I just read a review of Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition which sniffed at it as being journalism rather than history. Guilty as charged; if ever there were a subject which called for a fast-paced, impressionistic and anecdotal treatment more than sober examination, it was the 13-year-experiment in telling Americans they couldn’t drink. The subject sprouts analogies like a hydra; this is the most insightful political book, the most informative book about what we put in our bodies, the most revealing book on American morals of the year, and it moves at a pace that, if it sacrifices detail (suddenly Prohibition has passed everywhere— were none of those state by state fights fascinating in themselves?), utterly fits a subject that seemed like a kind of mania that seized the country, and was undone by half a dozen other madnesses it spawned in its wake.

Prohibition came out of the religious revival of the early 19th century, but took a back seat to other moral causes (such as slavery) at first. (It was not being allowed to speak on temperance that drove Susan B. Anthony toward demanding votes for women.) A country so thoroughly drunken as the United States seemed unlikely to ever adopt such a cause, and there was never a pro-Prohibition majority in America, but by choosing to go the Constitutional amendment route (where they could assemble the necessary votes among rural states, and avoid the urban majorities of the House of Representatives), and where necessary preying on anti-immigrant sentiment against those beer-swilling Irish and Germans and the booze-inflamed Negro threat to white womanhood, they managed to eke out state by state victories. Suddenly, without the largest states and cities having had a say, alcohol was illegal nationwide, and the victorious Drys declared a new day had dawned in America, forever.

What they failed to reckon on was, simply, American ingenuity. Prohibition exploded in a million ways of getting liquor past the laws. People with boats could sail to floating liquor supermarkets just past the 3-mile limit of US legal jurisdiction over the seas, or take a new kind of vacation called a “cruise” to a Caribbean destination where rum flowed freely. Doctors issued alcohol prescriptions, drug stores opened to fill those prescriptions (and built mighty chains like Walgreen’s on alcohol profits, squeezing non-alchoholic druggists out of the business), and gentiles became “rabbis” to be able to distribute wine for ritual purposes to their supposed flocks. Great fortunes were made (the Bronfmans, but not, Okrent argues, the Kennedys, at least not nearly so much as is claimed today).  The formal dinner party, with its after-dinner segregation by sex, was replaced by the cocktail party, mingling lawbreakers of both sexes who, having broken one rule of morality, didn’t stop there. The income tax was created, largely to replace the decline in government revenues caused by outlawing liquor and, thus, eliminating liquor taxes. (In a real sense, the lifeblood of government before then was alcohol.)  The search power of the police was vastly expanded (including to the telephone); something called the “plea bargain” was invented to deal with the immense volume of cases.

Oh, and there was a little thing called “organized crime” that grew from a tiny scourge of inner city ethnic populations into a major, permanent feature of the economy and society, corrupting every police force that existed with an irresistible shower of money for something that, truth be told, most of them simply didn’t believe was wrong in the first place. The Maryland State House had an official bootlegger, who had to be fired when Prohibition ended.  In San Francisco, the city trash service delivered California wine— and took away your empties.

It’s a marvelous story, in the sense of marveling at how so many outrageous things happened, and it’s one that is trotted out all the time as a demonstration of the futility of government legislating morality, not least in the matter of our own modern prohibition of mood-altering illegal substances. Ironically that’s the one form of Prohibition that actually did work, for a time; for 40 or 50 years after the government outlawed narcotics, they did stay pretty much out of the mainstream, unlike bootleg liquor. The lesson is, you can outlaw something that people are already convinced is wrong and to be avoided, though once they stop believing that, as people did about pot in the 1960s and 1970s, you’re back where Prohibition started.

Likewise, cigarettes could be restricted once people were against them anyway, and our modern game of replacing lard with trans-fats and trans-fats with the next fat and HFCS with something else can work as long as no one really has to make a sacrifice beyond Mickey D’s fries tasting slightly different. But get more restrictive (or bossy) and you will create a black market in Russian mafiya Twinkies overnight. And while we’re tallying up analogies, the way in which Prohibition was passed through every clever procedural maneuver known to man despite substantial voter doubt and opposition, and trumpeted as a great and permanent achievement that ordinary people would learn to appreciate in time, can’t help but remind one of Obamacare earlier this year. Health care is surely as personal as drinking, and if its restrictions come to seem too intrusive on personal choice, it is not hard to imagine that American ingenuity may sprout just as ingeniously beyond the 3-mile limit of the internet. The lesson that passing a law is not the same as having the consent of the governed has to be relearned with every generation, apparently. The only truly permanent law is the one of unintended consequences.

In Prohibition’s case, when it became (rather belatedly if you ask me) obvious to the Anti-Saloon League’s tight-leashed coalition in Congress that the law was being widely violated, they did what politicians always do— they Got Tough On Crime with something called the Jones Law in 1927, which ratcheted up the penalties for serving a single glass of hooch from speeding ticket level to felonies. To the extent it frightened ordinary barmen and druggists and rabbis out of the business, it only removed competition for the gangsters who were unafraid of any laws, and its excesses finally provoked national outrage against the pecksniffs and humbugs who’d foisted this whole regime on America and found no aspect of everyday life they couldn’t stick their noses into.

Newspapers were filled with tales of the crimes the Jones Law had led to, such as “The Massacre in Aurora,” in which a middle class Illinois housewife was gunned down in her kitchen by Prohibition agents seeking to search her cellar. Even Prohibition’s victories, like the conviction of Al Capone for violating the tax laws that only existed for the same reason he did, couldn’t stem the growing conviction that it had all been a big, naive mistake.  A Wet coalition, improbably uniting immigrants (led by the likes of Al Smith and Fiorello LaGuardia) with the bluest of bluebloods (Pierre duPont, William Randolph Hearst) on the common ground of telling government to buzz off, overwhelmed the worn-out, demoralized Drys. The most effective Wet political figure, forgotten today, was probably a Morton Salt heiress named Pauline Sabin, a former Dry who came to believe that responsible social drinking among the young was better than the irresponsible binge drinking Prohibition fostered. (In a weird way, Prohibition and Repeal were both attempts to reduce the amount of alcohol consumption and the attendant social damage.) She legitimized the Wet cause among society women, and that legitimized it for everybody. And so a cause that had started with women’s newfound political power ended with it, too.

It would take five more years to pass the only Constitutional Amendment designed to completely invalidate a previous Constitutional Amendment— the Depression, and the need to restore liquor tax revenue when incomes sank, probably did the trick in the end— and pockets of dryness exist in rural counties to this day. But the idea that government could tell citizens not to drink was discredited forever on the national level (well, except for 18 to 21-year-olds, the one group that still parties like it’s 1929). And so Prohibition ended, but the types who forced it through moved on to other things to frown upon. H.L. Mencken, a vigorous defender of his own heritage of beer-drinking Germanic gemütlichkeit, described them for future generations to recognize and resist:

They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy.

It must seem like a wondrous fantasy of salvation to modern journalists waiting for the ax to fall on an entire industry— a government program to pay writers to write! Alas, the 1930s Federal Writers Project was the sort of idealistic New Deal-era folly our hardened age would find too frivolous to spend money on, unlike more practical fictions such as credit default swaps or a viable American auto industry.  Auto workers actually have to be paid to make cars, but as the internet has proven, writers will crank it out no matter what.

The idea of offices full of neurotic young men and women composing acres of government poetry and plays about the working man would have been horrifying, so someone had the brilliant idea of sending them into the sunshine and fresh air to gather material for guidebooks about the 48 states and various major cities. The result was the wonderful, literate, highmindedly populist WPA Guides; and when those were mostly done by the late 30s, the people still in the program were given the further task of gathering material about the food cultures of the various states. These food manuscripts were collected in Washington, and a guide composed from them was being readied to go to the printer… on December 7, 1941. After that day, other priorities took over, and according to The Food of a Younger Land, an anthology edited by Mark Kurlansky (Cod, etc.) and now in paperback, most of these manuscripts were buried like Rosebud or the Lost Ark in a box in a warehouse, until this book brought them to light for the first time…

…that is, if you don’t count the previous anthology made out of the same material, and at least one book collecting a specific writer’s contributions to the project.

So if this isn’t quite the unknown treasure trove claimed, it’s still a rich slice of one of the major food projects of the previous century, and one of the earliest records of foodways around the nation.  For this foodie age, it’s not only a picture of our cuisine’s prehistory B.C. (Before Child, Julia), but a record of how people thought about food before people thought as much about food as we do, or at least in the particular way we do.

The book is, unsurprisingly, organized regionally; and it starts, unfortunately, in the northeast, a section which proves a bit colorless when it comes to food.  America Eats! had already used the better of two pieces on a Vermont May breakfast, and the one that’s left sums up the boringness of the flinty Yankee palate perfectly (“Among other things served at that first breakfast was cold boiled ham”). It only comes to life in gleaming Art Deco New York, where we get a snarkily droll account of a literary tea (“If the party happens to be given in honor of a new author, he is almost always completly ignored”), and a well-observed piece on drugstore lunch counters that includes news of a new dish, hyphenated as if T. Herman Zweibel were writing, called the cheese-burger (“a doughty bit combining grilled hamburger and melted American cheese served on a soft bun and tasty enough to ensnare even the one-cylinder appetite”).  Most usefully to the author of imitation hardboiled fiction, there’s an extensive glossary of classic diner slang, such as Bay State Bum (a demanding lousy tipper), Guinea Footballs (jelly doughnuts), or Two Cackles in Oink (ham and eggs).

The South, unsurprisingly, has the longest and most colorful section, not to mention the biggest names among the writers (such as Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston). Many of these pieces read like fiction, or scenes from longer stories, and you can just about pick a passage at random and find something evocative of that old weird America:

The Negroes begin to gather by sundown. The host walks around barking:
“Good fried hot chitlins crisp and brown,
Ripe hard cider to wash them down,
Cold slaw, cold pickle, sweet tater pie,
And hot corn pone to sap your eye.”
(Menu for Chitterling Strut: A North Carolina Negro Celebration)

This is the part of the book that fulfills the idea of a lost American food culture, full of exotically named delights (Mississippi Mullet Salad, Georgia Possum and Taters, South Carolina Pee Dee Fish Stew) and, more to the point, a rich social dimension to how food is made and consumed in large groups.  It’s also the part that truly seems to care about how you make the food; where the New England section could be frustratingly cryptic about recipes, here the detailed descriptions are loving and meticulous.  It is hard not to conclude that this is the part of America where food matters, has always mattered, as more than mere sustenance.

The Midwest portion is missing some sections (Chicago, for instance, somehow vanished from the surviving manuscripts) and some of what’s left reads like parody of its food’s legendary plainness— the first piece on Kansas seems designed to convince you it’s the most boring steak-and-potatoes place on earth. There’s also a definite tendency to overwrite here, as if to make up for the drabness of the subject— Nelson Algren’s would-be intro to the section is a clumsy clip-job of the info presented in the actual pieces. And William L. White— son of the smalltown editor William Allen White, and famous for the European airs he put on after working as a foreign correspondent— affects a rowdy rusticness in the other major piece on Kansas that sounds like a city dude trying to play a tall-hat rancher.

A lot of the Midwest section is devoted to what the Indians ate before the white man, and the same is true of the Southwest section, which, as the area was pretty unpopulated, would be quite short if Southern California weren’t shoehorned in. The best of this part is a surprisingly thorough picture of the basics of Mexican-American cooking, introducing the cheese-burger’s great rival for the hearts of late 20th century Americans, “a sandwich called the taco: a tortilla fluttered through hot grease, folded around shrimp, sausage, and chili stew, garnished with shredded lettuces and grated cheese.”  The remaining section, covering the west and northwest, gives just a modest preview of the impact this region would have on American dining in the postwar era, mainly conjuring up a half-lost world of plentiful seafood like geoducks and salmon. It does offer two of the quirkiest pieces; one is a three-page rant against inferior ways of making mashed potatoes, and the other is sympathetic account of the choices in industrial alcohol products available to skid row sterno bums, which reads like a parody of connoisseurship (“a new type of tippler now tops all in drinking bravado, according to Portland police. His drink is a mixture of gasoline and evaporated milk”).

Mexicans come off pretty well, and so do blacks, thanks to the regional division of the book. Otherwise ethnic cuisine is pretty much ignored, save for the occasional ringer (some Scandinavian material from the midwest, a piece on Basques in Idaho).  You’ll look in vain for New York deli or Providence red-sauce Italian; this is a book about the old WASP culture.  Of course, fast food doesn’t exist yet (those nascent cheese-burgers and tacos are just harbingers from the future) and there’s little mention of restaurants at all outside the New York and Los Angeles sections; “famous chef” is very nearly an oxymoron in these days.

Mostly this is a book about social gatherings, as that would be the main occasion when rural Americans (and the country was still about evenly rural and urban then) escaped a subsistence diet (like the “corn-dodger” bread described in one piece) and managed to eat, well, high on the hog.  We tend to be convinced that the generation or two before us spent less time consuming media and more time interacting with people, but this book is so filled with affection for church suppers, barbecue struts, Nebraska bison roasts, police widow benefit potlucks and the like that you start to wonder, did they feel like the golden age of food togetherness had been just before their time, too?  Were they regretting the time they spent listening to Amos & Andy and thinking they should have been out catching possums for a burgoo?  On the evidence of this book, America has been bowling alone for longer than we may realize, and the social events that bring us together over food at its most dressed up have always been the cherished exception, not the everyday rule.

I’ve pretty much made my peace with Thomas Keller since starting to regularly make his vegetable stock (as described here). I accept that he is the world’s worst home economist, always urging you to toss away things that frugal housewives would carefully hoard and use to their last bit of life. I accept that he is more particular than I will ever be about straining and clarifying, and that he will always add a step of work if there is the teeniest bit of value to be gained from it. So I make his vegetable stock the way he makes it, and strain out my pricey leeks and fennel after 45 minutes like he says to, and then when he’s left the room, I simmer the vegetables some more and get from them the flavor he would have left behind, because it wasn’t quite pristine and clear enough for him, and then I have two vegetable stocks— a beautiful clear-tasting Keller one for delicate soups, and a slightly down-and-dirtier one for not so delicate ones, and each jar of vegetable stock cost me a buck or two, not three bucks or four. Everybody’s happy.

Well, until Keller came out with what was supposed to be his casual home cooking cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home. Somehow, not remembering my failed attempts to cook out of The French Laundry Cookbook, I convinced myself that it was not only a cookbook I wanted to have, but it would be a worthy Christmas gift for my sister, who’s a fine cook but let’s just say about 10,000 times less hyper about food than I am.

I snapped back to reality when Aschie30 wrote this LTHForum post about how difficult Keller makes the act of making something as simple and homey as chicken and dumplings. True, she finally decides that all the extra work was worth it, but in the process she certainly puts the lie to Keller’s opening claims that this is the casual food “I love to sit down to with my family and friends.” Charlie Trotter successfully put away the chive shears and managed to produce a book of modestly-scaled recipes which achieve his cuisine’s baseline virtues without a staff of 20, but Keller has not. I mean, this is a book which devotes an entire oversized spread to making your own soup crackers. Keller writes a book for casual home cooking like Wagner would have written one on musical entertaining at home.

At the risk of discovering that the main thing I’d strained was my family’s patience, I decided to have an all-Thomas Keller Valentine’s Day dinner, and thus settle the question in my mind: does Keller’s perfectionist approach to casual cuisine yield benefits worth sweating for, or is he freakin’ nuts? (It would have been an all-Ad Hoc at Home dinner, but I finally decided I liked the sound of a dessert from The French Laundry Cookbook better.)  But in any case it involved four main recipes from Ad Hoc, plus two additional recipes which produced something to be used in one of the main recipes; plus four separate recipes to produce the parts which would come together to make the dessert.

Braised Beef Short Ribs (p. 41-2)

I settled on short ribs because I figured a braise would give me some leeway to handle the extra steps in whatever other dishes I made— and because it seemed like something I could buy happily from the grassfed beef guy selling at the Logan Square Farmer’s Market.  I know all the reasons why I’m supposed to eat grassfed beef, but it’s just too harsh for my taste eaten in straightforward form (like a steak).  A nice braise though, lots of wine and aromatic vegetables, that’s where the stronger flavor of grassfed beef would work for me, I figured; and so I was eager to experiment with something like short ribs.  The pieces I got were certainly gorgeous looking:

Meanwhile, I spent about an hour making a wine glaze using Keller’s usual assortment of vegetables (onion, carrots, leeks, no celery) plus thyme.  Heedless of cost as usual, he says to use an entire bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon or other red wine; I finished off three leftover opened bottles of random red (two shiraz, one merlot), saving at least $10 right there:

And in typical Keller fashion, given his belief that vegetables have given up most of their flavor by the 45-minute mark, this is just the first of two sets of nearly identical vegetables and spices that you add to the braising liquid— throwing both away at the end.  Nonsense, said I, and so I rescued the second set of carrots at the end and served them alongside the meat.  They were fine, you should try them sometime, Tom!

Meanwhile, I browned the short ribs, and then, because Keller is so horrified by the prospect that meat might wind up with a little piece of limp parsley adhering to it, you’re supposed to wrap the meat in a shroud of cheesecloth and bury it in the liquid.   I did that, then cut out the little parchment paper doily that is another of Keller’s signatures, and put this in the oven to braise for a couple of hours.

As it did I prepared:

Puree of Garlic Potatoes, p. 223

I wondered how much Keller would gild the lily of something as straightforward as garlic mashed potatoes, a dish whose entire recipe is basically in its name.  He did so in two ways.  First, his method of adding garlic flavor was to make:

Garlic Confit and Oil, p. 266

Put some garlic cloves in a pan, cover with half a bottle of canola oil, poach in the oil until they’re soft and gooey.  The two bucks’ worth of canola oil seemed profligate— though I suppose it could be used later in something— but the resulting garlic was really nice and mellow, subtle once it was mixed into the potatoes.  And not much work, really, for a Keller extra step.  I would do this again, certainly.

The other was to have me cook the potatoes by dropping them, whole, into cold, heavily salted water, then bringing them to a simmer, then peeling them hot.  What does this add compared to peeling them with a peeler and cooking them skinless?  Not much that I could tell.  (I guess you could argue that it’s actually less work to peel them this way, but only if you have titanium fingers and don’t mind peeling something boiling hot.)

Brioche, p. 272

I hadn’t planned on making anything from his book breadwise, but then I spotted the brioche recipe, which is actually rather easy (if you have a Kitchenaid mixer) and though the quantity it makes is fairly huge, I knew there would be another use I could make of much of it, which I’ll post about separately.  So I used some of it to bake round brioches in a muffin tin.  The kids loved the buttery bread.

Little Gem Lettuce Salad, p. 142-3
with Honey Vinaigrette, p. 143

One of the things that I came to find frustrating about looking through the book was that Keller would often be quite specific about the fruits or vegetables he wanted you to use— for instance, this salad requires Little Gem lettuce, Ruby Red grapefruit, blood oranges (at least he didn’t specify Sanguinellos over Moros), Satsuma oranges and a pomegranate.  Well, that’s fine and dandy if you’re Thomas Keller and can basically get your hands on anything with a phone call, but here I am in a major city and the closest I came at my local Whole Foods was a Rio Star grapefruit (at least I knew that would be similarly sweet), blood oranges, no pomegranates (but I finally found a lone box of pomegranate pips), and some tangerines (actually, I later realized that WF had a small bunch of Satsumas, when I remembered what they were— the little oranges with dark green leaves— but the sign for them was missing).  As for the lettuce, only because of a passing reference to Little Gem being like butter lettuce was I able to find something that would substitute reasonably well— I assume.

This is annoying not only because it’s unrealistic, to think that the shopper even in a major city will be able to find all of these things at once, but because you can’t believe it’s how Keller would really assemble a dish— he’d see what was available and adjust accordingly, making things a little more sweet or tart based on what he could find.  And even the slightest clues as to how to do that myself would be of far more use than telling me that I have to find some specific lettuce variety that may be easy to have trucked over to your restaurant in Napa, but which I’ve never seen in my life.

That complaint registered… this is a fantastic salad.  Maybe I just lucked out and despite having the wrong grapefruit, the wrong tangerine, etc., the balance was pretty much perfect anyway, but the sunny juiciness of the fruit and the tart note of the vinaigrette and the tenderness of the lettuce— just wonderful, especially at this time of year.  Even my sons, whose ideas about salad are pretty much that they like ranch dressing and NOTHING ELSE, gobbled it up.  This will undoubtedly be a keeper… and I will undoubtedly evolve its mix of flavors depending on what I find in the store from one time to the next.

Meanwhile the meat seemed tender— well, the middle parts seemed tender; the upper stripe of meat was either over or undercooked, I frankly couldn’t tell with this grassfed meat— and so it went into a pan in the oven while I reduced much of the sauce to a glaze.

So the grass-fed beef: good rich flavor, I need more experience braising it to really know how to do it right, but on the whole I was happy with it this way. That said, I can’t say that I particularly thought all the little Keller touches— making the wine glaze first, then the braising liquid with stock, putting the doily on top, etc.— added up to much, I made just as nice a short ribs braise from The Balthazar Cookbook with less fuss.  So final score for dinner from Ad Hoc at Home: salad great, brioche fine, potatoes worth the effort of making the garlic confit if not the pain of peeling unskinned, boiled potatoes, braised shortribs fine but no great difference from anybody else’s recipe for a dish like that.

Then came dessert from The French Laundry Cookbook:

Velouté of Bittersweet Chocolate with Cinnamon Stick Ice Cream (p. 286-7)
with Chocolate Sauce (p.280)

This was a satisfying recipe first of all because you could methodically prepare its parts over the preceding week without the stress of a last minute rush to get it made.  The velouté is sort of somewhere between a mousse and a meringue, and you make it in plastic wrap inside a ramekin or other round object and freeze it.  The ice cream you see underneath it below is cinnamon ice cream, made by steeping a stick in your custard; it’s subtle, almost ethereally cinnamony.  The flat disc is a cinnamon cookie, which you par-bake a day or two before.  At the bottom is a basic chocolate sauce.  When the time comes you bake the veloute on top of the cookie until it’s got an outer skin and a gooey inside, then assemble it quickly.

This is another great recipe, an easy way to wow your crowd; it looks complex but really it’s no harder to put together than a cheeseburger.  Ironically, I don’t think a recipe like this would have made it into Ad Hoc at Home, it’s too restaurant-showy, yet designed as it is for efficient production in a busy kitchen, it’s actually easier, and even more practical perhaps, for the home cook than many of the recipes in Ad Hoc at Home which take something simple and then fuss and fret it into a lot of extra work.

So where did I come out of all this on the subject of Thomas Keller?  I think there’s a lot of value in going through his overelaborated ways of making things, because it forces you to think about what goes into your dish, where extra efforts are worth it and where shortcuts are shortchanging you.  I think you will often decide that Keller is overdoing it for not enough return— but not always; here and there his way of doing it really is a better way, a way that takes an old familiar dish to the next level.  In a world where most cookbooks promise ease, there’s something to said for the master who challenges you to try harder and do more.  You may not always like his book, but you will learn a lot from it— including what matters more to you in the kitchen, time or perfection.

It may seem wrong to review books you haven’t read all of, but I suspect it’s often the case with food books, whose formats lend themselves to constant nibbling more than cover-to-cover devouring.  This is the first of two reviews of books I’ve been nibbling at, haven’t finished, but feel capable of judging now and enjoying for some time to come.  The second, Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land, will follow in a couple of days.

Milk at least has cheese as its bid for immortality, but chefs don’t even have that— meals are made to be made to disappear.  Our more conceptual chefs clearly find this frustrating, hence the arrival of the commemorative, menu-as-book-as-art-object volume carefully cataloguing the dishes and bites produced by such conceptual artists in the medium of food as Ferran Adria, Grant Achatz and Heston Blumenthal, arguably the most conceptual of them all.  Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook originally came out as a slipcased $250 volume, more expensive than the iPod hidden in a seashell to play sounds of the sea in one of his more famous courses, and has now been reproduced as a $50 objet d’art that’s an absolute bargain by comparison, so lavish and complete that the meal itself must seem like a mere appendix next to it.  (Careful about using a word like “appendix” next to someone like Blumenthal, by the way, it could go anywhere from there.)

There are really five books here, and whether you will enjoy this or not depends on how many of them can truly interest you.  Two of them are really of technical interest only to chefs hoping to follow in Blumenthal’s footsteps: that’s the actual recipes for his dishes, and the extended glossary on his weird-science ingredients and methods.  Given that dishes such as “snail porridge” and “sardine on toast sorbet” sound like parodies of modern cuisine gone mad, the actual audience for home cooking of such things has to be minuscule.

In a tactical error, as far as I’m concerned, the book actually begins with a memoir by Blumenthal (who may have discovered many marvelous things, but the chapter break is not among them) about the opening, management and steady success of The Fat Duck.  It seems to be designed to convince us that a man who thinks “Hmm, what about snails with porridge” is just a regular restaurateur, which strikes me as the wrong tack to take, normalizing the strangeness of his cuisine rather than embracing it with gleeful, Peter Lorre-esque abandon.  The problem with this is, minus Surrealism Luis Buñuel’s story is no different from any other movie director’s, and minus the molecular gastronomical weirdness this becomes just the story of a guy running a small business, not that different from any other restaurateur— or plumber or video store owner.

That leaves the last two books, easily the most fascinating parts and the ones that justify the $50 price tag for the non-mad-science-chef.  One is what comes before each recipe, a description of the thought process by which Blumenthal thought up each of his coups de foudre, each of his happenings on the theatre of the plate.  The madness and brilliance that the memoir lost in a blizzard of kitchen renovations and mounting bills finally comes to life, as he recounts how childhood taste memories and some odd bit of food science came together again and again in a moment of inspiration and a long process of refining execution at the far edge of food science.  Here is his Duck pressed between the covers of a book; here is the master class spent trying to keep up with a brilliant, unpredictable teacher who the memoir tried to hide in the clothes of an earnest manager.

The other is the book that runs all the way through the others— the book of art inspired by his cooking, including dazzling foodpornogasmic centerfold displays of his exquisitely plated dishes, spread wide and glistening for all to lust over, and (liveliest of all) drawings and collages by Dave McKean, an English caricaturist definitely in the blotchety line of Ronald Searle, Gerald Scarfe, and Ralph Steadman.  These drawings sustain the memoir during its more pedestrian moments, and the photos convey a sensuality about his food that the focus on science and juvenile memory in the text has somewhat obscured.

Which raises a point about these avant-garde chefs.  For all his free-range braininess, Blumenthal, with his emphasis on turning childhood experiences into lightning flashes of taste memory, is still working with a careful and unthreatening conceptual palette, rooted in childlike pleasures and delights— the ocean, the forest, primary colors, a magician’s switcheroo of expectations.  Our conceptual chefs will not rank with the other artists until they can find a way to bring the whole of human experience into their work— where are the dishes that evoke the alienation of modernity or the existential terror of existence?  Where is the take on Spanish food as powerful as Picasso’s Guernica, where is the play on banh mi that smells like napalm in the morning?  You can question whether diners would be willing to pay for that— but this has been a whole book devoted to dishes no sane businessperson would think diners would want to pay for, and now the restaurant they come from is booked months in advance.  If there is to be a Fat Duck Vol. 2 that doesn’t merely repeat Disneylike tricks of wonder, these are the dark places Blumenthal, and all our conceptual chefs, must go next.

Mike Gebert, creator of Sky Full of Bacon and a founder of LTHForum, will host and moderate a conversation with Tom Standage, author of An Edible History of Humanity and business editor of The Economist, Saturday June 6th at the 25th Printers Row Literary Festival, from 10:30 to 11 am at the Good Eating Stage presented by Jewel-Osco.

An Edible History of Humanity shows how food has been an important shaper of culture from the earliest days of seed cultivation to today’s global food-transportation system. Sky Full of Bacon is devoted to exploring what food means in people’s lives and how they use it to express their values and culture, so it should be an interesting and wide-ranging conversation.

At 2:15 the same day on the Good Eating stage, hot dog authors Bruce Kraig and Bob Schwartz, hamburger author Andrew Smith and moderator Kevin Pang will talk fast food icons. So c’mon out for some great food chat.

For more info: The official guide to the Lit Fest will be printed in a special section in the Friday, May 29th issue of the Chicago Tribune and the website is updated frequently.

Books have been piling up at ye olde Baconarium, awaiting fuller reviews, so I will here dispatch three of them briefly but not any less completely, I hope, including one of particular note to LTHForum readers:

I first heard of Clementine Paddleford like almost anybody who’s heard of her did— from a Beard award-winning article in Saveur reviving her memory as a pioneering writer about regional food dashing around the US in her self-piloted plane.  Now the author of that article and the keeper of Paddleford’s papers at Kansas State (her alma mater and hometown) have expanded it into a full biography, Hometown Appetites, which should restore her rightful place as a foodie patron saint.  From the 40s to her death in 1967, she was probably the best known food writer in America, working for what was then the most interesting New York paper (not the Times but the Herald Tribune, employer of everyone from James L. Cain to Tom Wolfe) and its Sunday supplement This Week, which was distributed nationwide like Parade, except that it was actually literate.

There’s a lot about Paddleford that we would like today— her interest in regional traditions, her egalitarian tastes, her no-nonsense Kate Hepburn-style feminism— although it’s unlikely that her writing will enjoy a full revival; the bits included in the book seem chirpy, can-do in a way that’s too corny for modern tastes.  Ironically, in real life she mostly couldn’t do; she wasn’t much of a cook, and stuck to the local color while the recipes were churned out by the Herald Tribune’s test kitchen.  (In this way she may well have inspired Barbara Stanwyck’s kitchen-incompetent magazine writer in Christmas in Connecticut.)

Still, she was respected in her time— H.L. Mencken, who might have made a rich satiric target out of a middlebrow tastemaker like her, instead commissioned a serious anthropological piece from her on church suppers— and deserves to be remembered.  The reason she wasn’t is that everything she worked for went out of business right around the time she died, so there was no institution to promote her memory, as the Times has done for the likes of Claiborne and Franey.

The life is interesting too, at least at first.  Small town girl, gawky and not physically attractive but plenty captivating to men attracted by brains, moves to Chicago and then to New York, hustling her way to various lucrative freelance gigs on both the editorial and advertising sides at once; she marries a fella from back home, and before long he seems to be the one male she’s not interested in sleeping with.  (Paddleford destroyed a lot of personal correspondence, but enough hints of her sex life survive to indicate that she was unabashed and independent; one ex-lover’s ashes occupied her mantle for years, and when she adopted a dying sorority sister’s little girl, it was widely assumed, wrongly, that that was just a story to cover up her own pregnancy out of wedlock.)

At the time she entered magazine writing, women’s magazines were mostly run by clueless men trying to dictate scientific home management notions to women, and she was a leading figure in bringing a down to earth woman’s point of view to women’s magazines and, as a result, expanding their and her own popularity.  Tragedy struck early on— throat cancer nearly killed her and left her with an open trachea covered by a brooch and a throaty whisper, which somehow only added to her odd allure.

The story of her rise in such a male-dominated world is great reading; the story of her long and fairly uneventful survival at the top is less so.  Still, if the story is exciting only up to a point, there are plenty of middle-American recipes that look worth a try as well.  You could do worse than reading the book and then having a dinner in honor of old Clem, the fearless feminist barnstormer of the American kitchen.

UPDATE: As soon as this review went up, the 5-Step site was pulled down. (Of course, it is still available if you know where to look. Not that its availability or not should affect your decision about this book, useful on its own terms.)

Disclosure: When Gary Wiviott first devised his method for teaching the basics of barbecuing several years ago, I built the original Wiviott 5-Step Website; and from time to time reading Low & Slow, a sentence would pop out at me (if no one else, I’m sure) as having been written by me, as I expanded Gary Wiviott’s sometimes cryptic notes or phone comments into prose helpful to BBQ newbies like I was then.

Dozens of people have since followed the program to learn the rudiments of successful slow cooked BBQ, as noted in the otherwise rather exiguous acknowledgements, which raises the question why one should pay $19.95 for 256 pages of something that works in ten pages for free.  Of course, the answer is that no one buys barbecue books, they give them, to middle-aged men they are otherwise stumped as to gift ideas for. As Wiviott himself notes on pg. 13:

It’s a well-known phenomenon that once you have the reputation of being a serious barbecuer, people who know nothing about barbecue will begin giving you books, celebrity-endorsed tools, and accessories that you should never use. My motto: Accept graciously, re-gift rapidly.

If this is one worth hanging onto, it’s because the goal of Wiviott and his cowriter, Colleen Rush (The Mere Mortal’s Guide to Fine Dining), is to undo all the bad habits of all those other books, geegaws and whatnot that you’ve been gifted with over the years.  Barbecue was invented as a way to cook meat while you were busy doing other things, like roping cattle or converting Native Americans to Catholicism at swordpoint, and so not only does it not require a lot of messing with with fancy techniques and tools, it’s usually harmed by them. Keep It Simple Stupid, as Wiviott says (often), and you’ll most likely come out better.

At the same time, even amplified at two or three times the length of the website version, this lesson comes nowhere near book length (hence obvious padding like a quiz at the end of each chapter). It’s also true that while the additional material is often more in-depth in explaining why marinades or brines do what they do, say, that kind of length and digressiveness might be fine for reading on a wintry off-season evening, but isn’t necessarily as direct and, well, simple to consult as the website in the middle of a cook.

So the rest of the book is filled, inevitably, with recipes.  I approached these with a certain skepticism; once you get past the meat, tastes in BBQ-land tend to be pretty whitebread-pedestrian, and the recipes in barbecue books tend to be either the kind of macho appetizer/gutbomb that a sensible person eats warily, or the kind of bastard fusion (Thai sweet and sour ribs with pineapple salsa) that should be confined to chain restaurants named O’Hooligan’s or The Fudge Dispensary.

Wiviott is guilty of the former on occasion— dragon turds, sausage-stuffed jalapeno peppers, make an inevitable appearance under a more family-friendly name in this surprisingly, for him, G-rated and rather sobersided book.  But his considerable grounding in real Asian and Latino ethnic cuisines (he was, like me, one of the founders of LTHForum, a fact the back cover gets slightly wrong) means that when he brings in a flavor from outside U.S. borders, it comes in pretty authentically.  The templates for how to create things like rubs, marinades and brines are quite useful when it comes to offering the aspiring BBQist a platform for their own experimentation and creativity, and there’s an eclectic range of mostly good-sounding, barbecue-friendly side dishes from corn pudding to smoked tomato bruschetta or Thai cucumber salad.

As one of the founders of LTHForum many years and worlds ago, I take pride whenever one of our now mostly scattered company of amateurs graduates to greater professional accomplishments— Morowitz and Gardner with The Local Beet, Hammond’s ever-thoughtful print and radio essays, Cathy Lambrecht’s and Melissa Graham’s involvements across wide and productive spectrums of the Chicago food scene, or my own piece of a James Beard award nomination for Sky Full of Bacon. It’s a well-organized, genuinely useful book, of which both authors (I of all people should not forget Rush standing there just out of the limelight) should be proud.  Father’s Day is June 21st.

Teach a man to cook barbecue and you’ve given him something to talk about for a night, but teach him the cultural history of barbecue and you’ve given him something to argue about for a lifetime. Slowly, we’re building up a shelf of key histories of the major barbecue-producing regions; Texas had Robb Walsh’s Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook (despite the title, more history than recipes) and now North Carolina has Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue.

Two quotes from journalists in the book sum up North Carolina barbecue: “No man has ever been elected governor of North Carolina without eating more barbecue than was good for him,” and “Write about the succulent glories of Tar Heel barbecue at one’s peril. It’s much safer to take on the National Rifle Association.” That gives some sense of the importance in public life of BBQ, the swaggering white-frat-boy pride taken in it, and the deep and embittered divide between the two main styles (vinegary Eastern style and ketchupy Piedmont style).

Not having a pig in this fight, I sometimes rolled my eyes at the exaggerated xenophobia displayed by the academic authors, engaged in the perennial game of slumming and getting real with the people over barbecue. (Especially since the one thing that unites easterners and Piedmontese is slagging on Texas barbecue. A little of that goes a long way.) Still, the 75 pages of cultural history that launches the book is an admirably thorough and flavorful account of BBQ’s role in everything from labor movements to German immigration (that’s probably who put the ketchup in the sauce), accompanied by a scrapbook’s worth of flavorful photos and graphics.

It’s followed by 100 well-detailed pages on cooking a whole hog, making sauces and sides like cornpone (no Thai cucumber salad here), and finally, a series of oral histories with many of the most noted figures in North Carolina barbecue.

To be honest, the oral histories get a bit repetitive, and I haven’t read them all yet (for a representative sample, read Ed Mitchell on how he got started), but the point isn’t that you need to read them all, but that someone has gotten the words of these BBQ masters down before they’re all gone. That section will make Holy Smoke a primary source for many years to come.

Mark Bittman is a New York Times writer and the author of some highly useful cookbooks which bridge the gap between real cooking and modern lifestyles. So Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating seems at first as if it might be a more practical (“With More Than 75 Recipes!”) version of Michael Pollan’s food-system polemics like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food (the cover of which it especially resembles):

It certainly starts out like the work of a New York Times writer:

Two years ago, a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) landed on my desk. Called Livestock’s Long Shadow, it revealed a stunning statistic: global livestock production is responsible for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gases—more than transportation.

Unfortunately, the New York Times writer this mainly sounds like is Thomas Friedman, whose standard breathless lead-in was mocked recently by Matt Taibbi: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” Everything about this paragraph throbs with self-importance: the report didn’t come in the mail, it landed on his desk at the Times, with an urgent thud (“Bittman! Friedman! I need global greenhouse gas statistics— that means now, ladies!”) The report doesn’t contain, it reveals a statistic, which stuns Bittman (though it shouldn’t be that surprising to a leading food writer that modern agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels). And all that’s just in the opening paragraph. At this rate, by the third chapter he’ll be spraying cranial fluid every time a carrot arrives in his inbox, demanding action.

Indeed Bittman soon reveals that his is no mere feelbad meditation on food, but an actionable diet plan with truly planetary consequences. And not just in the sense that yo’ mama so big, when she rubs her legs together, it makes global warming:

If I told you that a simple lifestyle choice could help you lose weight, reduce your risk of many long-term or chronic diseases, save you real money, and help stop global warming, I imagine you’d be intrigued. If I also told you that this change would be easier and more pleasant than any diet you’ve ever tried, would take less time and effort than your exercise routine, and would require no sacrifice, I would think you’d want to read more.

He might think that. You might be thinking, how do I get away from this relentless huckster before I wind up with a timeshare in Florida and a complete set of ShamWow?

Cutting through the hype, Bittman’s basic premise is that if we eat less meat and more greens, the pounds (and the planet) will take care of themselves. Eating less meat may seem a simple choice, but only in the sense that “Stop drinking” and “Relate to hot girls as people” are simple choices, too, which often prove devilishly difficult to carry out. Eating less meat is no sacrifice only if you find Pan-Cooked Greens With Tofu and Garlic (p. 211) every bit as satisfying as steak. The change is easier and more pleasant only if you have the time to devote to learning new ways of meal-planning. And so on. It’s not that these things aren’t true, possible or undeniably beneficial, it’s that Prof. Harold Hill keeps selling us on all the fabulous benefits of having a band while gliding over any mention of the need to practice.

Most of all, there’s that reference to global warming. I expect publishers have been trying for years now to find a way to make global warming into a diet book, thus bringing two of today’s hottest trends together, and Bittman does valiant work in connecting the dots between industrial agriculture and global warming. Again, it’s not that any of this isn’t true, necessarily, it’s that it’s hyped so breathlessly to make this the most important, most impactful, most earthsaving diet book in the history of mankind:

Could improved health for people and planet be as simple as eating fewer animals, and less junk food and super-refined carbohydrates?
Yes.

Helpful tip: never answer “no” to the question “Is it really this simple?” in Bittman’s book. For baby boomers, who can turn any personal choice into an issue of planet-sized portent, it’s no longer enough to lose weight to save your arteries or your sex appeal; only the prospect of rescuing an entire celestial body will keep you away from the donut cart.

To be fair, having pounded the podium into organic mulch in his first few chapters, Bittman does tone it down in in the next 100 pages or so, with a more temperate run-through of our present food system that will be familiar to Pollan readers, especially those of In Defense of Food. Familiar, that is, but not comparable in its impact or interest— Bittman does essentially none of the reporting Pollan does, never taking us to meet food scientists or feedlot operators; he’s saving the planet without leaving his desk. (He even explicitly prefaces a section on factory farming by saying he’s going to “skip most of the deplorable stuff,” as if dramatization would get in the way of self-dramatization.)

Nor is his account as well organized as Pollan’s critique, flitting about semi-randomly from topic to topic as long as every factoid he flings supports his general thesis.  That opening statistic about agricultural greenhouse gases returns at the end of chapter 2 as if we’d never heard it before; every activity is reduced to its measure in fossil fuels consumed—as if efficiency alone weren’t a numbers game that industrial agriculture is destined to win.

And not to sound like I’m shilling for the American Michael Pollan Council, but in contrast to Pollan’s coolly incisive dissection of the problems, Bittman’s anger often runs ahead of his grasp on logic:

It doesn’t take a genius to see that an ever-growing population cannot continue to devote limited resources to produce ever-increasing amounts of meat, which takes roughly 10 times more energy to produce than plants.  Nor can you possibly be “nice” to animals, or respectful of them, when you’re raising and killing them by the billions.

Like a soy burger, this looks like it has the meaty fiber of an argument, but crumbles at the first touch of a fork. Set aside the sloppy writing (that first “produce” should surely be “producing”), and it’s a logical muddle: how much meat is taking 10 times more energy to produce than what plants, the meat we eat now or the ever-increasing amounts? And is it the killing or the numbers that make raising meat not nice? Are we talking my individual niceness (hence the second person), or society’s (hence the billions), which are presumably two different forms of niceness? A fiery but confused paragraph like this doesn’t exist to inform, it exists to keep you wound up enough to keep turning the page. Bittman is to Pollan on nutritionism what Dan Brown is to Graham Greene on Catholicism.

Okay, but even if Bittman’s book is a clip job, doesn’t it serve a purpose if it calls more attention to the very real problems in our food chain? I think not, because the lack of nuance in Bittman’s account extends not only to the problems but to the solutions. Because ultimately he’s writing a diet book, which is to say a book preaching hope and salvation for those who follow the one true path, he ignores and even flatly contradicts himself on the sticky dilemmas that Pollan wrestles with.

Pollan recognizes that food prices will have to go up to support better forms of agriculture. But Bittman preaches that you’ll be saving money in no time (and his factoids have food prices shooting up in one chapter and falling, thanks to industrial efficiency, in the next). Bittman pushes buying less meat as a way to reduce the impact of meat on the planet, but never considers the irony that that’s likely in the short term to increase the market share of industrial meat, as the conscientious people support their local farmers less and the unconscientious ones buy 48-packs of lamb chops at Sam’s Club.

Which leaves only the second half of the book, the recipes. How are they? They look all right, in a Mediterranean-diet-with-a-touch-of-Asian kind of way. The breakfast and lunch ones are simple and pretty attractive; there’s no question that Bittman has a genuine knack for idiot-proofing contemporary flavors so that the harried, not-all-that-culinarily-skilled yuppie can turn out something respectable that matches modern tastes in a fairly short amount of time.

The dinner ones are more problematic, because they look less like a change from anything anyway (when Bittman suggests a 40-minute cassoulet containing a pound of sausage or pork chops, he’s not making a healthful cassoulet, he’s just mucking up a classic dish with bad technique), and because many of them are too vague to really help the cook who has no clue what to do with a kohlrabi or a squash. Telling people they can use any old vegetables they want in a stir-fry isn’t likely to be news to them, and it isn’t likely to lead to terribly good stir-fries, either.

And that’s the problem with what ought to be the most useful part of this book: there’s not enough depth to it. Are 77 recipes, even ones that teach basic skills, enough to put my family and the planet on an entirely new basis for eating? It seems unlikely.

To put the comparison in Bittmanesquely reductive terms, at a shipping weight of 1.2 pounds per book, a case of Food Matters uses as much fuel (according to calculations that just landed on my desk) as a 733-mile road trip.  Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone weighs in at a much heftier 4.3 pounds, which is as much oil as 3.6 sperm whales, but it contains over 1400 recipes, making it approximately 20 times as efficient to take those sperm whales on a road trip. Can it really be this simple, that if you want to take Bittman’s advice, you can get all you really need of it from this review and then spend your money more wisely on a comprehensive vegetarian cookbook like Madison’s— or, indeed, Bittman’s own How To Cook Everything Vegetarian? Yes.

Having written about Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food before reading it, I thought it might be nice to write about it after, too.

As noted before, Pollan— the author of the our-food-chain-is-messed-up book The Omnivore’s Dilemma— is here trying to put a positive spin on that message by showing how it’s possible to arrive at a reasonable and healthy diet by, basically, following the principle on the book’s cover: Eat Food.  Not Too Much.  Mostly Plants.

Pollan’s overarching target in the first half of this book is what he calls Nutritionism— the unnatural practice, as he paints it, of breaking our diets down into scientific processes.  He is very compelling, first, on how this has caused a major shift in how we eat that few of us have really noticed:

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. [p. 28]

This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism… when the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinctions between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. [p. 32]

This is one of Pollan’s key points: an emphasis on nutrition rather than eating has actually made our food worse for us, because it strongly favors Big Food’s latest product over the little farmer and the real food from the soil.  Food marketing requires novelty.  Carrots are pretty much carrots, a commodity.  But new Totally XTreme Asian Ranch Whole Grain Num-Os are an improvement over last year’s Partially XTreme ones, or at least they can be if some science can be rigged up to let you make a claim that they cure heart disease.  And that’s what nutritionism’s reductive view of eating is: find a magic bullet, hype the hell out of it, and sell sugary salty gloppy glop because it has a supposed single virtue.  A mere carrot hardly stands a chance against such marketing muscle; “the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa-Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound ‘whole-grain goodness’ to the rafters.” [p. 39-40]

The problem with this is not only that the claims are often dubious (he shows how malleable supposedly legally-defined terms such as “whole grain” are) but that the science underlying so much of this is, simply, bullshit.  This is perhaps the most eye-opening and valuable part of the book, a long section in which he shows that, as Dr. Happy Harry Cox put it, everything you know is wrong, or rather, everything the largely self-appointed experts have told you is built on evidence ranging from flimsy to nonexistent.  Take one of the things everyone knows, that a high-fat diet leads to heart disease.  That’s like saying sunlight leads to plant growth, right?

In a recent [Harvard] review of the relevant research called ‘Types of Dietary Fat and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,’ the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease… Only two studies have ever found ‘a significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of CHD [coronary heart disease]’; many more have failed to find an association. [pp. 41-3]

But at least we know that high cholesterol is bad, right?

As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found ‘a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of CHD.’ [p. 43]

Still, encouraging us to replace all that fatty red meat couldn’t have been all bad– it’s not like what we ate instead could have been worse for us:

By the end of the review, there is one strong association between a type of dietary fat and heart disease left standing, and it happens to be precisely the type of fat that the low-fat campaigners have spent most of the last thirty years encouraging us to consume more of: trans fats… the principal contribution of thirty years of nutritional advice has been to replace a possibly mildly unhealthy fat in our diets with a demonstrably lethal one. [p. 44]

If this were fully recognized for what it is, it would be considered one of the great government screwups of all time, nutritionism’s Vietnam.  In the late 70s government started encouraging us all to eat in a new way, eating less fat and, more importantly, different kinds of fat.  The “low fat” or “lipids” theory was embraced by food companies and is evident in thousands of products at every supermarket today.  Yet what was supposed to make us thinner and healthier instead has made obesity, diabetes, every “disease of affluence” far more prevalent.  It has blown the O-ring on American health and sent its flaming wreckage spiraling toward the ocean.  It has done exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do, and in a real sense the famous joke in Woody Allen’s Sleeper has proven prescient:

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

But at least from a food marketer’s, or a diet book author’s, perspective, it’s been an enormous success, because it’s created a massive market whose hunger is limitless for new products– which have the tremendous benefit, from a marketer’s point of view, of never working.

*  * *

So if nobody knows nothing, what the hell do we do now?

Pollan starts by suggesting that we back our way out of the nutritionist mindset and accept that we just don’t know what we don’t know about how food works.  The search for magic bullets has been a red herring, we just don’t know how the combinations of foods produces healthful effects, eating one thing to produce one result almost never seems to work.  We’re in the dark ages still on this stuff.

But what we can reasonably deduce is the basic validity of things like the French paradox– that if we need complex combinations to produce a fully healthy diet, then the traditional diets of most cultures have evolved to provide such combinations.  As he points out, nearly every culture, whether they eat lots of vegetables or nothing but meat and blubber, manages to have roughly the same low incidence of diseases of affluence– except us.  Only we managed to create, scientifically and industrially, a diet that so overdelivers on the things humans crave that it causes us problems.

This is where the advice to eat nothing your grandmother wouldn’t recognize comes in.  Basically, he says, if you eat real foods from before the days of food science, you should wind up with a diet that reflects cultural knowledge of what makes you healthy.

The problem with this is that the apple’s been eaten and we can’t go back to Paradise.  Once we have knowledge of Mexican and Thai and sushi, we’re not going to be happy living on an American farm diet full of English or Germanic touches circa 1910 (which would probably be what most of us, strictly choosing to eat like Grandma, would wind up with).  But the danger of being an omnivore is that in choosing to eat from many cultures, we’ll wind up cherrypicking the most appealing foods from those cultures– and miss out on the balance part.

To my mind, the grandmother advice doesn’t really work, except as a reminder to keep a skeptical eye toward the new foods (or, as Pollan calls them, edible foodlike substances) that pop up every year in the supermarket.  The other problem is that the foods in the supermarket aren’t themselves any more, anyway.  Grandma might recognize a steak (though it’d look pretty darn lean to her) but its cornfed taste would seem very odd.  And that difference conceals the fact that a cornfed steak is lacking precisely the omega-3s that were one of a grassfed steak’s contributions to your balanced diet and health.  It really isn’t the same food it was in her day.

Nevertheless, Pollan does try to identify some basic principles which, if followed, will help you generally work your way toward a diet as balanced and healthy as Grandma would have recognized:

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.  [Since the real stuff tends to be along the walls, and the fake stuff is in the center.]

Avoid food products that make health claims.  [If it had to be engineered and tested, it’s too fake to be part of a balanced Grandma diet.]

Eat meals.  [Grabbing a sack of food and wolfing it down in the car, or grazing all afternoon, is not a meal.  The way the French sit and eat for an hour and a half has all sorts of mechanisms built into it to provide satisfaction and feedback without stuffing yourself silly.]

These principles are the way Pollan avoids falling into the trap he’s set for himself, which is being someone who’s just condemned nutritionism, and then proceeds to write a diet book.  There are no recipes and no weight-loss schedule here– which is why it’s all the more startling when he suddenly turns up advocating we all take supplements.  Isn’t that exactly the kind of nutritionism, healthy eating reduced to a pill, that he’s been against in the rest of the book?  It may be good advice for the middle-aged, but so is making sure to invest in your employer’s 401k, that doesn’t mean it belongs in a book about looking at eating as a part of a rich and happy life, not as a system of self-medication.

One principle is perhaps the most thought-provoking: Eat less and pay more. It’s not that paying more is exactly a positive good, but until you know you’re paying more for your food and spending more time preparing it, you’re not getting the stuff that’s better for you, better for the farmer and the food chain.  If it’s cheap and convenient, there’s something wrong with it, is Pollan’s basic point.  To be that cheap, it must be being grown in a way that’s less than ideal.

*  *

In warning us against the latest breakthrough in nutrition science, Pollan runs the risk of being exactly that— this season’s Scarsdale Diet or The Zone or South Beach, the book that finally Explains It All… until the next one.  And in reviewing it, I run the risk of becoming the acolyte who has Found the Answer… until the next book.

Yet I think the first half of the book, demonstrating how completely farbungled our dietary situation is, thanks largely to science and experts who were just plain wrong, is extremely important— a key text of American skepticism and debunking, up there with Mencken and Jessica Mitford, if not as wittily written.

And the second half, if not entirely news you can put to use today, thinks seriously and practically through the issues involved in trying to get back to a more sensible way of eating in today’s world, as it’s just becoming possible enough to actually do it thanks to farmer’s markets and CSAs and so on.  It may not be possible to live entirely according to Pollan’s principles yet, without growing it all yourself, but living according to as many of them as you can will make that day come a little closer, and probably make your meals taste better— even as they also take longer to make and cost you more.