Salon.com > Pete Wells

“Keep Australia on Your Left” by Eric Stiller

Thu, 31 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Nonfiction
Keep Australia on Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak
By Eric Stiller
Forge, 412 pages

There comes a time in the life of every young man when he feels an overpowering urge to do something monumentally stupid. For Eric Stiller, that moment came at 32, when he decided to paddle all the way around Australia in a 17-foot kayak with someone he barely knew.

Stiller knew a lot about kayaks, not much about Australia. He worked for his father in a Manhattan shop that sold the boats to adventurers, but he had never gone off on the kind of grand expedition for which he had outfitted so many of his customers. Then Tony Brown, a 6-foot-4 model from Sydney, Australia, swaggered into the shop and announced that he was going to kayak around his native country.

Why was this a stupid idea? For one thing, Australia is bigger than it looks on the globe. The coastline, unspooled, would stretch out to 20,000 miles; cutting across many of the coves and inlets would trim the distance only to about 12,000 miles. Stiller and Brown's small, canvas-covered kayak would be hammered by towering waves that, after journeying across thousands of miles of open sea, collide with Australia and bounce back in a hundred new directions. They would do most of their traveling in relatively quiet offshore waters. But twice a day, when they launched in the morning and sought shelter at night, they would meet with vivid and terrifying illustrations of the principle of chaos theory.

“The Invention of the Restaurant” by Rebecca L. Spang

Fri, 24 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The title of Rebecca L. Spang's scholarly yet highly accessible social history, "The Invention of the Restaurant," causes a small jolt of surprise. For people who eat out so often that boiling a pot of spaghetti at home is a special occasion, a world without restaurants is hard to imagine. We realize, at some level, that they have not always been here, but few of us could say who invented them, or when. The automobile, the telephone, yes. But the restaurant, a creation every bit as characteristic of modern life as the other two? To most of us, its author is anonymous.

According to Spang, the forgotten inventor was Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, a figure so perfectly emblematic of his time that he almost seems like an invention himself. The son of a landowner and merchant, Roze moved to Paris in the early 1760s and began floating a variety of schemes he believed would enrich him and his country at the same time. He published a kind of early Yellow Pages, advocated a bizarre currency that would decrease in value each time it changed hands and, in 1766, opened an establishment in Paris that claimed to serve "only those foods that either maintain or re-establish health."

“The Cockroach Papers” by Richard Schweid

Mon, 03 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Before I read "The Cockroach Papers," I had an irrational and unfounded disgust for roaches. But Richard Schweid's book set me straight. Knowing what I now know about the digestive, reproductive, circulatory and neurological systems of these remarkably designed insects, I can say with certainty that my disgust is as rational and well-founded as it gets.

I used to think that roaches were indiscriminate eaters who would devour anything in their paths. Now I know the whole story -- which is that although they prefer cinnamon buns above all other foods, they will make do with paper, bookbinding glue, wallpaper paste, leather, wool and milk that has dried around babies' mouths. For this last delicacy they usually wait until the child is sleeping -- a tactic they also use when they are hungry for human toenails, fingernails, eyelashes and skin. Of course, a dead person is even easier to feast on than a sleeping one, which is why the New York City Police Department employs a full-time entomologist to determine whether wounds seen in autopsies were caused by violence or by ravenous roaches.

“My Kitchen Wars” by Betty Fussell

Wed, 24 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

One of the oddest recipes ever put in writing can be found in M.F.K. Fisher's book "Serve It Forth." It involves gently peeling tangerine sections -- "do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine" -- and placing them on newspaper atop a hot radiator. "Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. Of course you are sorry, but ... On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready."

Of course, making Fisher's tangerine sections requires an old-fashioned steam radiator. But there are other components, just as essential: the soldiers, the Rhine, the snow on the windowsill and, most of all, Al. Without Al, the recipe will fail like a cake without eggs. The point is that a recipe broken down into a neat series of ingredients and procedures can never capture the thing that makes food memorable. Fisher, in her sly, elliptical way, is telling us: You had to be there. Our meals are always tied up with the rooms where we eat them, the people we share them with.