Posts tagged elizabeth gilbert

—Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Some thoughts: 

1. I love patriotism in unlikely places! 

2. Last month, I finally read Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love because my dear friend Joanna gave it to me at her bridal shower.

3. Joey always gives me great books, particularly about divorce. She likes the “divorce-memoir-genre,” as she calls it. Now I do, too. (Examples include: Happens Every Day and This is Not the Story You Think It Is.) There is no exciting personal story as to why, since neither of us have even been married. I think it’s the combination of high stakes + love + conflict = good story that feels like you are catching up with your best friend in real life over margaritas. 

4. In hindsight, I  agree that giving my sister a memoir about how one woman’s marriage crumpled was not the best choice of honeymoon reading. (But if you are not getting hitched this weekend, Happens Every Day  is a page-turner!) 

5. As I mentioned yesterday, lots of people hate Elizabeth Gilbert in passionate, emotional ways, and they are often the same people who finished her book in two days.  

6. When I see women on the subway reading Eat, Pray, Love in 2011, I think “Good for you, Outlier!”

7. The way I justify writing this post in June, 2011 is that I just read Committed. 

This is my last post about Indianapolis.

Recently I figured out something: it’s fine for me to be a foodie, I just can’t go around calling myself one. Or at least, I’m afraid to after reading B.R. Myers’ piece in The Atlantic. (If you haven’t read it, this is the tagline: “Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony.” And that’s the nicest thing he says about foodies in the whole piece.) And while I don’t agree entirely with Brian Reynolds Myers, I get his point. It’s gotten ridiculous. 

  Nevertheless I enjoyed the Kombucha on tap at Whole Foods this weekend.

And I’m realizing that people love to hate foodies! Have you noticed? Foodies are the new

Eat, Pray, Love. Meaning: something super-popular that gets backlashed. The argument against foodies and Elizabeth Gilbert boils down to this:

 they are pretentious and selfish and I hate them.

In a way these “debates” are fun. They’re a lot easier to understand than the Israel-Palestine conflict. So much simpler for me to have an opinion about one woman’s trip to Bali than pre-1967 boundaries. 

Which of course, brings me to Indianapolis. I was thinking about what a great visit we had there, thanks to Rich and Kristin, who are so funny and smart and very kindly showed us around town. 

  This picture is taken from the website of Trader’s Point, which is a creamery and a restaurant. I lost my camera at the Indy airport.

And something else very cool we learned about Indy is that it’s easy to fall into a foodie culture without being ridiculous about it. Because Indiana is part of the Corn Belt, it has so much farmland that people are (somewhat) locavore by default. Things that seem really over-the-top in other places are just practical. “Farm to table” isn’t some pretentious aspiration; it’s an accurate way to describe the food’s commute. 

  This picture is also taken from the website of Trader’s Point, which is a creamery and a restaurant. I lost my camera at the Indy airport.

We went to a dairy farm called Trader’s Point and had fresh cheddar and milk from the farm. It was five minutes outside Indianapolis city limits, in Zionsville. After brunch, we got to walk around the farm and look at the piglets. There were 22 born that week. 

Another highlight was Recess, which Chef Greg Hardesty calls his “playground,” because he tries out fun creations there using local ingredients as often as possible. 

We also checked out Mesh on Massachusetts Avenue (amazing local cheese!) and Petite Chou in the Broad Ripple neighborhood for nibbles. (Amazing mushroom on toast!)

If you are a foodie, or if you want to be one but are wary of the pretension, try Indiana.