Recipe for a Revolution

original-grist
Recipe for a Revolution

How a cookbook renaissance heated up the sustainable-food movement
By Tom Philpott
15 Feb 2007
In the postmodern United States, a cultural critic laments, "The pleasures of the table are rarely appreciated at face value."

Speak truth to flour.

A near-hysterical concern with health has replaced common sense, he continues, leading to all manner of dubious decisions: "Americans blithely drink sodas filled with artificial flavors and sweeteners, yet paste warning labels on bottles of wine; they decry the dangers of eating butter and claim that margarine, a completely manufactured artificial product, is better for you."

For Americans, he worries, eating has been drained of joy and imbued instead with anxiety. "Are we so out of touch with our senses, our intuition, and our cultural heritage," he wonders, "that we cannot eat without consulting medical journals and diet books?"

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making, by James Peterson.
This mini-jeremiad on the vexations of the American table would not be out of place in the latest Michael Pollan essay. Yet I encountered it nearly 15 years ago, in James Peterson's landmark Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making.

I got to thinking about Peterson's wonderful cookbook a couple of weeks ago, while immersed in my three-column farm bill series. My research reminded me that for most of the last 100 years, food production in the United States has undergone a steady process of mystification. More and more, Americans are content to let others not only grow their food for them, but also cook it.

A Dash of Spice

There are several ways to illustrate our alienation from food production. Here's one: In 1905, the USDA tells us, households spent nearly 90 percent of their total food budgets on food to be consumed within the home. One hundred years later, Americans spend almost half of their food budgets eating out, and much of what they eat within the home is heat-and-serve fare that requires no real cooking.

Now, when writing about these trends, it's too easy to lapse into a sort of nostalgia that's really no different from historical amnesia. History offers few lost paradises. People may have been cooking and eating lots of fresh food in 1905, but social relations around food production weren't rosy. Still 15 years from gaining the right to vote, women bore the brunt of all that household industriousness. Few Americans today could easily withstand the rigors of keeping a house without electricity, modern appliances, and a nearby supermarket. Nor will many African-Americans look back fondly on the era. The promises of Reconstruction had decisively collapsed, and white-supremacist ideology reigned in the north and south alike.


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