Judy Jarvis Co-Editor in Chief

Maybe it was cute, maybe it was corny, but I asked famed former New York Times food editor Molly O’Neill to survey the All Campus Dining Center’s culinary offerings with me. She was on campus for a reading of her forthcoming memoir We Would Be Heroes and it seemed like exposing her to the Vassar cafeteria was the right thing to do.

As we toured each serving station, she held her face close to the food, analyzing in silence. Certain offerings would give her more pause, like the new pasta place, and she would move closer to read a menu, nodding at any white-uniformed worker who looked her way. I let O’Neill—author of three award-winning cookbooks, former host of the “Great Foods” television show, and New Yorker magazine contributor—take her time to speak. Finally, as we began to exit past the salad bar, she commented, “the sesame noodles are something new [to college dining] but nothing else…this is real institutional food.”

Perhaps O’Neill seemed disinterested because she’s got a new focus since starting We Would Be Heroes two years ago: her life. O’Neill’s family structure is intriguing enough on its own—she has five younger brothers, the youngest of whom, Paul, played for the Yankees; health-food obsessed parents who were opposed to any sort of mass culture; and a former minor league pitcher father who saw to it that his young kids did strength conditioning regularly. But it was O’Neill’s wit and precision in relating her younger self’s thought processes during her memoir reading that made the small but attentive audience in the Students’ Building laugh so frequently and so loudly on Jan. 27. She read excerpts from the chapter “My Baby Sister,” relating the time in her childhood when she had resigned herself to the fact that her mother was not going to have a second girl. The young O’Neill took the next best route: she turned baby Paul into her little sister for the first few years of his life, dressing him in drag, with dainty pink ribbons in his curly blonde hair.

“I have no idea whatsoever what I’m going to write,” said O’Neill, sitting at a window table in ACDC, of the hilarious childhood episodes she recalls in her memoir. “It’s like a photograph, you’re watching this Polaroid emerge and you then say, ‘that’s it.’” Her book will be released in the spring of 2006, O’Neill estimates, and the process has been demanding, especially in comparison to her extensive experience in journalism—a world of writing that allows the author to stay in the background. “I’ve had to be face to face with everything I would prefer to live around…but there’s certain things you can’t walk around, someday you have to walk through them, at least if you want to be a writer in full voice and with access to your complete range of expression.”

Although O’Neill has written for a variety of sections in her experience, she is best known for her food writing, and, as her memoir explains, it all goes back to the formative years with her family. From when she was nine until her mid-teens, O’Neill secretly concocted junk food to rebel against her parents. “My parents were very health-conscious and we weren’t allowed to have junk food, packaged food…so when they went out, I would invent junk food using their really good ingredients. So I would make these pizzas out of whole wheat hamburger buns and I would take ketchup and use that as the sauce and then take really good meat and stamp it out so that it would look like pepperoni and I would try and make it taste trashy because my brothers and I wanted trashy food.”

After using sloppy joe demonstrations at the grocery store as her first “cooking school,” O’Neill’s tastes gradually became more sophisticated and she began to “live in books” like the blind food writer Roy Andries De Groot’s Feast For All Seasons. She worked at her college Denison’s cafeteria, attended Paris culinary school La Verenne, founded a woman’s nonviolent cuisine restaurant, wrote for a wide variety of food magazines, as well as the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The New York Times. Versatile food connoisseur she may be, but don’t call her a restaurant critic: “It becomes a very tedious exercise...when my jaw was moving, the meter was running,” she said.

Now that she’s explored almost all things food, O’Neill is branching out not only with her memoir, but she’s also in the planning stages of a multimedia project about eating in America. O’Neill will travel around the country organizing dinners, gathering recipes, raising awareness and money for hunger in alliance with America’s Second Harvest.

In her brown bag lunch chat before her reading, O’Neill explained that the food industry is on the rise in terms of sophistication and snobbery. But how true is that for her other field, journalism, as well? “Any time you have to beat somebody else to be good, there’s going to be a cutthroat aspect to it. And you absolutely have to beat other people every single day to be a good journalist, and so if you don’t like winning, you shouldn’t go into it. However, you don’t have to be a jerk, you can just be good at what you do.” Luckily for rival journalists, O’Neill’s emphasis is now on her book and she doesn’t think she will return as a full staff member to The New York Times. But non-fiction authors—move over.