BOOKS: MARCH

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent food-themed books that have knocked our respective socks off.

BRINGING IT TO THE TABLE: ON FARMING AND FOOD
by Wendell Berry
(Counterpoint, 2009)

As bestselling author and food guru Michael Pollan explains in his humble introduction to Wendell Berry’s most recent collection, the Kentucky farmer and writer was speaking out for responsible land use and against agribusiness before many of today’s locavore hipsters had their first taste of solid food. Pollan accurately praises Berry’s common-sense eloquence as “at once perfectly obvious and completely arresting. To read these essays is…to be somehow stopped in your tracks by the plainly self-evident.”

In the spirit of the author's best-known aphorism, “eating is an agricultural act,” BRINGING IT TO THE TABLE collects nearly four decades’ worth of Berry’s extensive body of work—both essays and fiction excerpts—on the topics of farming, farmers, and food. Given the scope and tone of these pieces, many of which date to the 1970s and 1980s, it is difficult to encapsulate the author’s quiet wisdom without using the word “prophetic.”

Lines we liked: “I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.”  —“Renewing Husbandry” (2004)

—SCA

HEAT
by Bill Buford
(Vintage, 2007, paperback)

As former editor of the British literary journal GRANTA, known for its offbeat theme issues, Bill Buford is no stranger to diving headfirst into a new passion. But when he goes to work in the kitchen at Mario Batali’s famed Babbo restaurant in New York, what begins as a story for THE NEW YORKER (where Buford was then fiction editor) becomes a new calling—or, perhaps more accurately, a life-changing, all-consuming obsession. After proving himself through months of dicing vegetables and deboning ducks, Buford eventually earns a coveted—if sweat-drenched—spot at the grill. By then, he has fallen so far down the rabbit hole of Italian cooking that he quits his job and moves to Italy, apprenticing himself first to a pasta-making expert and then to an eccentric butcher. Though it begins as a compelling and nuanced profile of the larger-than-life Batali, HEAT is ultimately the diary of an obsession, rendered in compulsively readable, vividly descriptive prose and with a sense of humor that has the power to hook even nonfoodie readers.

Lines we liked: “Chicken feet are a vivid sight—like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly—and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water, trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.”

—SCA

CORNBREAD NATION 5: THE BEST OF SOUTHERN FOOD WRITING
edited by Fred Sauceman
(University of Georgia Press, 2010)

In the ongoing effort to show that Southern cuisine is “enduring,” as editor Fred Sauceman puts it, CORNBREAD NATION 5 maintains that the proof is in the bread pudding—and in the oyster stew, the chicken mull, the sweet potato cobbler, and other marvels of the country kitchen. From Alan Deutschman’s backwoods sojourn for dry-cured ham to John Shelton Reed’s history of smoked meats and Roy Blount’s discussion of Louis Jordan’s STRUTTIN’ WITH SOME BARBECUE, no part of the pig goes unused. Beth Ann Fennelly’s essay on the economics of taste and Pete Daniel’s discussion of the USDA’s legacy of racism explore the moral dimensions of food production and policy. And Brett Anderson’s piece on Indian chow in the Crescent City and Mei Chin’s article on Asian soul food show that Southern cooking has become a multicultural fare. Local cuisine remains a strong cultural force in the South, the book opines, not only because of its long-standing traditions, but because of its willingness to adapt.

Lines we liked: “Food consumption, as historian Andrew Heinze has noted in his examination of European Jews in America, became a ‘bridge between cultures,’ capable of signifying ‘one’s attitude toward and place within society.’ Reflecting modern Atlanta's culinary melange, John Kessler, a food writer for the ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, described his intimate relationship with the Dekalb Farmers Market: ‘I love the thrilling strangeness of the place, the feeling that this—right here, right now—is my culture.’”  —“Your Dekalb Farmers Market: Food and Ethnicity in Atlanta” by Tore C. Olsson

—BS

EAT, MEMORY: GREAT WRITERS AT THE TABLE—A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
edited by Amanda Hesser
(Norton, 2009)
 
This best-of compilation of food memoirs from the NEW YORK TIMES’ series adorably titled “Eat, Memory” doubles not only as an erudite, foodie-leaning CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL anthology, but a cookbook—often including recipes of the featured dishes, from the delectably simple “Figs in Whiskey” to George Saunders’s painstaking preparation for a “Light-As-Air Brunch”, the key ingredient being, of course, nothing. Not to trivialize: There are some bitter scenes, including Ann Patchett’s bare-bones recount of a couple’s expensive over-dinner argument, Tucker Carlson casting off his bowtie to work in a baked-bean factory, and Anna Winger’s improvised Passover Seder hauntingly celebrated in Berlin. EAT, MEMORY unexpectedly casts aside sentimentality for dastardly humor and at times, agonizing epiphany.
 
Lines we liked: “But she couldn’t stop. To maintain that complexion despite the Delhi dust, to sustain the riversweep of hair that could have propelled the narrative of a fairy tale, she used homemade potions concocted from kitchen supplies. Washed down the drains, they caused an outbreak of cockroaches.”  —“Home Turf” by Kiran Desai

—NE

THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE: THE TRUTH ABOUT FOOD
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
(Norton, 2009)

Are you an animal lover who also likes to eat meat? Author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson observes in his new book that “most people, in theory, want animals to be happy. When asked if they care about the lives that animals lead before they eat them for dinner, an astonishing 80 percent of Americans polled said that they did.” The problem, according to Masson (a former psychoanalyst, who knows how the human psyche resists direct orders), is that we are either unaware of the suffering that occurs on industrial (and organic) farms or we are in denial about it. Masson is encouraging and upbeat—and this is how his argument seeps into you—as he presents persuasive evidence about the toxic effects of industrial farming on the environment and in our food products; the surreal escalation of world hunger even as “the world produces more food than ever before”; and the obvious health benefits to cutting back on meat and dairy products. But his most piercing commentary derives from the grossly unnatural lives that pretty much every animal we eat endures. How can you reconcile a love of animals with the recognition of the most basic practices of the food industry—the milk cows whose calves are spirited away at birth, the pigs, chickens, and salmon that are fattened, confined, and steered to premature death? These are discomfiting moral questions that Masson asks—and his view is that even creatures on organic farms “live in the antechamber of death.” Reliable arguments—humans have been hunters since the beginning of time, for example—are tidily dismantled (a preeminent medical expert has recently concluded that “human beings have the mouth and gastrointestinal tract structure of a committed herbivore.”) THE FACE ON YOUR PLATE probes the concept of consciousness, revealing the moral decisions you may not realize you are making with every bite.

Lines we liked: “Two geophysicists from the University of Chicago, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, have concluded that changing one’s eating habits from the Standard American Diet to a vegetarian diet does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car. Eating meat is like driving a huge SUV. A vegetarian diet is like driving a midsized car or a reasonable sedan; and eating a vegan diet (no dairy, no eggs) is like riding a bicycle or walking.”

—CAF