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Roger Porter is one of the grand old names of Portland food writing. For decades, the James Beard Award-nominated Porter has documented Portland's transition from culinary backwater to farm-to-table pioneer at WW and other publications. This year, the Reed College professor was tapped to co-edit a compendious Norton anthology of food writing, Eating Words, alongside literary critic Sandra Gilbert. We talked to Porter about Portland's evolution, and why we bother to write about eating.
WW: This year, we named chef Vitaly Paley's Imperial as Restaurant of the Year. Twenty years ago, you gave his restaurant Paley's Place the same honor. What does Paley mean to Portland?
Roger Porter: I come from the New York metropolitan area. I thought of Portland as a kind of a backwater in terms of sophistication. What Paley's did, along with Higgins that preceded it by a year or two, is made what we now call the farm-to-table movement a reality. I thought it was James Beard's vision come true. It launched a sense of Portland as a place that could develop its own cuisine, play with it and experiment with it and never be unfaithful to the ingredients they're so good with.
What makes the Norton food anthology different from others?
What we thought was lacking was a broad-ranging anthology with wonderful food from all over, that will showcase food writers, and people not thought of as food writers. Given the culture of TV, of the Food Channel and of food films, we thought the time was right for this kind of book. The three great topics at the dinner table are sex, religion and politics. I'd add food to that now.
There's nonetheless a lot of politics in the book.
We start with a section of Leviticus on food taboos. It's echoed in all kinds of things—vegans talking about meat as taboo, people talking about health. We came upon writers you'd never think of: Chekhov on oysters, Barthes on chopsticks, Walter Benjamin on borscht. Who would have thought?
Why do you think people like to read about food instead of just eating it?
We thought a lot about that. It, itself, can satisfy a craving. Women in a concentration camp, in the Holocaust, they spoke about meals they'd had. Not to amuse themselves, but to nourish themselves on sharing recipes and food they were completely deprived of. We're encouraging people to think about what it means to write about eating.
GO: Roger Porter will read at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Dec. 8. Free.
Willamette Week