I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen With Your Favorite Bands
A book by Kara Zuaro

As we continue to watch the mainstream media’s growing obsession with the lives of famous people, a similar phenomenon has started to creep up in the normally insular world of indie rock. We’ve stopped considerably short of photographing our small-scale stars as they walk out of Starbucks, thankfully, but there seems to be a heightened desire to know more about what exactly they do outside of the music they make—the goal, I presume, being to find anything we can to more readily identify ourselves with the people who so often stand as exemplars of the idealized lifestyles we always told ourselves we’d have, way back before we had, you know, bills and shit.

Look at how people have treated Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn and his fondness for baseball. Writers everywhere jump at the chance to discuss it, and the band’s live shows consistently feature baseball-related banter between songs, often initiated by the crowd—some of whom are implying an ironic wink of the eye, while the more insecure of the bunch actually seem to be in search of permission to like both music and sports.

Look, too, at the way indie rock has in recent years kind of joined forces with the comedy world. At this year’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, comedians like David Cross, Aziz Ansari and Patton Oswalt were nearly as ubiquitous as the bigger-name bands, getting out there on stages all across the city like some sort of ancillary joint product whose sole purpose was to further establish the indie rock brand. Sub Pop Records, the longstanding arbiter of good counter-culture taste, has even taken to releasing comedy albums.

All of this brings us to I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, a cookbook edited by New York music-and food-writer Kara Zuaro. While playing host to friends in touring bands, she would often find herself providing the one thing touring musicians miss most while out on the road: a home-cooked meal. Over breakfast or brunch (or drunken, late-night feasts), conversation would eventually lead to the bands discussing their own culinary excursions, and Zuaro had the idea to compile recipes from all of her favorite bands.

The results, as to be expected, vary quite a bit in terms of quality, or at least in the required skill level. Crooked Finger and former Archer of Loaf Eric Bachmann, for example, contributes his recipe for “Seared Tuna with Wasabi Coconut Sauce and Roasted-Pepper Rice Pilaf,” while Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla offers his recipe for his “Veggie Sausage and Peanut Butter Sandwich.” The list of bands that contributed is long and admirable—everyone from Belle and Sebastian and Ben Kweller to They Might Be Giants and the Mountain Goats chipped in. Yet the most impressive thing about the whole package is the stories that accompany the recipes—both from the bands and Zuaro herself. They shed just a little bit more light on these artists we respect so deeply, offering us another way to identify with them, just when we start to worry that the similarities between them and us have run dry. We might be fooling ourselves, but then again, we might not be. After all, if Franz Ferdinand and I both love “Lemon Ginger Flapjacks,” it’s got to mean something, right?