\u201cFood is metaphor,\u201d Jane Stern told the class. \u201cWe\u2019re learning about someone\u2019s life in depth, not about how to cook a carrot.\u201d<\/p>\n
The students in “Food Writing,” the course Stern is teaching during Furman\u2019s Spring 2023 semester, listened as the acclaimed food writer continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWas Hemingway really writing about fishing and bullfighting?\u201d she asked. \u201cWas Erica Jong worried what airline company serviced the jet? Did Shakespeare wonder about the mortar holding up Juliet\u2019s balcony?\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, food writing can describe what life was like in the Great Depression or Victorian England, in war or in peacetime, she said. Food has sparked passion and romance, driven some writers to suicide and saved others\u2019 souls. It has experienced religious conversions, led to hedonistic frenzies and cured illnesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re writing about cornbread, are you really just writing about a slab of cornbread on a plate?\u201d she asked. \u201cOr are you writing about the cultural context of generations of people in this area, in your family, or in the restaurant that you\u2019re eating at? Food is the beginning of what you\u2019re writing about. It is not the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, no matter where you are, you can learn about the place and its people by watching what they eat. Stern started learning those lessons around 50 years ago after she and her then-husband packed up their beat-up Volkswagen Beetle for a cross-country trip, indulging a mutual desire to \u201chang out and eat.\u201d<\/p>\n
During that trip, Jane and Michael Stern kept a diary of the unknown and unique local eateries they found. That diary eventually became the book \u201cRoadfood<\/a>,\u201d originally published in 1977 and currently in its 10th edition.<\/p>\n During an era when food writing mostly focused on fine cuisine and prestigious restaurants, \u201cRoadfood\u201d introduced a national audience to regional American food, an \u201ceater\u2019s guide to more than 1,000 of the best local hot spots and hidden gems across America.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe had no formal culinary education,\u201d Stern said. \u201cWe had a car, we bought a Rand McNally map, and we said, \u2018We can do this in a month.\u2019 Five years later, we were still on the road. That\u2019s how we became food writers.\u201d<\/p>\n The Sterns\u2019 nomadic legacy continues with the Roadfood website<\/a> and PBS TV series<\/a>. Stern continued serving up local flavor as a contributor to NPR\u2019s \u201cThe Splendid Table\u201d and columnist for Gourmet and Saveur magazines. Her writing has won five James Beard Foundation awards, appears in the Smithsonian, and earned her a spot in \u201cWho\u2019s Who in American Food.\u201d Her byline has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Cooks Illustrated and countless other magazines, as well as on more than 40 books, many of which became New York Times bestsellers.<\/p>\n Food is a common motif in her work, but her books contain multitudes of interests, including travel, Elvis, pop culture, tarot reading, truckers, the Old West and dogs. Her memoir \u201cAmbulance Girl,\u201d detailing her midlife decision to train as an EMT in her Connecticut town, was dramatized by Kathy Bates in a Lifetime original movie.<\/p>\n When the time came to leave New England \u2013 \u201cI love Connecticut, but I don\u2019t love spending $600 a month on heating and still freezing to death,\u201d she said \u2013 a colleague from her EMT days now living in South Carolina recommended the Upstate. Not long after moving, she found an opportunity.<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing I noticed in the schools around here is that people don\u2019t teach food writing,\u201d said Stern, who had taught the subject at Yale, Wesleyan and colleges in Connecticut.<\/p>\n She approached Melinda Menzer, chair of Furman\u2019s Department of English, and soon her course was added to the catalog.<\/p>\n For her students, the course represents \u201cthe first day of the rest of their lives as a food writer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to come in here as people who, if I say, \u2018How was your hamburger?\u2019 you just say, \u2018Good,\u2019\u201d she told the class. \u201cBut at the end of the class, you\u2019ll be Shakespeare.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jane Stern, co-creator of the legendary \u201cRoadfood\u201d series and author of more than 40 books, introduced her food writing course in the Spring 2023 semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":23621,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}