Q & A with author Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic

I "sat down" last week (aka sent questions via email) to author Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic about her most recent book,  Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate. Read her answers to my nitpicky questions below.

LZ: What was the moment when it struck you to write a book about your history of being a picky eater?

SL: It wasn’t so much my moment as it was my husband’s. We were eating at one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants (NOPA in San Francisco), and I commented that, since there was a time I despised cooked vegetables, I couldn’t believe I was getting so much pure joy and comfort out of the amazing brothy vegetable soup I ordered. “Let’s talk seriously about you writing a book,” was Mark’s response.

LZ: Are there still foods you steer clear of?

SL: Most certainly, and here’s my list from the book: succotash, raisins, bananas, oatmeal, cream of wheat, grits, polenta, the skin of tomatoes, caviar, offal, innards, feet, ears, flan, tofu, red peppers, yellow peppers, cooked green peppers, string beans, some fish, figs, dates, most melon, stews, braises, gelatinous desserts, things with heads, rabbit, veal, dill, black licorice, tarragon, lemongrass, coleslaw, mozzarella cheese, mayonnaise, rice pudding, some leafy greens, cooked cherries, and more.

If I had to, I’d be able to eat those foods. I just prefer not to.

LZ: As a past picky eating child, and now a mother, do you push your son to eat a wide range of foods?

SL: I don’t push him, but I introduce him to foods. If he’s not interested, fine. I try very hard not to make it an issue, but I also don’t decide to never offer that food again. It will show up on another day. I’ll usually fill his plate with 3-4 things, one of which I know he’ll like, the others being more of a crapshoot.

But with kids, it’s so up and down. For instance, just last night he finished his entire serving of roasted broccoli (the recipe is in the book). What you should know is that I’ve made this for him multiple times, and he’s taken one bite, two bites, and left the rest. He’s also had nights where he hasn’t taken any bites. For him to finish every last smoked paprika-drenched floret on his plate was unprecedented and I was thrilled. However, I know there will still be nights when he doesn’t do that. Kids have moods and they’re largely not in control of choosing what they get to eat.

LZ: In the book we learn of several possible reasons for children (and adults) picky-ness, and you say at the end that you don't know why you were picky. Now that you've had some distance from writing the book, do you have any further thoughts on your picky eating provenance?

SL: I really don’t. As I said in the book, I know that my picky eating came from a variety of factors and that there wasn’t just once source alone. I do think my dislike of vegetables was heavily influenced by eating mostly frozen vegetables. However, frozen vegetables are what was available back then and no amount of butter or salt can mask that blandness. I firmly believe that having access and knowing the best ways to cook fresh, in-season vegetables has made a huge difference in my life.

I remember the one time my mother was able to coax a few tomatoes out of our Minnesota garden. I ate them sliced with salt and though I thought I hated tomatoes, those straight-from-the-garden specimens were the best things I ever tasted.

LZ: Now that your picky eating secret is out, do your friends treat you differently at dinner parties?

SL: Some have teased me about serving a raisin-filled dinner and needing to check their bookshelves after I leave.

LZ: Have you heard from any famous picky eaters?

SL: Gosh, I can’t even think of any famous picky eaters except Anderson Cooper, though I’m sure they’re out there! But no, I haven’t heard from Anderson Cooper directly, though I did make an appeal to him in a column I wrote for CNN where I told him I could help him rewire his neural pathways which could help him like more vegetables.

I also heard through the San Francisco foodie grapevine that Dave Eggers is known to be a picky eater, but he hasn’t come to me with any secret confessions.

LZ: What are you working on now?

SL: Preparing my son for pre-school and enjoying the hell out of not having a looming 60,000-word deadline! 

Q & A originally published on The Inquisitive Eater.

Book Review: Suffering Succotash

Until I read Stephanie Lucianovic new book, Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, I didn’t quite realize the range in picky eating. I had often referred to myself as a picky eater, the kind of person that only likes good food. Of course I qualified the word good by saying things like healthy, local, organic, or even just tasty. In Stephanie Lucianovic’s book she attempts to determine why kids, and “finicky eating” adults, decide not to eat foods based on looks, taste or feel. Why do we have strong aversions to certain foods and, while we’re at it, what is succotash?

Simpler than I imagined, succotash is a mixture of sautéed lima beans, tomatoes and corn. It actually sounded pretty good, but I’m not twelve. Lucianovic grew up as one of those “three more bites and you’re done” kind of kids. She tells us she complained about things touching on her plate, steered clear of any food with a skin and more, subsisting on a narrow list of approved items from the four food groups. Just the cherry from the fruit cup please. Lucianovic had ways to manage the bad foods on her plate; she had places to hide them (try the books in the living room) and physical techniques to swallow them (deep breaths and lots of water). She was a food vanishing magician.

In addition to sharing her own funny stories, like when she was forced to eat “squishy and maple-syruped and gross” squash before she could leave the table, Lucianovic interviews friends and colleagues who were also picky. Like her chef friend Julie, who wouldn’t eat anything that she thought was “’wet,’ like a condiment,” or her friend Jeff, who “has a complex relationship with tomatoes”:

Chunks of tomatoes, like in salsa, are fine, but a quarter of a tomato is too much. What about slices of tomatoes? “I won’t eat them sliced,” Jeff tells me. “In fact, I just pulled one out of my hamburger and threw it out the window on my way home this morning.” 

Read the entire review, originally published on The Inquisitive Eater.

The Guggenheim transforms NYC into stillspots

The concept of peace and quiet, while living in any one of the five New York boroughs, can be pretty short-lived. That is, until you stumble on stillspotting, the Guggenheim Museums’ two-year multidisciplinary project that takes their Architecture and Urban Studies programming out into the streets and transforms them into places to sit, listen and watch. Last Saturday I found myself travelling to Staten Island to experience one of their latest installations, Telettrofono. Created by sound artist Justin Bennett and poet Matthea Harvey, the audio walking tour braided history with fantasy around the waterfront and residential areas of Staten Island.

I stepped into the temporary headquarters in the St. George ferry terminal ready to be inspired. Greeted with smiles, the volunteers in blue stillspotting shirts got us all set up; I gave them my ID, they gave me headphones and an iPod. Shirley, she looked in charge, handed me a map and said with a smile, “Maybe you’ll see a mermaid.”

Mermaids?

Exiting out to the waterfront park I looked at my friend, we nodded the go-ahead, and pressed play, beginning our journey back to 1860. Voices came on through the headphones, instructing us to turn off all 21^st century gadgets (you know who you are), and to follow the path closest to the water. Then the voices stopped and the sounds came in: a turning radio knob, static and water, lapping at my ears like gentle waves. It was a bright, hot day and I moved slowly, taking in my surroundings, both real and imagined.

Read the entire piece, originally published on Untapped Cities.

Minetta Brook: A Lost River Under the Streets of Manhattan

The irony of searching for a lost stream in Manhattan on a blazing hot day was not lost on those of us who took the recent Atlas Obscura tour with Undercity’s Steve Duncan, a “guerrilla” historian and urban explorer. The tour followed the 1.5 mile route of the now buried Minetta Brook, which originally ran above ground in Greenwich Village. The stream flowed through the western section of Washington Square Park, which was then just a marsh and ran out to the Hudson River at what is now Charlton Street.

Steve arrived wearing an orange mesh vest, a well-worn cap and nice leather shoes, ringed with bits of dried mud. The twenty of us stood at the Union Square Forever 21, listening to his introduction of the world under our feet. Rushing rivers under Union Square? Hard to imagine, we thought. Steve continued with an enthusiasm that wouldn’t flag over the course of three hours on the black tar streets of Manhattan.

Our first stop was a Subway sandwich shop. Too late for lunch, I wondered what the deal was. We paused long enough for Steve to point out the first of dozens of manhole covers he would point to throughout the day. It was in the middle of the street, partially under a parked car, partially under a big MTA bus rumbling by.

At our next stop we paused, at the corner of 14th Street and 5th Avenue to notice the designs engraved in the various covers sprinkled throughout the intersection. Was there a diamond pattern, squares, or grates? They all meant something and in all cases spoke to which municipal department needed it: electrical, sewage, water supply, runoff, subway, you name it. This one was easy. It said WSNY, which stands for Water Supply New York. The stop was brief and our motley crew of city dwellers wandered south along 5th Avenue, making a right on 12th Street, and pausing in front of the First Presbyterian Church. Standing in the shadow of the Gothic revival building dedicated in 1846, just after the stream was covered up, it became clear why the river was forced underground. One word: expansion.

Read the entire piece, originally published on Untapped Cities: New York.

Book Review: How to Get Into the Twin Palms

If you’re drawn to this book, like I was, because of its cover–crimson daggers plunging through skulls–thinking you’ll get a drug lord tale à la Breaking Bad, turn back. How To Get Into The Twin Palms, the first novel by Karolina Waclawiak, is the slack tale of immigrant Los Angeles. Within the stucco backbone of apartment buildings lining the palm tree blocks found on the west side, Waclawiak builds an outsider’s story, a narrator in search of a different life, or sometimes just a change in hair color.

We first meet our narrator, Anya–a twenty-something alien attempting to shed her Polish feathers in exchange for a Russian sable coat­–on her balcony, hiding behind a ficus, watching a man and woman fuck against a car outside the Twin Palms nightclub. So begins Anya’s quest to become Russian, to gain access to the Twin Palms, and to discover a place in the world that feels tolerable. Much of the book takes place in Anya’s apartment, a squat building in the Russian populated neighborhood of Fairfax. Her inherited apartment is “vertical blinds, beige carpets, bare off-white walls, and small things” left behind by previous tenants. And here we learn that Anya is a cataloger of stuff: bobby pins, hairballs, and ramen.

Waclawiak’s prose of clipped, vibrant sentences moves the story forward in a way that suits our narrator, whose English isn’t quite perfect, but who clearly misses her homeland. Even as Anya is rejecting Los Angeles, she isn’t considering going anywhere else:

My dark hair makes my eyes more cat-like and brighter in hue. More Eastern European. Less American. I am starting to make sense to them. I am taking off all my American skin. Killing my ability to pass for the Middle American and quiet and from here. Instead I am from the bloki again. Soviet-built and dooming.

When Anya’s not sizing up the men at the Twin Palms, she’s driving her car, occasionally to her job, most often with no clear destination in mind. Enveloped in her steel universe we’re along for the ride, going anywhere but here:

I took the 170 to the 101 and headed back to Hollywood. Past the car dealerships and the mosque, the deaf children’s school. Nothing made sense anymore. The giant neon cross on the hill was leaning down toward me. I opened the window and breathed in the air. It was blowing in my face and it felt fresh and I felt like I was flying. I accelerated and when I saw red taillights in front of me I quickly pulled off the freeway onto an exit, careful not to lose my stride.

The author is funniest when she pushes Anya into scenes with Mary, an older woman she befriended at her bingo job. When Anya gives her a ride home, Mary tells her about her dead husband, saying, “I’ll show you my wedding photos. You’re pretty but I was beautiful.” Anya shakes her head: she can’t even compete with an 82-year-old. The author is saddest when she pulls Lev into Anya’s life, a man she says, “ When I see him I know it’s going to be him,” but later in the book, once she knows his flaws, numerous that they are, she begins to change her mind, “We drove back in silence. I didn’t know if he wanted to sleep over and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. I didn’t want his sweat to spoil my bare mattress.” Losers and loners alike, we want to push these people away, even as we keep turning the pages.

Much of our narrator’s world lies in the unknown cracks of Los Angeles: calling bingo at the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church; sitting beside a cheap motel’s ash-covered pool talking to a stranger; hiding on the porch, taking note of men coming and going; and chasing down a fire that is raging in the mountains. In the end the existential grind of the city drives our narrator to irrevocable action. She heads to Griffith Observatory. Climbing high above the valley she tries to purge herself of the city, and her current boyfriend, a Russian gangster who’s already married. In the end all she is left with are charred remains: “Los Angeles wasn’t leaving and I couldn’t make it go away.” 

Waclawiaks’ mix of sad, dark humor is compelling and creates an other-ness that’s hard to shake. In the end, taking the bus along with Anya–now car-less–we feel, like our narrator, a little singed and covered in ash. But heck, maybe that’s not a bad way to start over?

First published on The Rumpus, July 17, 2012.

Book Review: Fear of Food

In Harvey Levenstein’s new book, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, we spend a great deal of time wallowing in the early 1900’s. As a Jewish girl from Los Angeles, I felt like I was being followed down the grocery aisle by my mother. Scratch that, my grandmother.

When I read the title of the book, I had high hopes. I anticipated getting a better understanding of my own food issues. To put it plainly: I’m a picky eater. I avoid bread (bad, bad, evil carbs), I don’t eat processed foods (most of the time), I try to buy organic and, when possible, I eat local. Did this book explain any of my “issues” to me? No. Well, mostly no.

Levenstein, a professor emeritus of history, sets forth in his preface to “uncover the forces that have lead to Americans inability to enjoy eating.” He goes on to say that he will regard his book as a success “if he can help lessen even a few people’s anxieties and increase the pleasure they get from eating.”

Read the entire piece, originally published on The Inquisitive Eater.

A Carriage House in Manhattan: The Mount Vernon Museum & Garden

The Mount Vernon Museum & Garden you must first head east, along 61st Street, past 3rd, 2nd and 1st Avenue. When you see the giant Bed, Bath & Beyond you’re close. Almost under the heavy metal cantilever of the Queensboro bridge, just a stone’s throw before the East River, and you’ll know you’ve arrived. Now walk up the brick stairs, shrug off the 21st century and go back in time. All the way to the late 1700s.

The Mount Vernon Hotel, built in 1799, began its career as a carriage house and, if you poke around the gardens at the end of the tour, you’ll see the second floor driveway used for just that purpose. It didn’t last long as a carriage house; we won’t talk about the dreadful fire that did away with the Manor House across the way. Its new owner, Joseph Coleman Hart, benefitting from said unsaid fire–perhaps an overturned candle–turned it into a full-fledged hotel in 1826. It was mainly a day hotel, used by the upper middle class neighbors (who lived below 14th Street) for a day in the “country”. It was occasionally used as a hotel by foreigners travelling by on boat, but its main use was a weekend getaway for locals.

Read the entire piece, originally published on Untapped Cities, New York.