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  • The Critic Magazine

    A foodie in his element

    Nov 26, 2020 4 minutes
    Paul Levy

    DIRT HAS A BAD NAME. What a shame that the UK publishers didn’t change the monosyllabic title of Bill Buford’s knotty, gripping memoir of restaurant kitchens in Lyon for British readers.

    In the great anthropologist Mary Douglas’s dictum, dirt is “matter out of place”. The London Wellcome Collection’s imaginative 2011 show Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life revealed that dirt can excite disgust, moral outrage or sexual excitement. What Buford and speakers of American English mean by “dirt” is “soil” or “earth”, not refuse, detritus or excrement, but the medium in which plants grow; and Buford’s book is an encomium

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