I subscribed to Saveur for several years but never finished any of the long articles — which weren’t that long. This should have puzzled me, but it didn’t. A month ago, however, I got the audiobook of Secret Ingredients, the New Yorker anthology about food. I was surprised how many of the articles I didn’t want to listen to. 90%? Usually I like New Yorker anthologies and read most of the articles. I’m a more tolerant listener than reader which made the comparision even worse.

Here’s my explanation. Food writing is like downtown Edinburgh. Its main street has shops on one side, on the other side a park. What should have been the economically most lively street in the city is rendered half as effective as it might be by the fact that half of it isn’t businesses. As something to write about, food is similar. Just as a park is economically inert, food is psychologically inert. Like a park, food can be pleasant (to read about) but it doesn’t act. It isn’t alive. This is why those Saveur feature articles were hard to read, I realized. They resembled flat lists: We cooked and ate X, Y, and Z. It’s incredibly hard to make that sort of thing fun to read. The best article in Secret Ingredients was John McPhee’s profile of Euell Gibbons. It’s a mini-adventure story, with an interesting guy at the center. The food is . . . a condiment.

This is why I’m so impressed by the chapter “Waizhou, USA” in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee. Waizhou means “out of state” — in this case, away from New York City. It’s the story of a family who left New York to run a Chinese restaurant in a small Georgia town. It took a shocking turn that Lee didn’t expect. Police took the children away. The father was arrested. “The offices pointed to the burn scars from cooking oil on the parents’ arms and said that was evidence that the couple had a history of fighting.” This had horrible and ramifying effects. “Oh, I can’t eat there anymore,” said a lawyer, “that’s the DV [domestic violence] case.” The teenage daughter starts using the court system to punish her mother. The parents are arrested again. “They had violated court rules by driving near their children’s foster home. Because they had sold their restaurant they were considered a flight risk.” Eventually they get their children back, and go back to New York. It’s a whole slice of life I’d never read about before. Enormously emotional and unpredictable. The father enjoyed jail. “When I was in jail for two days, it was really relaxing,” he told Lee.