Why I Write About Food: Guest Post from Jory John, Author of The Sour Grape
Hardcover $19.99
The Sour Grape
The Sour Grape
By
Jory John
Illustrator
Pete Oswald
In Stock Online
Hardcover $19.99
Jory John and Pete Oswald’s The Food Group series has quietly become an essential guide for how to teach children about their ever-confusing emotions. In their latest, The Sour Grape, we dive into the world of “grudges.” An under-discussed part of life, grudges live in all of us regardless of age. With their signature humor and art style, John and Oswald help us digest these feelings in a way only they masterfully can. Don’t skip your daily servings of The Food Group! Keep reading for a delightful story from Jory John about why he writes about food rather than cooks it!
Jory John and Pete Oswald’s The Food Group series has quietly become an essential guide for how to teach children about their ever-confusing emotions. In their latest, The Sour Grape, we dive into the world of “grudges.” An under-discussed part of life, grudges live in all of us regardless of age. With their signature humor and art style, John and Oswald help us digest these feelings in a way only they masterfully can. Don’t skip your daily servings of The Food Group! Keep reading for a delightful story from Jory John about why he writes about food rather than cooks it!
Sure, I’m the author of books like The Bad Seed, The Good Egg, The Cool Bean, The Couch Potato, The Smart Cookie, and the brand-new picture book, The Sour Grape — all part of a series that illustrator Pete Oswald and I are calling The Food Group — but my experience with food goes back even further than this, if you can believe it.
Yes, when people ask me why I write about food-based characters, I tell them this story:
When I was ten years old, I decided I wanted to become a top-notch, real-deal, world-famous chef. Oh yeah, I was going to open a Michelin-starred restaurant and regularly appear on my own cooking show and yell things like, “Bam!” when I added some spices to a sizzling pan, or whatever. That was my big plan, a plan I had for … nearly a week.
Of course, I had to learn how to cook stuff, first. So, I bought a handy book detailing how to bake delicious cookies, I enlisted a couple of neighborhood pals, and we collectively decided that we were going to make a top-notch, real-deal, world-class batch of sugar cookies and eat them, or sell them, or both. We weren’t sure. The plan was in flux. It didn’t matter, really. All that mattered was that we were going to create some incredible cookies, that sunny weekend afternoon, long ago.
We immediately set to work on the dough, forgoing measuring implements in favor of the more expedient technique of pouring ingredients directly into the bowl. Being a bit impatient and hungry, we started munching on our concoction and the conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hmmmmm … this dough is … salty.”
Friend #1: “Yeah … this is way too salty. This is … salty dough.”
Friend #2: “This is some … seriously … salty dough, you guys.”
All of our faces were puckered, crinkled and wrinkled.
My plan to become a chef was already faltering, based on hasty salt-based measuring mistakes, so I did the only reasonable and rational thing you could do in that situation: I grabbed a canister, overflowing with sugar, and added a ton of the stuff to the dough, trying to counteract and absolutely destroy the salt. I just poured and poured and poured the sugar. Voila!
(Before you ask: No, there was no thought about simply starting over on the dough. We were wayyyyyy too far into the project to begin again. We’d been working for at least ten minutes by that point. So yeah, we were just going to make it so that the sugar, ultimately, outweighed the salt. Simple science!)
After that — and without a subsequent taste-test, for reasons that have become lost with the passage of time — we shaped the dough into spheres, popped them into the oven, set the timer, and paced back and forth, waiting for our creation to transform into a perfect pre-dinner dessert.
When we finally removed the finished cookies, our mouths watering, our stomachs rumbling, we each grabbed two from the baking sheet and prepared to sample our creation. The following scene went a little something like this:
Me: “Whoa! These cookies are twice as salty as before! What happened?!”
Friend #1: “Seriously! These aren’t sugar cookies. These are salt cookies!”
Friend #2: “These are some seriously salty cookies, you guys.”
It turns out that, after tasting the aforementioned salty dough the first time, we (or I) had just added a ton more salt to the dough, assuming that it was sugar. Nobody bothered to verify the contents of the unlabeled container. (Please note: If you’re just staring at it, salt does a pretty good impression of sugar.)
And that, it turns out, was the day I decided to become a children’s book author who wrote about food, instead of attempting to make it.
Or … maybe it wasn’t that exact day. I honestly can’t remember. It was probably a different day. I guess my point is that I didn’t end up becoming a world-class chef, and the rest is history.
Years later, I wrote a book called, The Smart Cookie and basically got cookies out of my system. I no longer think about cookies, except when I want some cookies, or when I’m talking about that particular book, or when somebody mentions cookies.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about grapes, instead, and I even wrote a new book about a sour one. Yes, indeed. But I don’t have any good, personal anecdotes about grapes. Sorry.
So this — “The-Wayyyyyy-Too-Much-Salt-When-I-Meant-To-Use-Way-Too-Much-Sugar Incident” — is why I write picture books about food, rather than preparing actual food at my top-notch, real-deal, world-class restaurant. Everything, they say, happens for a reason.
Bam!