“Everything I Ate” is either the goofiest food-related book ever written, or the most existential chronicle of a man’s food life ever to roll off a press.
Former Denverite Tucker Shaw has captured, on color film, everything he ate in 2004 – including the time at which the photograph was shot.
Subtitled “A Year in the Life of My Mouth,” the book ($14.95) is slightly crazy-making. You pick it up, meaning to give it a quick thumb-through, but can’t put it down.
It’s bizarre. It’s mesmerizing. It’s endearing. It’s really quite extraordinary.
Using his pocket-sized Canon Elph camera, Shaw wanted to create – through unretouched photographs – a document that would serve future culinary historians or anthropologists; something that showed what we ate at the turn of the 20th century.
“We’re living in a time of unprecedented excesses,” he says by telephone from his home in New York’s Greenwich Village. “I wanted people to know about all the choices we had. There was also … a more personal reason. I wanted to create a yearbook for myself. For some reason whenever I traveled, I always came back with pictures of food.”
So rather than a picture of the Eiffel Tower, Shaw took a photo of the tarte tatin he ate near there.
Shaw, who graduated from South High School in 1987, still remembers school days and Denver’s food scene.
“In the ’70s an ’80s, when I was growing up, Denver was pretty bleak foodwise,” he says. “Obviously you could get a good steak, but you couldn’t find good produce. Now, Denver is this new place where there are so many good restaurants and markets. I just read about (Frasca) in Boulder, so the scene is really transformed.”
And that’s part of Shaw’s rationale for writing about everything he ate, hour by hour, day by day. In this curious tome he takes the reader on dates, to birthday parties, to Italy and all over New York.
We munch bags of corn chips, pretzels and Tabasco popcorn. We even eat a Denver omelet at 10:25 p.m. on May 23. Through his snapshots we eat out and eat leftovers, including many pizzas and even more bowls of cereal.
“I probably eat more breakfast cereals than anything else,” Shaw says. “It’s my comfort food and my favorite snack food. New York can be so stressful that, while going out to dinner is fun, it’s not really relaxing. So when I come home and eat a bowl of cereal, it calms me down.
“We talk about food in terms of the perfect dish or a fabulous restaurant, but we eat all the time,” he says. “We eat when we’re happy, depressed, with friends and alone. We eat while watching TV or riding around in a car. I hope the pictures show how food permeates our lives. I wanted to record the more mundane, which we don’t often acknowledge.”
Shaw also has written for magazines as diverse as Gourmet, Marie Claire, Rolling Stone and Mademoiselle. Here, one suspects, he has outdone himself.
Believe it: You’ve never quite seen a book like this. When you arrive at the page with the can of Campbell’s tomato soup you just know Andy Warhol would have loved all 2,500 of the images packed into the 500 pages of “Everything I Ate.”
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-820-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
