory in WW2.
As a boy, Frank Bruni too was obsessed, and while the subject of his obsession may not alter world history, he has attained a more than dignified place in the world as a keen and gifted observer of the minutiae of food. Frank Bruni was born to be a renown food critic — it was his destiny. To Bruni, the effusive scrutiny of food is no different than the critical examination of art and literature. Food for Bruni is quite literally “art appreciation”. In my estimation, few, if any, are more qualified than he to critique food.
We all remember the childhood joy of candy bar pleasures as one big monolithic lump of sweet heaven, but not Frank Bruni. Consider this Bruni childhood reflection:
I wasn’t merely fond of candy bars. I was fascinated by them and determined to catalog them in my head, where I kept an ever-shifting, continually updated list of the best of them, ranked in order of preference. Snickers always beat out 3 Musketeers, which didn’t have the benefit of nuts. Baby Ruth beat out Snickers, because it had even more nuts. But nuts weren’t crucial: one of my greatest joys was the KitKat bar, and I couldn’t imagine any geometry more perfect than the parallel lines of its chocolate-covered sections. I couldn’t imagine any color more beautiful than the iridescent orange of the wrapping for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
For most of us the excitement of the Good Humor truck has faded gracefully from our childhood memories, long since forgotten and filed broadly under ice cream — not so for Frank Bruni.
And the sweetest sound in the world? The most gorgeous music? The bells of a Good Humor truck. There was the Strawberry Shortcake bar, coated with sweet nibs and striped with pink and white. There was the cone with vanilla ice cream and a semihard hood of nut-sprinkled chocolate over that. An argument in its favor was the way the eating of it had discrete chapters: hood first, ice cream second, lower half of the cone after that. And then there was the Candy Center Crunch bar, which was vanilla ice cream in a crackling chocolate shell, with an additional, concealed element, a bit of buried treasure. When you got to the middle of the bar, you bumped up against a hard slab of nearly frozen dark chocolate, clumped around the wooden stick. You had to chisel away at it in focused bites, so that chunks didn’t tumble to the ground — lost, wasted.
Bruni’s food adoration was not driven by his mother and father’s collusive encouragement as is sometimes the case in European families. On the contrary, Bruni’s mother attempted to discourage Bruni’s food preoccupation with an assortment of suggested diets. But Bruni’s adoration of food began practically at birth. “I was a plump infant,” writes Bruni, “and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they’d never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food.”
Bruni’s first bulimic episodes were at 18 months and manifested in the form of childhood tantrums designed to manipulate his mother into to feeding him more food.
I cried. I cried so hard that my face turned the color of a vine-ripened tomato and my breathing grew labored and a pitiful strangled noise escaped my lips, along with something else. Up came the remnants of Burger No. 2, and up came the remnants of Burger No. 1. Mom figured she had witnessed an unusually histrionic tantrum with an unusually messy aftermath. But I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living…It became a pattern. No fourth cookie? I threw up. No midafternoon meal between lunch and dinner? Same deal. I had a bizarre facility for it, and Mom had a sponge or paper towels at hand whenever she was about to disappoint me.
I’m inclined to think that in Bruni’s case, his bulimia is more a learned social coping mechanism — as a toddler he used bulimia as a tool for more food; as a young adult his bulimic episodes were designed to stay thin in order to guarantee his viable status in the shallow world of popular culture. Bruni poignantly characterizes his struggle to lose the ten more pounds doctors insisted on for optimum health.
It was the distance between me and some confident, enviable, all-American ideal that might well be mine if I could just turn away from yet another quarter of club sandwich, from the third buttered yam at Thanksgiving, from the second bowl of ice cream I carried up to my bedroom on a weeknight when I was up late studying.
The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it — were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.
I’m well aware of the health implications of a more than robust physique. But since when has maintaining a lean and trim body been foremost in the minds of great chefs? — hell, does anyone really trust a skinny chef?
And so it goes for a critical lover of food. I doubt Bruni would be tormented with bulimia had he not lived in a society driven by conformity where those we praise are devoted to female emaciation and the worship of stoned sculpted Michelangelo males. I’d rather gain a few pounds from freely partaking in the sensual joys of food than be enslaved by the mediocrity of social compliance.
