—M. F. K. Fisher
A friend in the hospitality industry asked if I would lead a poetry workshop at a conference in Durham, North Carolina. The organizers wanted to offer the participants a creative interlude—a lighter approach to their subject than the graphs, trends, and bottom lines that would otherwise dominate the programming. It will be fun, she said, and the food will be good.
The workshop was broken into two parts. On the first evening of the three-day conference, I chaired a lively, seminar-style discussion of food-adjacent poems for a group of forty people. We explored what “tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier” evoked for us.[1] How sharing a coke with “you” could be “even more fun than . . . being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona . . . partly because of your love for yoghurt.”[2] And in what sense it was true that “everything good between men and women // has been written in mud and butter / and barbecue sauce.”[3] Finally, I offered a prompt for those who wished to try writing a poem of their own. It was all in the spirit of no pressure, no obligation, no expectations.
Over the next two days, some participants approached me with questions and drafts. Others averted their eyes, pivoted on their heels, ducked into doorways, sprinted down corridors, and dove into elevators—avoiding me like the ghost of their high school French teacher.
Evening three: We convened around a grand, U-shaped banquet table for the closing dinner. After appetizers, my friend shot me a signal, and I asked for any volunteers to read the poems they had written. Here and there, hands inched up and flickered like fireflies. I was about to choose among the more robust flashes when, without warning, one of the pivoting divers scrambled to his feet and launched into a recitation of his poem.
The piece was well-enough-executed, if somewhat old-fashioned. It skated along in competent iambic pentameters through rhyming quatrains like a first-string player on the junior varsity hockey team. But it was overlong and somewhat tedious—even to its author, whose energy clearly flagged before he took a deep breath and threw himself across the finish line.
I was about to thank him for his contribution when a smattering of laughter rippled down his arm of the table. Yes, he proudly confessed, he had fed the prompt to the newly released Chat GPT-4o model rather than, his words: put myself through actually writing a poem. I mean, he added, a little loudly, what’s the point?
Thank goodness, I thought. At least he’s not one of those adolescent, middle-aged men who sit alone in their rooms penning dreary, meandering, ersatz nineteenth-century verse enumerating their grievances or fantasizing their revenges. I smiled and thanked him for his contribution, and we moved on to the other readers.
A few weeks later, when I relate the story to Walter, a poet-friend of mine, he laughs ruefully. I tell Walter of another friend who got AI to write a poem in her style, and how the result spooked her. Sure, he says, but it couldn’t have written it without her. It needed “her style” to imitate. Now that she’s seen what it can and can’t do, maybe it can help her outpace herself. I use it to give me the parameters I need when I’m baking a loaf of sourdough bread at altitude, he says, laughing again. And sometimes when I write to my father. (Walter has a difficult relationship with his father.) You could use it, Liane, to adjust your morning yoga practice based on your injury, he suggests.
Sure! I’m all for making use of AI. I’d like help coming up with a plan for varying my breakfasts, and tweaking my yoga practice to help me recover from this herniated disc, and writing to people I wish I didn’t have to write to. But should I ask AI to write one of my poems, or do my yoga, or eat my breakfast? Among those of us who continue to object to AI’s seemingly omnivorous encroachment, the same, old, baseline critique persists: Wasn’t the whole point of AI (so they said, long ago) to relieve us of the inhuman, robotic tasks that eat away at our time and batter our self-respect, to free us to devote ourselves to more fulfilling pursuits?
Clearly I had failed to convey to the man at the conference that just as eating and digesting breakfast gets us through the morning in a different way from looking at the tantalizing eggs Benedict on the cover of Food & Wine, we get something more out of “actually” writing a poem than we do from simply printing one out. And while it’s true that the photo may stir our imaginations, unless we open the magazine, find the recipe, and test it in our own kitchens, all that imagined delight will remain exactly that. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it will return months later in an unaccountable hankering for the eggs Benedict on a menu in a diner on a road trip. Maybe it will turn up in a new form in something unrelated that we do—when we decide to paint the ladder-back chair we found at the garage sale white and yellow. Or maybe it will haunt us, one of those incidental desires we brushed aside.
*
As the weeks and months after the conference went by, and articles fretting over or touting AI proliferated across my newsfeed, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the workshop had been a colorful, bustling Saturday morning market in Provence that I had driven right past.
I hadn’t even touched on the affinities between writing and cooking! We measure our ingredients and our words. We connect through food to culture, history, science. We tell the stories of our meals. Our meals are stories in themselves! Literature is full of symbolic repasts, from little Marcel’s madeleine to Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf en daube. The oldest known poem about food dates back 4,000 years. It doubles as a recipe, for brewing Sumerian beer. The very word “meal” (meaning when and what we eat, rather than the edible part of a grain) derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *meh1-, meaning “to measure,” from which we also get the words “inchmeal” and “piecemeal.” It’s from the same word that we arrive at our own for poetic rhythm: “meter.”
Operating instructions, warning labels, listicles—what were they if not the fast foods of reading and writing? We might have delved into the ways a recipe from Mark Bittman’s New York Times column The Minimalist was the culinary equivalent of one of William Carlos Williams’ poems. Auguste Escoffier’s masterpiece of simplicity, the Pêche Melba, a gastronomic expression of an Ernest Hemingway short story. The intricate, time-consuming preparation of a Mole Poblano, the Paradise Lost of cuisine.
I might have gotten them to think about writing as a form of hospitality. When Pete Wells started writing for the New York Times in 2012, my whole family looked forward to his next review. The first of us to spot a new one alerted the others. We found his blistering Emperor’s New Clothes takedowns delectable, to be sure, but really it was his fragrant and zesty descriptions we relished, like that of the “doori kebab with young goat . . . so tender and delicate it is almost like grilled pâté, and is easiest to eat inside a folded piece of sheermal, crisp flatbread brushed with saffron butter.”[4] We read sentences like that one aloud. They whetted our appetites, but more than that, they made us feel welcome at tables conjured out of nothing but words.
*
I’ve always been a fairly adventurous eater, but I don’t think I will ever live up to M. F. K. Fisher’s idea of the “real gourmet,” exhibiting as he does a “complete lack of caution . . . . [H]e has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.” I can, however, understand how he arrived at this daunting fearlessness:
He not only knows from everything admirable he has read that he will not like Irish whisky with pineapple chilled in honey and vermouth, or a vintage Chambertin with poached lake perch; but every taste bud on both his actual and his spiritual palate wilts in revulsion at such thoughts. He does not serve these or similar combinations, not because he has been told, but because he knows.[5]
I love the paradox of the real gourmet’s knowledge and freedom. He’s born with them; they both derive from his reading—what he has taken from literal books and the book of experience; they feed each other. We know that we learn (hopefully) from our experiences, but do we give enough credit to all that we learn from “everything admirable [we have] read”?
Fisher wrote about food, but her subject was all of life’s pangs and pleasures, the actual and the spiritual palate. Preparing meals, writing, eating, reading—they weren’t just metaphors for each other, they were all part of the great, bubbling bouillabaisse of life. “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”[6]
There are certain dishes I have eaten that I wanted to go on eating forever, but as if every bite were that first unimaginable morsel, or really maybe the second. Since that can never be more than a wish, I sometimes try to reproduce those dishes myself. This process of inspiration is the same one I experience as a writer. No matter what else has inspired me to sit down to write, I am also always inspired by my reading. Like Fisher’s real gourmet, it is from other writers that I have come by my (innate?) sense of what good writing is, my confidence in my own taste and, maybe most important of all, my sense of creative freedom.
This is fundamentally different, of course, from the way an AI learns from its “reading” of what others have written. Like humans, an AI learns vocabulary, grammar, syntax, facts, and even reasoning from “reading.” But because it can’t lose itself in the pages of a good book, it can’t discover anything in those pages either—not its own understanding of what it’s reading, not a feel for what words mean, not how that meaning shifts from one context to the next. It can’t discover its own style or what it already knows or who it is. It can’t discover its own taste any more than what it’s like to close its mouth around a spoonful of steaming bouillabaisse for the first time, or the second. An AI does not read or write; it absorbs and generates texts by a mathematical process. It cannot exhibit caution, or a lack thereof, or come to feel or cultivate a sense of freedom.
*
How each of us reads, how each of us writes, these are unique to each of us. Maybe this was the single most important idea I wish I had communicated at the workshop in Durham. A poem is vitally personal—not as in autobiographical, but as opposed to impersonal. A poet’s style, her “voice,” is a reflection of who she (uniquely) is—the confluence of time and place; individual and collective history; nature, nurture, chemistry, will, barriers, chance. I should have encouraged (compelled!) a discussion of why that matters. I should have pressed the group to reckon with a poem’s dual identity as utterly distinctive, something only that person could have said in that way at that moment in time, and yet simultaneously representative of something bigger.
Wasn’t that, among other things, the foundation of the hospitality business, creating an environment for guests that makes them feel that their particular needs have been anticipated, that desires they hadn’t realized they harbored were being catered to?
But there was more, because reading is so basic to who we are, and because reading and writing are inseparable, two sides of the same coin, one continuous Möbius strip of a process. When we read words on the page, we are also “writing” our reading of them, bringing our whole lives to bear on how and where we take them; making of them, within the limits of definition and context, what we will. It’s the same when we “read” a painting, a scene, a story, a face. It’s the same when we “read” those powerful and ephemeral and intransigent things we call thoughts and feelings, both our own and those of the people around us. We are all looking at the same words on the page, but no one is reading the same poem. And that’s a good thing! It’s an activity, an engagement with something outside ourselves that grounds us by reminding us how we are distinctly and profoundly unique, as individuals and as a species: these thoughts and feelings in this body at this moment in this life.
“Reading and writing” describes our continual efforts to decipher, weigh, and assess the gestures, inflections, intentions, and intensities we perceive. It’s a process because it requires practice as well as theory—the building blocks of intuition (and therefore confidence, and taste). It demands time as well as effort, just like the mastery of any art. And it is incremental: we add in the act of recollection to what we picked up on in the moment of perception, equipping ourselves to meet similar experiences more knowingly, to see more, to manage better, to interpret more freely, and maybe even to master the situation, or the recipe, next time.
Maybe it’s the process that we resist, or rather all that process brings in its train. An AI can’t take risks or the last bite; it can’t fear disappointment; it doesn’t wish it could avoid regret. It gets bigger, but it doesn’t grow; it updates, adapts, and exhibits randomness (though only in predictable ways), but it doesn’t change; it doesn’t die, but it doesn’t live either. We humans understand very well why grappling with poetry feels more formidable than plugging into AI, but we also know that that’s what makes it more relevant and real. We are creatures of process, we know that it’s the process (the work!) of doing it ourselves that is the purpose, and “the point.” “I’ve lost my appetite,” Fisher said in an interview the year before she died. “But my mind and heart have never been clearer.”
*
If only I had spelled all this out in Durham. I could have shown them that the most important difference between the “reading and writing” we do all day long—of road signs, advertisements, menus—and the “reading and writing” we do with a poem, is the secret sauce that boosts “making sense” into “making art.” It’s not the meter and the rhyme and the awkward inversions they can spawn as the “poem” grinds through its theme. It was right there all along, in the visionary modulation that takes the speaker in Ginsberg’s poem “from shopping for images” to spotting “Garcia Lorca . . . down by the watermelons.” It’s in the onrush of lines in O’Hara’s poem, and why he ends the poem by sending us back to the beginning: even as it seeks to represent process, art can’t help but become a finished product, the opposite of the “marvellous experience” of life it wants to share, “which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.” It’s in the way, in Wright’s poem, the imperative to “Cover the lettuce [and] Call it a night” summons the soul and exhorts it to “[f]low on. Instead.”
Art happens where the unexpected dovetails with the inevitable in a way that changes what you started with. It’s in that quantum leap that art shows us what living really is, that it resides in those essentially creative moments where we break, rather than reiterate and recombine, the patterns we’ve been trained to see and repeat—in our thinking, in our work, in our relationships.
I can’t eat the words I never said. I’ve blown my chance to persuade those duckers and divers in Durham that the difficult and deliriously satisfying work of books and poems and sentences is too meaningful, precious, proprietary, intrinsic, and eccentric to be outsourced to some “processor,” no matter how fast or sophisticated. But I like to think that, like me, they wouldn’t dream of trading those first pangs of hunger, or that first taste of whatever has been simmering on the stove all afternoon, for even the most comprehensive listicle of comfort food classics. And ever since that weekend, while I worry and marvel at everything AI can do, I also think about all that’s lost on an AI, and how that may prove as good a prompt as any for humanity to rediscover what is uniquely, if only, human.
Liane Strauss
[1] Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California.”
[2] Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You.”
[3] C. D. Wright, “Everything Good between Men and Women.”
[4] Pete Wells, “Restaurant Review: Kebabs from India, in So Many Shapes and Forms,” New York Times, March 21, 2023.
[5] M. F. K. Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourmets (New York, 1949).
[6] M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me (New York, 1943).