As far as I can remember, this all started with Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which I was eager to read after listening to the author being interviewed on NPR on one of my many long drives down to Philadelphia in the winter. The book didn't disappoint; it unveiled how food companies have increasingly packed our food with chemicals that are cheaper than the ingredients they replaced, and are continually tweaking the levels of sugar, salt and fat in a given product to achieve the perfect "bliss point" of taste. It was surprising to think of some of our beloved food products, many of which been a part of our diets our whole lives, as continually in flux, but apparently companies never stop changing and testing, not only to save more money but to attract new consumers. There were some really great-slash-horrifying origin stories in the book, not least about how the Lunchable was created (and boy, am I glad now that my mom never bought them for us, not that I recall being particularly envious of those who had them). Eating processed food is like playing in a casino--the house always wins. When foods are designed to be as delicious and addictive as possible, your poor body can't help but want them, even when they contribute negligibly to actual nutrition.
Michael Pollan's short book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto described this environment as one filled with "foodlike substances" rather than actual food. He offered a number of deceptively simple suggestions for eating more whole foods: choose foods that your grandmother would recognize as food (no Go-Gurt or soy product), for example, and if you eat processed foods, choose ones that have fewer than five ingredients, and make sure you can pronounce all of them. After I read the book I spent a little time surveying the contents of our pantry, and was surprised that we still had a number of things that didn't fit the profile of "food", pure and simple. This, despite the fact that 2013 has been a banner year for us in terms of improving what and how we eat: we have less processed food and refined grains on hand, and more fruits and vegetables than ever before; we cook regularly, and make our own versions of easy items like hummus, salad dressing, and peanut butter; we try not to buy crap.
To be fair, sometimes it's a rock-and-a-hard place choice--like making our own bread. Would it be healthier to have homemade multigrain bread? Sure, as long as we could keep our hands off it, which we couldn't. Our time on the dysglycemia diet, when we were only supposed to eat a single serving of grains (ie, 1 slice) per day, made the decision to retire the breadmaker much easier. That diet, by the way, was responsible for helping us break a lot of our dependence on grains; we're no longer following it strictly, but Sean now drinks a kale, berry, and peanut-butter protein smoothie for breakfast in place of oatmeal, and I have eggs, fruit, and almonds in place of my old friend, Cheerios. I haven't eaten a granola bar since May, when I replaced them with cheese sticks. Pasta has made a return, along with the aforementioned sandwich bread, but we're much more careful about it than before. Just the other night, making pasta for the two of us, I threw in a whole cupful of dry pasta for myself, and then complained that it was too much--Sean, enjoying 1/2 a cup, laughed and pointed out that last year, we'd have split the entire box of pasta.
Another eye-opening book was The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, by Tracy McMillan. I referred to this as Nickel and Dimed: Food Edition, because that's pretty much what it was. Instead of reading about the experience of a Minute Maid in Maine, I read about what it's like to be a migrant farmer picking peaches, garlic and grapes in California; the massive food waste in Walmart's produce sections; and the "foodlike substances" that are prepackaged and reheated for your eating, um, pleasure, at chain restaurants like Applebee's. We're not chain restaurant eaters anyway, but if we were, I'd be seriously grossed out by how little actual cooking is going on in those kitchens! One of Sean's friends loves Olive Garden, despite living in New Haven, where the Italian food is fantastic. It boggles the mind--or rather, it would, until you consider that those restaurants are extensions of the food-industrial complex described in Sugar Salt Fat: those pre-made dishes are designed to hit you right in the tastebuds and keep you coming back for more. Plus, breadsticks.
My reading has taken a pleasant turn more recently, however, starting with Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr. I was familiar with Child and Beard (the latter only because of the award named after him), but not Fisher, who was one of the first well-known American food writers, beginning in the 1930s. Profoundly influenced by her love of France and French cuisine, she wrote essays and books that explored the sensual pleasures of the table--at a time when that concept was largely anathema to Puritan-inflected America. The author of the book is Fisher's great-nephew, and he based it on the voluminous correspondence preserved among and by the personalities in the book, as well as his aunt's meticulous journal covering the winter of 1970, when she, Child, Beard, and a raft of other American culinary lights happened all to be in Provence at the same time, sharing meals and wine together.** He argues that 1970 represented an important moment of tension for the American food scene after decades of dominance by French haute cuisine, and among the individuals present in Provence that winter he identifies members of the various factions--the old guard and the purists (Child's stormy French collaborator, Simone Beck, and the perfectionist American ex-pat Richard Olney) vs. those ready for a breath of something new, and perhaps no longer exclusively European (Child, Fisher, Beard).
The book managed to evoke the smells and tastes of the meals just as well as the turbulent personalities of those who created and enjoyed them, and left me with the desire to visit Provence, and to drink and taste some of what they describe. True, I'm not much interested in the snails, oysters, or sea urchins, but rabbit stew, braised slowly over low heat in a pan sealed with a piece of fabric dipped in water and flour, to form an airtight seal? Count me in. Same for sole meuniere, the fish which converted Julia Child to French cuisine upon her arrival in France--sole fillets dredged in milk and flour, fried in butter, and garnished with butter and lemon juice. (I have aspirations of making this after the holidays, as soon as I can locate sole fillets). I should add, though, that I sensed more hidden issues of class and snobbery at play here than did Barr (who was clearly raised with money, and who is now an editor at Travel + Leisure). For for example, I found myself rolling my eyes when Fisher mourned how crass and commercial, how American, everything in la belle France was becoming by 1970, in contrast to the pre-war halcyon days. Somehow her attitude, which was shared by Child and the others, seemed terribly selfish. France is not for you, I kept wanting to say. It's not some sort of Eden for wearied Americans to recharge their cultural and gastronomic batteries; it's a living culture, not an artifact displayed for your pleasure in a museum.
At any rate, after I finished the book I read some of Fisher's own work, starting with the rather eclectic Serve it Forth from 1937. Julia Child's My Life in France is on my to-read (I even watched Julie and Julia, but only for the Meryl Streep parts; Amy Adams' plotline was so terrible I couldn't even bear to watch her). I've just started another book by Michael Pollan, as well: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, and so far it's excellent. More food reading, more food-making, and of course, more eating is to come between now and the New Year!
**Wouldn't it be great if one day, some grand-niece or grand-nephew of mine wanted to use this blog as material for a novel?
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