Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life
by Kim SeversonRiverhead Books, 242 pp., $25.95
I’ve been a fan of Kim Severson’s food writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, and more recently The New York Times, every time I run across one of her fascinating pieces. I didn’t know anything about her personally, but I appreciated her reporter’s gift for using food as a vehicle to tell a diverse range of stories. In her poignant and insightful new memoir, Severson uses the same skills that made her an excellent newswoman to tell her own life story, using food as a touchstone. She reveals that she began her job as a San Francisco Chronicle food writer at the same time she began to recover from alcoholism and to deal openly with her family about her homosexuality. Those dramatic life changes required rigorous honesty and introspection. Most of all, they required a willingness to relearn how to make her way in the world.
It turns out that just when Severson demonstrated the willingness to learn necessary life lessons, fate, serendipity, or a writing assignment would deliver a teacher to guide her. She credits eight cooks – her Italian-American mother, Anne Marie Severson, and culinary icons Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Edna Lewis, Rachael Ray, Marcella Hazan, and Leah Chase – with providing important lessons that make her current life more rewarding. I think Severson and the eight cooks who saved her life have something important to teach us all.
This article appears in May 28 • 2010.