Justifying my collection of cookbooks

Now I am just procrastinating. It's a lovely day outside, the house is clean, dishes done, laundry laundering... I've managed to read the first chapter in the new book by my external examiner. I'm debating going up to the Bollywood film in an hour.

And as always happens when I'm looking for distraction, I've started pulling down my cookbooks and feasting on imaginary dinners. I'm quite as good as Peter Pan at eating pretend food. And I'm quite happy with my collection these days. While I am still seduced by the gastro-porn style of food writing - more pictures than text - I'm more and more attracted to good writing. Our last purchase - a lucky find in the Oxfam shop in the city - was Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. For the record, and because I'm curious, the entire collection is as follows:

How to Eat - Nigella Lawson
Larousse Gastronomique
The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater
New Food Fast - Donna Hay
The New Cook - Donna Hay
German Cooking Today - Dr. Oetker
The Family Cookbook - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
The Silver Spoon
The River Cottage Year - Hugh Fearnley - Whittingstall
Cooking from an Italian Garden
The Vegetarian Chef
Lighten Up
Best Recipes: German Cooking and Baking - Dr. Oetker
Soup - Sandler and Acton
Curries and Indian Foods - Linda Fraser
Fondue - Loraine Turner
various old Canadian Living magazines
my ratty old spiral notebook with recipes from various people and sources

Huh. Written out like that, I do have rather a lot of cookbooks. I think I left some in Canada as well. I think I likely read them more than actually use them on any kind of daily basis - which isn't to say that I never use them. Lawson and Slater I just enjoy reading - hell, I've taken both to bed with me in the hopes of inspiring some flights of dreamy gastronomy. My collection does run the gamut from straightforward food preparation (German Cooking Today and The Silver Spoon tie for the most stripped down writing) to philosophical treatises on eating ethically (Slater) or the wickedly onanistic pleasures of cooking for one's self (Lawson).

Is feeding the body feeding the soul? I have no idea. But I love food - I love preparing it, I love feeding people (a genetic predisposition - thanks gran!), and I love eating. But not just the mechanics of eating, the whole socio-cultural ritual of the thing. On my own, food simply doesn't taste quite as good or as satisfying than when taken in good company. I'm fascinated by table manners, by eating disorders, by images of consumption and expulsion - maybe it's a Catholic thing? How we devour our world, are devoured by our world - by each other. We are fed with ideas, eat up words, get 'fed up', are glutted by consumer culture, digest bad news, sink our teeth into new things, worry at something 'like a dog with a bone', lap up information... We are part of a body - we're taught in Catholic school that God has laid a feast for us - we obsess about the Last Supper - we play games of describing our perfect 'last meal'. Food is desire; it signals belonging and strangeness, continuity and change. It is, in the end, all that we are.

Chew on that.