Catching Fire

A very interesting book that answers the question of what makes humans different than animals... cooking! Most of it is an anthropology study determining when in the evolutionary chain humans starting cooking their food, and the implications to society. What makes it good is that it brings together several branches of science to support the theory, and although a bit technical, is well written. It pulls together several things that once put together seem obvious (like much of our food, like most grains, are not digestible if not cooked). The other is that it takes much more energy to digest raw foods (vegetable or animal), and that as humans, our digestive systems are not designed to eat large quantities of raw foods (it also supports this with some not so flattering studies done on current raw-foodists, especially if their goal was to propagate the species). The key take-away for me was that no one has a good understanding of the net energy value of foods (calories in the food minus calories needed to digest minus what is not digested). Small studies show that both cooking foods and making food finer in texture (like grinding) increases the energy and nutrient value of food, and reduces the amount of energy needed to digest the food. Which supports one of my key beliefs on nutrition: there is still a lot we don't know.

Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch

I will be the first to admit I’m not the type to read big non-fiction books.  So I’m pretty proud of myself for actually getting through the 500 pages of Appetite for Life!  This is a biography with a big B:  it was authorized; the author had full access to Julia Child, her letters, several family diaries, as well as letters and interviews with family and friends.   It’s very much the historical work, sometimes overstuffed with minutia, names and dates, but does an excellent job of describing Julia and how she fit into the recent history of food as well as US history. The appendices describe all the source material, a great job was done in editing to only 500 pages. In the end, I find myself awed and inspired by Julia and her works.

The early part of the book is slow, she grew up as a spoiled California party girl which was not all that interesting.  The story picks up during the time she was in the OSS in India and China.  Fascinating to me (as someone who doesn’t read big historical books, but lately, lots of WWII fiction) was the non-European perspective of WWII:  the people and politics of the time, including the OSS, McCarthy-ism, and their influence on Vietnam. 

Later in life, Julia Child was quite the celebrity between PBS shows and Good Morning America appearances in addition to her books. I never saw much of her on TV (but knew enough to fully enjoy Dan Aykroyd’s satire of the show), and never had the Mastering The Art of French Cooking  cookbooks. I didn’t understand her real influence on food.  Her memoir, My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme gave me much more background on what went into the first cookbook, but this book brought so much more to the story. 

Julia was passionate about food, and wanted to share this passion with others.  She followed through with incredible organization, detail and hard work to share the vision through teaching.  She had the drive to get things right (and that would be her definition of right).  Also impressive was the energy that Julia had, right through her 80’s, even with the problems of aging like bad knees and loved ones in nursing homes.

Julia’s vision started with an attempt bring the pleasures of cooking and eating to the American public, not the “America home economics with its undercurrent of nineteenth-century melioristic scientism”.  (Definition of melioristic: the notion that the world can be improved by human effort). Her cookbook was out of step with the current fashion: “Americans were then eating canned vegetables with marshmallows melted on top, frozen chickens cooked in canned mushroom soups, frozen fish sticks, and dishes that could be served during commercials…  Processed food products and junk food led to unwanted poundage, which in turn stirred up a wave of dieting and diet books … Avis [Julia’s agent] commented about  the “gunk” in the American kitchen and the increasing number of manuscripts for diet books she was receiving … “[There is] not a single honest recipe in the whole book – everything is bastardized and quite nasty .. Desserts .. sweetened with saccharin and topped with imitation whipped cream. Fantastic!  And I do believe a lot of people in this country eat just like that, stuffing themselves with faked materials in the fond belief that by substituting a chemical for God’s good food they can keep themselves slim while still eating hot breads and desserts and GUNK.”  This was in 1959!  (and its taken until 2009 for me to get all of the high fructose corn syrup out of my house, and even then some slips back in, last in the guise of Rice Crispy Squares).

The other theme that runs through Julia’s work was to help Americans overcome their “fanatical fear of food”. An example: “fear of food was endemic in suburbia. Every new health warning (Poisons in Your Food) reinforced America’s puritanical relationship to food and wine. Food was either a sinful or a bothersome necessity.  The most popular food books in the early 1960s were Calories Don’t Count and the I Hate to Cook Book…”  That said, she had some confrontations with other visionaries of the time, like Alice Waters. Julia felt that all the talk of organic foods and evils of pesticides would just further scare people from cooking.

I could go on.. but this book really hit home for me during my current quest to reduce the amount of processed food in my diet and understand the struggles of those around me with food.  Plus I have another role model on living a full life, continuing to learn and share and grow (bad knees and all).  The other take away: During the life of Julia Child, there was massive amount of written communication compiled, including letters, diaries, manuscripts, and written articles.  I sometimes wondered if she ever made a phone call!    But I can hope that in addition to more people cooking from the larger selection of fresh food available, that someday people can use our blogs, tweets, Facebook and other written communications to write inspiring biographies!

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American

First, I have to say that The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite is the most highly hyped book I have read in a long time.  I heard about it on some blogs and twitter, bought it, and since then have heard the author at least three times on NPR (considering how little I drive, that seems impossible… maybe NPR has some stock in the publisher).

The book gives a credible story about the explosion of obesity it the US.  Basically, the problem is a combination of 4 things:

1. The food companies have optimized the sugar-salt-fat ratios in food to have the most appeal to our basic instincts (using sophisticated design of experiments and chemicals… seems I could have made better use of my ChemE degree than semiconductors.)

2. The above mentioned foods are cheap and easily available, heavily advertised, and easy to eat.
3. It is acceptable by society to eat anywhere, anytime – no need to stick to strict breakfast, lunch, and dinner meal times

4. The above factors have resulted in conditioned overeating, where the body is no longer able to give the brain credible input as to whether its hungry or full, rather, eating is triggered by the same biological factors as smoking, drug addiction, or alcoholism.

The author (a former head of the FDA) takes it a step further to recommend how to fix the problem of cue induced automatic eating. 

1. Understand that we are being manipulated by Big Food.
2. Become conscious of the cues that lead to over eating and avoid situations that lead to overeating.
3. Exercise – mostly as a substitute award, not just for calorie burning.
4. Develop a structured eating plan: have rules about when, what and how much to eat. Avoid highly processed food.

The content of the book is good – there are a lot of interesting studies cited.  It provides some understanding why the simple solution – eat less and exercise more – is so profanely difficult for some people.  Unfortunately, the book itself is not a great read. The writing style is choppy and redundant.
Basically – food is new cigarette, and the solutions aren’t much different – except that you have to eat.  I think it also gives some insight on how difficult a problem this will be. There probably cannot be enough hype.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Its always easier to like and recommend a book when it summarizes what you already believe.  I had a good friend comment (while we were chowing down at a party) “you’re so thin, you can eat anything”.   I didn’t say anything, but I’m thin because I DON'T just eat anything; I work to eat things that taste good and are good for you (and if not, don’t eat it!).   I quit using margarine probably 25 years ago (I had a good job and could afford “real” butter), I stopped drinking (and never started eating) stuff with artificial sweeteners 10 years ago,  discovered farmers markets 15 years ago in California, and over the last few years, have eliminated High Fructose Corn Syrup and trans-fats from my diet (so I use all butter in my piecrust instead of shortening).  I consider myself  lucky in that I like vegetables (always have), I like to cook, don't have a big sweet tooth, and grew up eating meals consisting of real food, with a minimum of junk food (thanks Mom).  So, I recommend reading this book, but realize its going to be harder for others to swallow than it was for me.

In Defense of Food builds on Michael Pollan’s first book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.   This book goes to the next step, successfully explaining how things have become so confused, and why people on the typical American diet have so many overwhelming health issues that are directly attributed to what they eat.  He cuts through the blather of what we hear (low-fat, high-fiber, no-cholesterol!) with a simple fact: the information on nutrition is simply missing a lot of data. Most of the studies are fundamentally flawed (such as relying on what individuals remember what they ate, or believing that they can isolate one food element without regard to other elements, some of which they don’t even know exist). On top of that, marketing organizations ("pork...the other white meat") further distort the data and influence governments and other large organizations to serve their bottom line, not our waist line. The solid data available is pretty limited:  trans-fats are bad, large amounts of highly refined carbohydrates are bad, vegetables are good. The best studies have shown that returning to diets that were typical of 100 years or more ago (before we started “refining” food) substantially improved health.   And that results in the manifesto: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.   One of the things that I liked about The Omnivore's Dilemma  that he did not prescribe a solution, he (tried) to stay objective to the subject of discussing where the food came from.  Here he delves into how to fix it… good information, but I’m not sure that it’s persuasive enough to get people to change.  He does give some good tips (“eat food your great-grandmother would recognize”). And its good to keep me on the path that I’m on.   

The Amateur Gourmet: How to Shop, Chop, and Table Hop Like a Pro (Almost) by Adam D. Roberts

I really hated this book.  I hated it so much I finished it to figure out why.  The premise is to teach people raised on chain restaurants and frozen dinners how to be gourmets, through a series of chapters of stories about shopping/chopping/table hopping with friends (non-gourmets) or experts (gourmets).   The book was preceded by a successful blog, but is not the Julia / Julie project!   I was interested in this because I too hope to persuade people that they can do better when it comes to eating, with more “real/good food” in their diets.   So… why do I hate it?  First, the term gourmet is off-putting, so I checked Widipedia to better understand the definition.  I think this sentence summed it up:  “The term and the practice may have negative connotations of elitism or snobbery, but is often used positively to describe people of refined taste and passion”..  I guess its OK to be called a gourmet, but not consider yourself a gourmet.  Next, his instructions to chop an onion went on for 2 pages, and I had to read it 3 times for it to make sense.  And I know how to chop and onion.   This would be hopeless to anyone who really wanted to learn.  Last, he has that self-centered, NYC writers affliction.   I don’t know where or why I picked up this bias against male NY writers (and the lead name of this list is Garrison Keillor). Female NYC authors like Julia Powell and Elizabeth Gilbert don’t seem to have this problem.

My next book is In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan…  Hopefully it will be better (he lives in California).

My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme

I think Julia Child had 2 lives, one as a TV Chef that we all know and love and laughed at the Dan Akroyd impersonation, the other is documented in “My Life in France”.  Of course, there were the 30-some years before this, but you really get the impression that she had not “lived” until she discovered France (and she didn’t start with TV until her late 40’s… maybe I still have hope!).  This book touches on many current events of the 1950’s and 60’s, ranging from McCarthy investigations to space exploration, but mostly how Julia learns to cook (and live) as the French do, and through that, come to realize how limited and narrow thinking much of America (including her parents) had become. 

I loved the writing style used, it was very matter of fact and understated. It was mainly based on letters that Julia and Paul wrote over the years, mostly to Paul’s brother.  The co-author is Julia's nephew, who worked with Julia and finished after her death.  What  treat it must have been for him to learn the history of his family.  Much of the book is about Paul (her husband).  You don't hear much about him, but he introduced Julia to French cooking, and through the years contributed everything from drawings for her books to behind the scenes support for her TV appearances.

Somehow history seems more real when seen from different views.  One character in Life in France, Curnonsky, was a journalist who reviewed some wonderful feasts (and passed himself off as a prince), and at some point was just invited to eat at the best restaurants when ever he wanted, seemed to be one of the eccentric characters from Suite Francoise who seemed to do nothing but eat.

Another link is Julie-Julia Project, not the obvious connection of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One , but the comments on intestinal upsets, not surprising considering the volume of butter, cream and other animal fat consumed!  Of course, Julia make Julie seem like a wimp, Julia spent 10 years and undoubtedly made well over 10x the number of meals that Julie did in 1 year.  The amount of work and detail Julia put into the research and testing of the recipes was phenomenal.  I was also surprised at the difference in basic ingredients between the US and France, such as flour, that she worked to adjust for.   Maybe the more important parallel is that today, Julie Powell changed her life and because a successful writer in a couple of years, something Julia took a decade to do.  Just that’s what they mean by “internet time”.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

If I had to give the movie pitch for Tender at the Bone, it would be “The Glass Castle meets the Julie / Julia Project”.   Ruth Reichl became famous as the food critic for the New York Times, is now is Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet, and has written a few books about herself.  This book is about her younger days, up to the point she started are a food critic.  The Glass Castle reference’s the relationship with the mentally ill mother, and the ability to build your own successful life while still maintaining that relationship in one way or another.  The Julie / Julia reference is living poor in New York as a young adult, and the seemingly natural ability to write about food.  The best line in the book is the disclaimer at the front “Everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual …  I have occasionally embroidered”.  I think it should be included in most the memoirs I have read!   An enjoyable read, but lets hope they don’t make a movie about it, her mother’s cooking would definitely put this in the category of horror movies!

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pepin

I actually read The Apprentice last year, after picking up the book at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in Napa Valley while on vacation.  Both Roy and I read it, and both loved it. I have always liked Jacque Pepin’s TV shows (most memorable moment was when he was fixing some giblet dish, and for the liver, he said in his French accent “this, you feed to the dog”).  He is one of those people who has had an amazing talent, and has picked his course in life, not just going the direction that tradition would take him.  I recommended this for our book club for this month, with the incentive that I would cook some of the recipes.  So, I picked up the book, and had a hard time picking recipes because I would start reading the book again, completely derailing plans for choosing a recipe or two.  But, I have finally picked recipes, and will do the Egg’s Jeanette, Mussels Ravigote, and Roast Leg of Lamb Provincial as well as a Tomato and Zucchini Salad and an Apple Tart from other Jacque Pepin recipe books (yes, I have several).   And in honor of my recent trip to Italy, we will start with Bellini's!   So – Pagerturners – please come hungry on Wednesday!

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael

Yes, another food book!  The Omnivores Dilemma is that as omnivores, we can eat most anything, and today's  huge selection of food makes it difficult to pick what to eat.  And in the US, where we don't have strong traditions of what to eat (and when to eat it), the result is a very dysfunctional relationship with our food, which has in turn led to high levels of obesity and other food-related illness.   The premise of this book is to follow supply lines of food - "industrial corn" which is responsible for the bulk of the calories eaten today in America, small sustainable farms as well as organic farms (which are mostly not small), and "forest" for hunting and gathering.  For each one he starts at the source (the first is a corn farm in Iowa, later is hunting pigs in Northern CA) and follows through to a meal (the corn resulting in a McDonald's meal, from the beef raised on corn to the soda made with high fructose corn syrup, later the forest resulting in a gourmet dinner with friends that helped with the hunt).  

Pollan contrasts the four systems:  the industrial corn is scalable, but not sustainable (not only is it killing the land, its likely to kill us), industrial organic (think Whole Foods) is some better, but still relies on mono-culture and lots of petrochemicals, small farms (grass) are sustainable but not scalable, and hunter / gather is neither sustainable or scaleable, but does get people much more in touch with their food.

His message is similar to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, but I found it much easier to digest ... yes he ranted about oil companies and high fructose corn syrup, but started with facts and put them together into a story.  Ultimately, the industrial corn and the resulting industrial beef, chicken and pork industries are portrayed as evil, but he provides a lot of data to support the conspiracy theory (how does that saying go, just because your paranoid it doesn't mean people aren't out to get you?).   He explains the government policies and history that made the industrial corn what it is today, where corn is sold for less than the production cost.  He goes through the calculation of how it takes more energy (calories) from petrochemicals to produce corn than calories of energy in the corn (which really makes ethanol production from corn a head scratcher).  But he also doesn't proscribe any easy answers or fixes.

The story of looking at food from the source to the final meal is also similar to  The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg, which I have been reading (for months now... it really more than you ever wanted to know about sushi), but is much more readable.  Sushi Economy gives insight into how airfreight became an acceptable means for moving our food around the world, as well as how food traditions change over time (before WWII, Bluefin tuna was not even a delicacy in Japan!)

The message is that we should care about our food: its important and a source of great enjoyment, and should not be reduced to filling and cheap.  We should care about where the food comes from, how the land and animals are treated, and enjoy the seasonality of the food.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

With this, I will be caught up on my book blogs… only to be hopelessly behind after our trip to Italy.

I had heard of the Julie / Julia project and the book, but never got around to reading it, thinking it was just another obsessed, foul-mouthed New-Yorker writer.  Fortunately Vy loaned it to me. 

The book is written by Julie Powell, about her 1 year self-imposed challenge to cook everything in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of Fine Cooking.  The project was motivated by feeling stuck in her job (a low level drone in a government office) as well as rebellion towards the whole Alice Waters, locovore, trendy foodie things.  I instantly connected with the author – she was a Buffy the Vampire fan (the blog was going on during the last season), found the act of preparing food very sensual, and was trying to figure out what to do next with her life.  The book is very entertaining, mixing stories about Julie Child and stories of her own family in with the trials of cooking the recipes (including treks to find bone marrow, brains and other offal).  Her husband Eric is portrayed as a saint, her friends are nuts.  Its fun to read.  

But what really struck me was not the challenge of cooking, but the blogging.  In addition to cooking every recipe, she blogged about everything she cooked. I went on-line and looked at some of the blogs. She blogged almost every day, and not just “I checked Filets to Poisson en Souffle off the list, didn’t puff but tasted good”… no, she went into details about procuring the ingredients, the moods of her husband, her cats, occasional Buffy references, how the food was prepared, what worked, what tasted good, and what didn’t.  And it was entertaining… she had a huge following (after a while, she set up a way people could donate money to help buy lamb and more butter to keep the project going – and they did).   She never talks about the challenges of blogging in the book.. things I find really hard, like making it witty (but not contrived), not offending others (however, that New York thing probably helps here), how personal to get, making a good story but not going on and on, punctuation and grammar good enough to make it readable.  It has a happy ending, she found her real calling as a writer.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

For me, biographies test to fall into two groups: ones I love, and ones I hate.  This was definitely a love.   It's told like a story, and even though there are lots of dates and people, its done in a way that's easy to read and follow along.

What really impressed me was Alice Waters, and how the author brought you a feeling really knowing her, warts and all.  Of course I knew of her, have at least one of her cookbooks, and knew that she is considered the "Mother of California Cuisine".   This book walks you through what she has done, how she has really changed the culinary landscape (literally... small farmers, organic, local).  But what was really interesting to me was how she did it.  She had a great skill: knowing what tasted good, and how to get something to taste just right.  That skill, combined with passion and energy was able to lead profound changes to what we eat in good restaurants (and some of us, at home), without things like good public speaking skills or people management skills.  She knew what she wanted, but often could not clearly articulate a vision.  She was not good a public speaker, was horrible about managing money, did not give others credit where credit was due, and many, many times let others "save"  her when things were going the wrong direction.  She is profoundly talented to react to what she saw or tasted.  She led in a way that only a women could.  And I suspect, in a way that was more possible 30 years ago than today.  But fortunately, she has both established herself and matured.  She has re-focused her energy on kids, and providing an environment where they can learn what is good about food.

The other wonderful thing about this book is the descriptions from Alice on how to cook things.  Not recipes per se, but how something should look and feel, how to go about cooking something marvelous and simple.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Its always dangerous to have really high expectations.  I ordered Barbara Kingsolver's (my favorite author),  new book about food (my favorite subject) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle just knowing that it was done.   What a disappointment.   The book is non-fiction, about the Kingsolver family pulling up roots in Tucson and moving to southern Appalachia (where they had been spending summers).  There goal is to live closer to the land, to grow their own food or procure it locally.  This is what sucks you in. But most of the book is a soap box, about evil oil companies, genetically modified food, poor city planning in Tucson, high fructose corn syrup and global warming.  And I agree that all of this is bad it didn't make for good reading. And some of it was a bit overboard,  the first 100 things I would do to stop global warming would not include not buying organic banana's from Ecuador.

The book is written by Barbara (the main narrative), her husband (educational side bars that look like something in a magazine or text book), and Camille, her daughter (delightful essays and recipes).  It's pretty chopped up - not a great story I was hoping for.

The miracle is that 4 related people (including 2 kids) were happy to do this together.  I get the point of eating seasonal food, meat that has been raised sustainably.  But the reality: this is a lot of work.  I sometimes think that I'm some kind of weirdo because I cook from scratch most of the food that we eat (and enjoy it).  But growing the food is real work, with bugs, dirt, rain, injuries, and sweat.  And no one seems to complain.  It may be non-fiction, but its not reality. 

One side of me thinks so what, you fed yourself for a year.  For centuries villages all over the world have figured out how to feed themselves without the benefit of good transportation, high fructose corn syrup, and Monsanto.  We have had good stories about these villages, like The Good Earth, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Cane River.  The other side thinks our modern society has this huge desire to be entertained: TV, movies, books, shows, sporting events, golf, video games, shopping; completely losing the satisfaction of productive chore. It's more popular to meditate than to pull weeds.  Most of us are pretty happy to have Mexican citizens pull our weeds and harvest our vegetables (no matter whether here or in Mexico). I do think many of the topics are really important. We must maintain the diversity of our food crops and not lose our heirloom varieties.  We need to eat better, cut the crap that big oil and McDonalds makes easy to eat.

I don't have the answers, and I wish this book could of at least had a story that really stuck.  How do we set higher expectations on the food that we eat?

Let me know if you want to borrow the book.  I think its good for your to read even though its not good reading.. and the recipes are good!