Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Table Comes First: France, Family, and the Meaning of Food. Before talking about foodie culture, he took questions in the green room about why Americans don’t get ice hockey, the historical figures he’d like to hang with, and what he ate for lunch.
Q. What was the last thing that inspired you?
A. I saw a production of Athol Fugard’s play, The Road to Mecca in New York City just before I left. It was terrific, particularly the performance of Rosemary Harris.
Q. I know you write children’s books. What are some of your favorites?
A. That’s easy: Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
Q. What do you like most about Los Angeles?
A. It’s the one city that I visit that’s organized in every way-geographically, spatially, emotionally-in a way that’s radically unlike New York or any European city. It doesn’t seem to ape 19th-century cities. It makes it profoundly disorienting and extremely interesting.
Q. Ask yourself a question, then answer it.
A. What’s your biggest disability when it comes to Los Angeles? I don’t know how to drive. I truly cannot get behind the wheel of a car and propel myself.
Q. What French word or phrase do you wish had an English equivalent?
A. Trahison des clercs. It’s a phrase that means generally, intellectuals abdicating responsibilities for detached criticism of the world, and passionately taking sides at the cost of intellectual honesty. I like that phrase a lot and nobody in America knows what it means.
Q. What’s the biggest thing Americans don’t understand about ice hockey?
A. That it is a very strategically subtle game, and that it rewards situational intelligence more than any other of the major spectator sports.
Q. What promise to yourself do you break most often?
A. Not to go online for a period of days.
Q. Who is the one person, living or dead, that you’d love to have a beer with?
A. I don’t know if he would have a beer, but I would love to have a port with Dr. [Samuel] Johnson. Or a glass of wine with Orson Welles. Or a cigarette, even though I don’t smoke, with Kenneth Tynan.
Q. What do you love to hate?
A. Gary Bettman and the administration of the NHL, which is destroying the strategic subtlety of hockey and replacing it with televised brutality.
Q. What have you eaten today?
A. I had lunch at the Getty-a very nice kind of pasta with nice lardons, but there was a kind of foam laid on top of it for no good reason. And it struck me that gratuitous foam is the décor of our time. You could probably write a good book called Gratuitous Foam and Other Incidents in Eating.
Q. What surprises you most about your life right now?
A. How little it’s changed in the past 10 years, and how I’ve come to be this age.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.