![Two chopsticks holding a bite of spaghetti]()
Food—cooking it, ordering it, eating it,sharing it, dreaming of it—is a recurring theme in fiction, and, in this handful of stories with plots involving food, one can see why. It embodies and signifies so much beyond nutrition. Food is culture, especially for immigrants who have to learn new foods, new recipes, and new customs, or who are made to answer for those of their homelands. In Ling Ma’s “Peking Duck,” a Chinese woman, who was an accountant in China, works as a nanny in Salt Lake City. One day she is terrorized by an intruder who demands that she cook Chinese food for him; she pretends not to know how to make the dishes he wants. In “Omakase,” by Weike Wang, food becomes the source of a culture clash for a Chinese American woman, her white American boyfriend, and a Japanese chef. Food is also home and family. In “Upside-Down Cake,” by Paul Theroux, a large and contentious family gathers for a meal to celebrate the mother’s ninetieth birthday. The final course is the mother’s favorite upside-down cake, a “slumping, soggy cake, topped with eight lurid pineapple slices, most of them with a cherry in the middle.” With it arrives another surprise: new relatives. And, as we know too well, food can be a compulsion, an obsession, a stand-in for emotions. Lara Vapnyar’s “Broccoli” tells the story of a Russian émigré in the U.S. who, unmoored by her new life, soothes herself by shopping for vegetables that she never has time to cook. In Haruki Murakami’s “The Year of Spaghetti,” a man spends 1971 escaping reality by cooking spaghetti: “Spring, summer, and fall, I cooked and cooked, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.” —Deborah Treisman, fiction editor | 
