On Process and Place: Letter Two (food!)

Substack Letters between Mark Dykeman (How About This) and Julie Falatko (Do the Work) about where we're from and how that influenced our work now

Hello, and welcome to week two of a Substack Letters series between me and

Mark Dykeman

of

How About This

, all about where we grew up and where we live, and how that has influenced our creative lives.

Last week we talked about regional television. If you missed our rundown of Miss Anne, Switchback, The Magic Garden, and Wonderama, catch up here:

On Process And Place - Letter #1 (Mark to Julie)

On Process and Place: Letter One (Television)

This week we’re talking about food, specifically regional foods of our childhood. Here’s Mark’s letter, and make sure you click over to read it so you’ll know what I’m talking about when I’m referring to mini sips and the Burger Junction.

On Process And Place - Letter #2 (Mark to Julie)

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MARK! I am so boggled by that bag of juice that part of me wants to toss out everything I had planned on telling you about and talk only about bags of juice. We have Capri Sun (which is a slightly-more-stately pouch of juice), but something about the packaging of mini sips seems both chaotic and dystopian (like I can imagine the factory machine that kachunks out these juice bags). Why do I keep picturing kids hurling these bean-bag-sized plastic packets of juice at each other? Were you all more refined than that? I can’t help but think there was a branch of bullying based entirely on having great aim with a mini sip. 

Also juice called BEEP is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard. It makes no sense. 

I loved hearing about Burger Junction. How many restaurants in the 80s had “a mildly train-like decor”? All of them? Was it all of them? Maybe? There is a deeply familiar feel to that, those eateries that were supposed to feel like a depot, or a train car. A restaurant decor as nostalgia for ways of eating we never actually experienced.

LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT CANADA

Here is where I confess to you that when I asked if we could write about regional foods, I was thinking about your Canadian foods. Whenever I go to Canada, I buy foods I can’t get at home, like Coffee Crisp, and poutine. On a camping trip to Nova Scotia in 2014, we stopped at a gas station and I bought something called Nova Scotia Oatcakes. The label said they were good for after school, breakfast, and midnight – in other words, the perfect food. They were great. I started to have visions of always having a batch of Nova Scotia Oatcakes ready on the kitchen counter, and if someone stopped by, I could say, “Would you like tea and a Nova Scotia Oatcake?” In this scenario I am wearing an apron and taking a break from mopping the floor, probably, so it was doomed from the outset. At any rate, I have tried to make them, but could never get them to be as good as the vacation gas station oatcakes.

On that same camping trip, we got this cereal just because we had never heard of it, and also they were advertising free flip flops. (We didn’t get the flip flops; we would have had to buy many more boxes of VECTOR to make it happen.)

But these letters aren’t supposed to be only about where you grew up. 

LET’S ALSO TALK ABOUT MAINE

I also kept thinking of the regional food from where I live now. Maine has bean hole beans, canned brown bread, Moxie (a regional soda my 14-year-old loves and which my friend Ian said tasted like “all of the sodas, with a bubble gum chaser”), and Needhams (chocolates with potato filling). Speaking of potatoes, and I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing you of anything, but, in fact Humpty Dumpty was founded in my small town (South Portland, Maine) and is known (apparently?) as “Maine’s potato chip.” Look, I don’t know. I certainly thought All Dressed (my favorite flavor) was a distinctly Canadian potato chip flavor that we were lucky to get because we live so close to Canada. But maybe we all have a metaphorical regional Humpty Dumpty potato chip factory in our hearts. Or maybe you and I were fated to be friends based on this delicious potato chip link. Maybe one day we’ll start our own society and people will greet each other on the street: “Humpty dumpty, Mark!” “And Old Dutch to you, Julie!” and then we’ll go have oatcakes.

BUT WHAT ABOUT NJ, JULIE?

WOW I am avoiding the topic at hand here. And do you know why? Because I couldn’t really remember any regional foods of New Jersey. I know it was a while ago, but nothing stood out. I texted my mom and she couldn’t think of anything either, and pointed out that we didn’t eat out much. 

I googled it, thinking maybe something would jar my memory, but the internet said “salt water taffy” (but that’s for the Jersey Shore, not the suburbs of Manhattan) and “tomatoes” (New Jersey is also known as the Garden State, but I’m not here to tell you that my adult creative process was deeply influenced by tomatoes). 

I think one problem is that a lot of the foods I ate as a kid weren’t regional. I ate Fun-Dip and drank Tab just like every other kid in the 70s (despite my mom’s extremely healthy homemade meals). Sometimes I got healthier candy (it wasn’t actually healthy) at the dusty health food store in town: Tiger’s Milk Bars and Honee’s honey candy. 

Luckily things started to come back to me. You are correct that New York City had an influence on the food of my childhood in Tenafly, NJ. The pizza of my youth was not your Pizza Delight or even Pizza Hut but standard delightful New-York-style pizza (thin and eaten folded in half). We also had a regular diet of bagels (with cream cheese and, on special occasions, lox). I loved getting a knish from a deli – have you had one? It’s a savory potato-filled pastry (a lot of potatoes in our childhoods, Mark). It was served in a piece of foil to keep it hot, and I would dip it in mustard. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a knish.¹

To go with the knish, I’d get a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda if they had it in the drinks case. Dr. Brown’s also had a celery soda, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. I had it a few times but in my mind it was something only old men drank. No kid wants celery soda. Its presence in a drinks case always felt like a dare. I’d probably like it now!²

In high school my friends and I went to the Tenafly Diner all the time, because we could hang out and drink coffee and eat french fries and talk without our parents overhearing. (There were adults eating in the diner, but somehow never our parents.) There was nothing special about the Tenafly Diner, except that it was walking distance from the high school. It was a place we could meet and stay for a long time. The waitresses always seemed to sigh when we came in, and now I can see why. We were a bunch of teenagers who barely ordered anything and hogged a booth for three hours.

The only other places I remember going to eat (both of which are now long gone) were the Yaffa Cafe in the Village (NYC), which was made me feel like an extra in Desperately Seeking Susan, and served good hummus. And I have strong memories of getting a hot vanilla (like a hot chocolate, but vanilla) somewhere in nearby Hoboken – maybe Maxwell’s, where I know my friends and I went to see bands sometimes, so maybe I got a hot vanilla there too? I have recreated a hot vanilla the best I can over the years. Now is a good time of year for it, actually. 

I’m thinking now about how there are foods of our childhood which don’t seem unusual at the time, especially the pizza or bagels or choo choo burgers of our very young years. It’s not until we’re older that we might realize that foods are different in other places. (I love going to grocery stores when I’m on vacation, just to see what’s there that I can’t get at home.) Like I talked about in last week’s letter, in fiction, at least, being specific about food can ground a character and a setting. So these foods of our youth – the local and the chains – grounded us in our specific times and places. 

There’s something too which came up for me: the walking meal, and the sit-down meal. And I do appreciate a foldable slice of pizza and a foil-wrapped knish for how you can eat and keep moving toward your destination. But there is something to those long lazy diner meals when you’re a teenager eating with your friends, talking about important things, which is to say: everything. If you do it right, you find yourself and your people over hot french fries and lukewarm coffee. When I think about the atmosphere I want to create in my novels, it’s a lot like the Tenafly Diner. Kids on their own, figuring things out, straddling the world between being kids and being adults.

I’m looking forward to next week, when we wrap all this up and talk about the actual places where we grew up.

Your friend,

Julie

1. A knish restaurant actually opened not that long ago in the town I live in now, and I haven’t been, only because, I think, I’m afraid it won’t be as great as the knishes of my youth. This is not a great reason and I should support this knish restaurant.

2. The online menu for my town’s knish restaurant has just informed me that they have Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray and Mark I really need to leave the house more. I should get a knish and a Cel-Ray before next week’s letter.