All Alone

When my family moved to the Bay Area, when I was in High School, there was a Roman Catholic priest stationed at the base chapel where my father had just taken command. He was a 60-something lieutenant who had spent the bulk of his career as a missionary somewhere in Latin America - I never knew how or why he ultimately made his way into the Navy's Chaplain Corps.

Father B. belonged to some order that took a vow of poverty, and was living with the irony of keeping that vow while simultaneously paying rent on a NoCal apartment. From what I was told, he seemed to regard it as a personal challenge to keep the place as unfurnished as possible. AT minimalists would weep in envy.

The piece de resistance in this living arrangement was the dining setup. At mealtimes, Father B. would pull his single chair up to the kitchen counter and pull out the drawer which served as his dining surface, kept perpetually set with his single plate and place setting of flatware. Sadly, I don't know what he liked to eat.

This story (which is approximately accurate) is what came to mind as I was reading Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, which could well bear the subtitle Extreme Exercises in Solo Dining. Not all the examples included are actually so extreme, but most of them try to be. The book is a collection of essays about "cooking for one and dining alone" as the real subtitle puts it. Some were enjoyable, others less so, but the main takeaway is that eating alone is an irrationally loaded topic.

This collection includes plenty of essays that moralize solo dining - that attempt to raise it to some sort of spiritual experience, or to confess it as the lowest moment of human life. I needn't tell you, at this point, how little patience I have for sentimentalizing the mundane and - yes, the functional. (Heck, I'm not even that fond of sentimentalizing the sentimental.) One included essayist (Laura Calder, "The Lonely Palate", p. 226) describes the body of work on the subject:

It's rather odd: I have read quite a number of essays in the past few days on the subject of eating alone. You wouldn't believe for how many it ends up as quasi-erotica. In one piece, the writer went so far as to take her dinner to the bathtub! Oh, the moans and groans of illicit pleasure, the unbridled indulgence that eating alone inspires in some! ...[T]here is little I find more depressing, and frankly I do have a hard time believing anyone who tries to pass it off as anything else. If eating alone were the truly juicy experience some describe, there would be restaurants in the red-light districts full of plate-sized tables in curtained-off booths. ... On the other hand, since eating alone at least sometimes is a fact of life, I can understand wanting to make the most of it. And perhaps even exaggerating how good it all was, after the fact: it sometimes takes that in life to convince ourselves we've had fun.

But it's not all what Calder describes. Lots of the essays in this book are just entertaining tales of experiences - or life seasons - that happened to involve eating alone. In the title piece, Laurie Colwin describes the years she spent in a kitchenless studio apartment (one burner, one fondue pot, no oven, dishes were washed in the bathtub). Another writer describes her personal strategy for eating as much fresh asparagus as she can choke down while it's in season. A cute piece by M.F.K. Fisher describes her annoyance at being left to dine alone on eggs and jug wine, night after night, since nobody has the nerve to invite a culinary critic to their dinner parties. And one very strange story by Haruki Murakami is all about a guy who ate spaghetti, by himself, every day in 1971.

In "Luxury," Holly Hughes relates the experience of a mother of small children, longing to eat a meal alone, a meal free from chicken fingers and buttered noodles. It was too evocative; I was physically jarred by her life's chaos.

Some of the essays are about dining alone at a restaurant, which of course everyone says is supposed to require tremendous courage. Personally, that's the sort of thing I never felt self-conscious about until I was told I ought. There are dozens of reasons for a person to be eating out, many of them not incompatible with solitude. I understand that a lot of people do find it daunting, but I don't know that I'll ever really understand why.

There are times when it stinks to eat alone, just as there are times when it stinks to work alone, or watch television alone, or sit in a church pew alone, or go to bed alone. In other words, if eating alone is a problem, the eating part doesn't seem like the real issue.