Care and Feeding: Writing about Food has Never been more Mainstream

Reading about restaurants and famous chefs is enough to make one hungry, and I confess I had to grab a snack of crackers and cheese (Tillamook pepper jack) while finishing Care and Feeding, Laurie Woolever’s darkly comic memoir of working as an assistant, first to chef Mario Batali and later to the late Anthony Bourdain.

Her story takes the reader on a bumpy roller coaster ride through Woolever’s life story: acquiring culinary smarts, becoming a food writer and misadventures with alcohol and over-sexed restaurant workers.

Restaurants and food writing have never been more mainstream in the press than they are today. For example, The Seattle Times now has three food writers but a single reporter at City Hall.

Yet food writing once was the timid little sister of journalism. So much dismissed was it that decades ago America’s famed food writer M.F.K. Fisher (Mary Frances) used initials hoping to be mistaken for a man and thus worthy of publication.  Americans didn’t much engage in food writing until the 1920s and even then it was dismissed to “the women’s pages.”

Nonetheless food writing has been with us throughout history. The earliest surviving recipes were carved into stone tablets 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. In the fourth century Archestratos of Gela cautioned that making too much of what you ate made you a glutton. He concluded, “Few people know what is wretched and what is excellent.”

In the 20th Century, the easy use of gas and electric stove tops and refrigerators drew men into the act, with Esquire acquiring a food column in the 1940s. Food writing devolved into food porn with newspaper columns filling with descriptions of dew-kissed baby lettuces, snappy radishes, and creamy ricotta. Recipes were designed to be savored and read, not merely followed.

It is into this sensuous food era that Laurie Woolever takes us with her memoir. An aspiring food writer, she takes a job co-authoring a cookbook with celebrity chef/bad boy Mario Batali. She endures his handsy behavior as tribute to be paid. Meanwhile she allows herself to slip into heavy dependence on alcohol, pot, and pills before eventually getting into 12-step sobriety.

Nicknamed Woolie by Mario, Woolever candidly acknowledges her boss’s boorish behavior. But she doesn’t hesitate to profit from the association, winning a recommendation for a job with Bourdain. Her admiration for Bourdain (“Tony” to her) knows few constraints. She joins him on some foreign travels, co-writes a cookbook, and handles his considerable correspondence. She comes to believe that those who seek connection with him “really want to BE Tony.”

Woolever sandwiches glimpses into her messy life with stories about the food scene and the legendary chefs she worked with. She supported Bourdain during life crises but failed to keep him from taking his own life. In her book, she asks, “How could I not have seen that Tony was in danger. I should have done something. I should have known.” In the end, she’s convinced he died as the result of a broken heart, mourning his last great love.

Her own life crisis – a chaotic love affair and a subsequent divorce as well as the struggle to mother her young son — ends on a hopeful note. She has obtained a contract for Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography and an advance from World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, a book underway before Tony’s death. In acknowledgments for Care and Feeding, Woolever gives special thanks to Bourdain for modeling what it was like to be a good boss, a curious person, and a man who used his powers to lift others up.