Back on September 17, Stephen Colbert's guest on The Colbert Report was Frank Bruni, former food critic for the NY Times. Bruni has recently written an autobiography titled Born Round, about his life as a compulsive eater. Follow me across the jump for a quick review of Born Round.
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Frank Bruni was born in 1964. His father was the oldest son of Italian immigrants, and grew up during the Depression. This early deprivation led to Frank's father always making sure the house was stocked with food:
For him a house brimming with tubs of Breyers and boxes of his beloved Mallomars was as reassuring as his diploma from Dartmouth College.
Perhaps worse for young Frank, his father's mother and siblings were proud of the success they'd achieved in America, and vied with one another to demonstrate it through food. Frank's grandmother was particularly manipulative - food was love, and not eating Grandma's food meant not loving Grandma. This was particularly brought home to Frank when he and his mother went on the original 1970s version of the Atkins Diet, and visited Grandma's house a few weeks after they started. Grandma pressured Bruni to eat, and when he refused the carb-loaded treats she offered, made it clear that his brothers, at least, still loved their Grandma.
However, it wouldn't be fair to Bruni's family to blame them for all his eating problems. Or maybe it would be fairer to say that perhaps overeating was encoded into their genes. Certainly Frank had an abnormal approach to eating from an early age. According to his mother, when he was just 18 months old he finished a hamburger his mother cooked and begged for another. She cooked it, believing he wouldn't be able to finish it, but he ate it just as quickly and began begging for a third. When she wouldn't supply it, he began throwing a tantrum, and finished by throwing up the first two burgers, as though his ancestors had been nobles at a Roman banquet rather than Italian country farmers.
I found most of Bruni's story not as absorbing as I thought I would after watching the Colbert interview. Perhaps reading about his insatiable appetite as a teenager and young man was an uncomfortable reminder of my own appetite - or perhaps not, as Bruni's eating was genuinely disordered, and I never felt that compelled by food. I was more of a "seefood eater" - see food, eat food. Bruni's appetite was more like a force of nature. I was like an omnivorous steer in a feedlot, munching my way through whatever was handy. Bruni, on the other hand, was like a land-going shark, and some of the descriptions of his feeding frenzies were disturbing.
I found it easier to relate to Bruni's reluctance to approach romantic relationships. Although Bruni was aware he was gay at a much younger age than I was when I puzzled out my own bisexuality, I found his experiences of deferring dating until "I just lose a few pounds" totally familiar.
It was after an abortive romantic encounter that, in his own words,
...I really turned the corner, accepting that if I wanted to do more than merely whittle at the edges of my excesses, I had to put real energy into the effort. I had to be methodical about it, and it had to hurt.
Or rather, it was a sympathetic but honest friend who set Frank up with his first two appointments with her sadistic personal trainer.
After just two months of hard work with the trainer, Bruni was able to fit into size 36 pants, and was feeling happier and more confident than he had in years. It was at this point that his career as a New York Times reporter took a new trajectory, and deposited him in Italy as chief of the Times' Rome bureau. It was in Rome that the grandson of Italian immigrants learned something about the Italian way of eating:
Why was the typical Italian I met so much narrower than the typical American?...By my observation the Italian secret wasn't aerobic activity or cigarettes or an avoidance of sugar or even lighter drinking...It was this: they didn't supersize anything...In Italy pasta came on plates, not in troughs, and the amount might not be more than a dozen forkfuls. A roasted chicken was more likely to serve four or even six people than two. As for snacking between and before meals, Italians limited that, if they did it at all...
In the end, Italians were generally slimmer than Americans for the plainest, most obvious reason of all.
They ate less.
After two years in Rome, learning to eat as the Romans ate, Bruni found that:
...Italian friends who had lived in Rome much longer than I had were asking me where to eat. Somehow, I'd segued from restaurant enthusiast to restaurant savant, and without gaining any appreciable weight.
It was at this point that his career took another turn. He applied for the newly-open position of restaurant critic for the Times, not expecting to get it. However, his varied experiences at the Times, on top of earlier experience as a movie critic for the Detroit Free Press, got him the job. This part of the book is more light-hearted than the earlier parts, as Bruni gives the reader a look at the harried life of the restaurant critic.
Although Bruni hasn't completely vanquished his demons, he was able to spend four satisfying years as a New York restaurant critic without again losing control of his weight. This despite at one point embarking on a nine-day cross-country ride in which he and a rotating ensemble of driving companions ate at every different fast food restaurant they could find. Unlike the Super Size Me odyssey of Morgan Spurlock [no relation - Ed], Bruni and his companions did NOT commit to finishing their high-calorie gut bombs:
A third of the way into the chicken sandwich, we'd throw that away. And then we'd toss the basic unadorned cheeseburger, a sandwich small enough that fully half of it was gone, each of us having eaten a whole quarter.
"Taste and trash," I'd remind Alexandra, restating our method for managing all of this food without having to loosen our clothing.
This year, after tasting (and sometimes in-print trashing) the restaurants of New York, Bruni moved from restaurant critic to writing for the New York Times Magazine.
When I was in the middle of Born Round, I wasn't sure it would make a good WHEE diary. After the chapters on his time in Rome, which agreed with my personal belief that large servings are the biggest cause of our national weight problem I think were very interesting and could contribute to WHEE discussion, I decided to add Born Round to my WHEE Bookshelf. It's worthy of at least two stars!
Scheduled WHEE diaries:
October 21
Weds PM - yr humble servant
October 22
Thurs AM - A DC Wonk
Thurs PM - ???
October 23
Fri AM - freedapeople
Fri PM - Be Your Own Geneticist: Chapter 2:
Experimentation and Wrong Diagnosis with louisev
October 24
Sat AM - cdkipp - Green Tea and Your Metabolism
Sat PM - Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 17)
October 25
Sun AM - Turtle Diary
Sun PM - kismet
October 26
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
October 27
Tues AM - ??
Tues PM - Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 18)
October 28
Weds AM - ???
Weds PM - Edward Spurlock