This post is part of the Totally Unrelated blogathon. 

When Stu first asked me to participate in this blogathon, he hadn’t picked a name yet, but in describing the concept, he used the word “fatigued” – as in, the whole point is to write about what we think about when writing about film has us fatigued. And it’s probably foolish for me to admit this, but not only am I familiar with that fatigue – I actually have a back-up plan to combat it. When the days get really long and/or it starts to feel like I have nothing left to say, a little voice in the back of my head says, “Just get through today, and if it’s still bad, you can always go back to selling cheese.” This seems to do the trick.

A week before the 2003 blackout, I moved to New York to go to grad school with a suitcase, a computer, and less than a thousand dollars to my name. I had never been here for longer than a weekend, and knew no one. I was 23 and had nowhere to live, and absolutely no idea how insane that was. I somehow talked my way into a $600 room in a loft in South Williamsburg with seven roommates. I needed a job immediately, and Dean and Deluca was hiring. I wanted to work at their pasta counter––I’d been making handmade pasta, badly, since before puberty, and wanted to get really good at it—but Dean and Deluca’s pasta counter was just an offshoot of their cheese counter, so if I wanted to do one, I had to do the other.

Over the next couple of years, I sold cheese, I waited tables (extremely poorly—I’m a clutz), and eventually went to work at an artisanal pasta factory. I was getting a full culinary education by day, and toiling in academia at night. I didn’t sleep much, and by the end of it, I was friendless and probably clinically insane. And of course, I romanticize it like crazy.

There’s no question that I’ve become a gourmet hobbyist, but I still have a hard time being on the other side of the cheese counter or the dinner table. For one thing, nobody likes a food snob, so I’ve got to be careful to keep the eye-roll inducing terminology to myself. My own boyfriend happily accompanies me to North Fork wineries or to a tasting at Artisanal, but the second I drop a simile, he’s ready and waiting to take me down a notch. “They don’t actually put butter in the press with the grapes? Then the chardonnay can’t be buttery.” So he won’t let me get away with saying that certain varieties of blue cheeses taste like vanilla frosting, but even he has a hard time finding a better explanation for Scamorza Affumicata than my old line for selling pounds of it at Dean and Deluca: it looks like bread and tastes like bacon.

It’s also hard to pay for what I used to get for free. The food porn industry is mostly aspirational in nature. Aside from Rachel Ray (whose insistence that canned chicken stock is just as good as fresh appeals to the populist in me but horrifies my inner gourmand), it’s all about dangling an improbable standard of living in front of unwashed plebes. Anyone who can actually afford to keep their kitchen stocked with truffle oil doesn’t need Michael Chiarello to teach them how to use it. Actually paying $35 a pound for ANYTHING makes me feel like a sucker. And it doesn’t even taste good, when you know the bill is coming.

I was flipping channels the other night, and caught a glimpse of Anthony Bourdain taking Marky Ramone restaurant-hopping Cleveland in search of “a dizzying, postmodern riff on Midwestern fare.” Ignoring the absurdity of that, I always get the feeling that Bourdain, more than any other celebrichef, is out looking for The First Hit—he’s trying to get back that experience of being a peon apprentice, when everything was new. He travels the world, eating rattlesnake venom and what not, forever trying to capture that experience of being humbled by a new flavor.

I admire his ambition, maybe more because I think his quest is ultimately futile. Nothing will ever taste as good as it did back when you didn’t know what you were tasting. Globetrotting is good work if you can get it, but nothing can capture that intertwined sense of pure discovery and criminal thrill, of tasting something you can’t afford for the sheer purpose of figuring out how to sell it someone who can.

When I had the chance to write about film for a living, I left the food industry without a second thought, and I definitely have no regrets about that. But there is something almost theoretical that I miss. Selling food is impersonal. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, and what I think and feel doesn’t enter into it. It’s not art, it’s math. Food is not an emotional experience for me. It’s purely sensual, but sensual in a way that can be concretely qualified (put it this way: anyone who’s using food as a substitute for sex doesn’t know how to eat). I suppose that’s why it makes for an appropriate counterpoint to my day job. Every time I publish an opinion about a film, I feel like I’m putting my heart on a clothesline. Food is pleasure without feeling. Film is a emotional commitment.