I have become the anti-food food writer. It's a specialized niche; I am the only member. Yes, it has all been extraordinarily unorthodox, but that's of a piece with the arc of my writing career. If you enjoy irony,this one has been the laugh that keeps on going.Recently, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a food symposium called MAD 2013, the others are all celebrated chefs and industry professionals. It's astonishing.

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Jon by Ellen Dubin Photography

JB: My guest today is Jon Reiner, author of The Man Who Couldn't Eat : A Memoir.

Welcome to OpEdNews, Jon. In 2010, you won the James Beard Foundation for Magazine Feature Writing. Your 2009 essay in Esquire by the same name later evolved into this book, published in September 2011. Wasn't it a bit unorthodox that the James Beard Foundation honored you for writing something that, rather than celebrating food in all its glory, dwelled primarily on food's assault on you and your inability to eat anything at all?

JR: Thank you for the opportunity to share my story with OpEdNews.  When my Esquire editor, Mark Warren, contacted me after the James Beard Foundation Awards were announced and exclaimed, "We won!" it served as the commemorative start of a fruitful period of wonderful irony.  I never intended this, but I have become the anti-food food writer.  

It's a specialized niche; I am the only member, so we always have a quorum at the group meetings.  Yes, it has all been extraordinarily unorthodox, but that's of a piece with the arc of my writing career.  If you enjoy irony, this one has been the laugh that keeps on going.  Recently, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a food symposium, called MAD 2013, in Copenhagen this coming August.  The symposium is led by Rene Redzepi, who is the chef at Restaurant Noma there, one of the top restaurants in the world.  The other keynoters are all celebrated chefs and industry professionals.  It's astonishing.

JB: It is! You've had a chronic case of Crohn's disease for years.  And then, on top of it, you endured a botched emergency surgery that almost killed you. That's the basis of your book. And beyond telling that story, it also focuses an awful lot on food, most of which you couldn't or shouldn't eat. Have you thought about why and how food is so central to our experience, how we define ourselves and live our lives?

JR:  Remember the old Joni Mitchell line, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."  That's a good starting point to explain my relationship with food and how it manifested itself in the writing process.  Before I went through the months of Nothing-By-Mouth that prompted The Man Who Couldn't Eat, I never considered writing about food, which was odd both because it had become so prevalent in literature and because I was a voracious eater, a flavor fiend.  And, I must confess, months into my food deprivation, the notion of telling the story of a profound episode through the absence of and craving for food still didn't occur to me.  

During a hospital visit, my editor suggested to me the idea of writing about what it's like not to be able to eat.  In my state -- miserable and despondent -- it took me a while to wrap my head around the concept.  Eventually, when I started writing, the story became unstoppable.  Food, in all of its dynamic elements -- taste, craving, appetite, smell, sense memory, psychology, family dynamics, occasion, history, culture, politics, economics -- offered a conceit that was as rich as anything I'd tried in my writing before.  Food's universality enabled me to tell a story of personal trauma without worrying "Who's going to care?'  Food is as essential as breathing, and, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, it gave me breath as a writer.  It sustained my storytelling.

JB: How did serious and chronic illness affect your family? Your marriage? Your relationship with your kids? Your thoughts about yourself?

JR: Before I get to this, I see that Michele Bachmann said that people who are unemployed should starve.  I recognize now that The Man Who Couldn't Eat isn't about illness; it's about unemployment.

JB: She'll change her tune as soon as she finds herself jobless.

JR: One can only hope that reason will penetrate the cranium of the not-soon-enough-ex-Representative from Mars.  On the other hand, I just received a Tweet from a reader that stated:  "The other day I spent my last 30 pounds [currency] on face paint and glitter.  Now I can't afford food."  In this case, the congresswoman might have a point.  

Regarding your question about the impact of illness on me and my family, it's no picnic.  During the period of The Man Who Couldn't Eat, my health-related encumberments and limitations isolated me physically, the Nothing-By-Mouth regimen isolated me socially, and the depression of declining health isolated me psychologically.  I was a stay-at-home dad of two school-age children who was no longer capable of providing for their many daily needs.  

To be suddenly removed from their lives was enormously disruptive and frightening.  Every child worries when a parent gets sick, and every sick parent worries about contributing to their kids' fears.  I also went from being a husband to a patient, and not a very good patient, so that placed an enormous strain on our marriage, something that I wrote about in the book.  I've lived with both long-term illness and unemployment -- two of the major stresses that can cripple happiness -- and the impact and repercussions of illness, in my experience, have been far more severe.

JB: Who would know better than you? You write about an interesting phenomenon you term "the patient's dilemma". Can you talk about that a little before we move on?

JR:  It's presumptuous of me to speak for all sick people in the context of my self-termed "patient's dilemma" -- who the hell appointed me spokesperson -- so permit me to relate it specifically to my own situation.  I used the term to refer to the psychological paradox I inflicted on other people as my condition improved.  

When my health was touch-and-go, I demanded recognition of its severity and resented people's impulse to offer words of hope and encouragement.  "You'll get better," sounded to me like a dismissal of my real suffering.  Then, when I was healthy enough to resume an active life, I was bothered when people still treated me like a sick person.  "How are you feeling?  Are you OK?" sounded to me like pity even if it was an expression of compassion, like a judgment that I would continue to be thought of as sick, when, psychologically, I wanted to move on.  As I said, I was a lousy patient.

book cover by http://www.jonreiner.com

JB: I see that. On a different but definitely related topic, your stint at ICU [the company, not the hospital unit], was archetypal for all kinds of reasons. You describe the set-up brilliantly in your book. Can you share that experience with our readers?

JR:  I'd be delighted to discuss this other kind of sickness.  The period in my life that serves the timeframe of the memoir was marked by two pivotal events -- illness and unemployment -- that triggered the personal crises dramatized in the narrative by the total deprivation and dislocation of Nothing By Mouth.  

As a writer, both events worked as equal weights on the same bar, allowing me to take the story far down before eventually bringing it back up to rejoin the living.  My invention of "ICU" (not the real name of my employer) may have been an overbaked joke, but I thought it was in the right spirit.  I'd actually experienced three corporate layoffs from 2001 to 2007, and I consolidated those events for storytelling purposes.  

The occasion of the ICU layoff depicted in the book really did happen.  I was a creative director for an integrated marketing agency, leading a pitch for the business of a global processed-food and sweetened-beverage company.  In the weeks leading up to the pitch, the publicly-traded holding company that managed us kept cutting heads until I was about the last person in the place.  I delivered the pitch at the client's opulent and silent corporate campus, and I thought it went well.  

On the ride back to the city, an ICU executive called to tell me there was no need to return to the office, and that my severance envelope was being delivered to my apartment.  ICU wound up selling my creative work to the client for someone else to execute.  I saw the campaign on TV and print for a long time after.  That was the last time I worked in a full-time job.  At least the word came to me by phone.  The news of my first layoff was delivered by fax.  That profound experience of worker devaluation has been a dominant theme for me and millions of other men and women in this country, so I thought it had the universality that would resonate in the book.  

JB:  You've written about good health involving balance -- in work, life and in what we  eat.  You're no longer a corporate cog. So far so good. Please talk about what else you've learned about how to achieve that Holy Grail of overall balance.

JR:  For me, "balance" has represented more than figuring out how to achieve the healthy mix of work, family, play, diet, etc., which is, enormous in its own right.  Those elements largely exist within your control -- you can have a palpable result based on the choices you make.   What's been harder has been accepting living with uncertainty, and in one area at least, that's directly related to living with chronic illness.  As my wise hematologist summed up the problem to me during an exam:  "You want answers and certainty.  You can't have that.  You live with uncertainty.  That's your lot.  You have to accept it."  

I'd never thought of things that way before.  Intellectually, it makes sense, but it's a hard judgment to reconcile with the emotional need for control, for belief in the future rewards of making good choices, for allegiance to a brighter future.  When I'm enjoying a period of good health, I fall back to a kind of functional denial -- I think I'm capable of anything, that I don't live with limitations -- that's also a way of believing that I've got control.  

Functional denial isn't all bad -- you have to put aside worry and uncertainty if you're going to have the will to get off your ass and do something, but failing to accept the capricious presence of illness can really knock you flat when you hit a bad period.  I tend toward extremes -- health or illness, euphoria or unhappiness -- but you need to be in the stable middle to deal with whatever comes along.  Living in the moment is one expression of that.  I've learned that lesson, but I don't live it as much as I should.

JB: Sigh. That's pretty true for most of us, I would guess. What did you hope your readers would take away from this book? And what kind of response have you gotten so far?

JR:  Because The Man Who Couldn't Eat was to be my first published book, I had tremendous interest in how it would be received.  I feared that due to the subject matter it would be ghettoized as an "illness" book, that readers and critics would be inclined to privilege the story over the writing itself.  To some degree, that's unavoidable.  However, my hope was that the book would be considered on its literary merits, and where there have been reviewers and readers who've responded to the quality of the storytelling, that has been enormously satisfying.  

Seeing the book through to completion was both a personal and professional catharsis for me.  I realize that doesn't address what's implicit in your question, but I had no desire to preach a lesson to readers about illness or deprivation.  I was interested in readers becoming engaged with the storytelling and forming their own impressions.  

Many readers have written to me to share their own experiences surviving the crucibles in their lives -- illness, unemployment, marriage, parenting, spiritual crises -- and I've been moved by their compassion.  They're writing with great concern and candor because even though we don't know each other, they've connected with something in the book that's prompted them to find me.  It's a wonderful expression of kindness and solidarity.  I love hearing from readers.

JB: That answer does it for me. What are you working on now, Jon?

JR:  I'm writing a novel that I'd begun before The Man Who Couldn't Eat opportunity happened.  It's a story I've been thinking about and writing for a long time, and it kept coming back to me.  I'm also directing a documentary film called Tree Man, about people who come to New York City every holiday season to sell Christmas trees on the sidewalks of the city.  It's a story that was under my nose for years, and I never conceived of it as a documentary until last December.  It's been a real surprise and has developed great momentum.  I'm also writing a fictionalized children's book adaptation of the film.  In the spring, I  finished a draft of a screenplay adaptation of The Man Who Couldn't Eat, and I've got to keep that one moving.

JB: So, you're not exactly sitting around eating bonbons, are you?  Good luck with all your projects. I'll be particularly interested in seeing how the screenplay turns out!

JR:  Thanks very much, Joan.  It's remarkable that all of this began with a rupture in my gut.  And, I would never turn down a bonbon.

JB: I'll keep that in mind, Jon! Thanks so much for talking with me. It was a pleasure.

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Jon's website

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.