Food is belonging, otherness and a ‘glorious addiction’ for Melissa Leong and Candice Chung |
Food can bring us together. It carries memories and meaning. And it’s at the centre of new memoirs by food writers Melissa Leong and Candice Chung. They explore the ways food can inspire us to take chances and to heal, and to say the unsayable.
Melissa Leong is perhaps best known for being the first MasterChef Australia judge to be a woman – and a person of colour. In her memoir, Guts, she reflects on her time on MasterChef (among other shows), and her life in the world of food more broadly.
Review: Guts – Melissa Leong (Murdoch Books); Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You – Candice Chung (Allen & Unwin)
Leong started her food writing career during a brief stint in corporate advertising. In 2007, she was encouraged to create something new – a blog! Fooderati was born. From there, she entered freelance food writing, mentored by industry heavyweights Helen Greenwood and John Newton.
Leong claims she “conned” her way into the food world, but reflects, “even before food became a defining part of my career, it was a guiding light in my life”.
While Leong’s memoir spans her entire career to date, Chung’s is more focused, centring mainly on her experiences over two years, interspersed with stories from the past. In Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, writer, editor and restaurant reviewer Chung, now based in Glasgow, takes us back to 2019, “the summer of bushfires”, when Sydney was burning.
Since the demise of her 13-year relationship several years prior, Chung had been accompanied on her restaurant review outings by her parents – whom she had been estranged from for a decade. According to Chung, by 2019 they were the perfect team, despite their long estrangement. She writes:
No one ever suspects we are working undercover […] No one ever asks – not even once – why we stopped setting foot in each other’s kitchens for thirteen years. At the restaurant, we are a normal family.
Into this tense equilibrium enters “the geographer”, a Canadian who “messages in full sentences”. On the cusp of the pandemic, she falls in love with him over fried mackerel and green beans, and margarita pizza.
While these books are very different, together they emphasise some key themes about food, belonging, family, mental health and working in the food industry.
Leong........