The Arrangement

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M. F. K. Fisher, the writer whose artful personal essays about food created a genre, died on Monday at her home on the Bouverie Ranch in Glen Ellen, Calif. She was 83 years old.

She died after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, her daughter Kennedy Wright said.

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Mrs. Fisher wrote hundreds of stories for The New Yorker, as well as 15 books of essays and reminiscences. She produced the enduring English translation of Brillat-Savarin’s book The Physiology of Taste, as well as a novel, a screenplay, a book for children and dozens of travelogues. While other food writers limited their writing to the particulars of individual dishes or expositions of the details of cuisine, Mrs. Fisher used food as a cultural metaphor.

Her subject matter, she said in an interview in 1990, “caused serious writers and critics to dismiss me for many, many years. It was woman’s stuff, a trifle.” But she was not deterred. In 1943 she wrote in her book The Gastronomical Me: “People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do. They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

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