0 The TV Dinner as Turning Point

In the first chapter of Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's [Really] Making America Fat, Hank Cardello identifies the invention of the TV dinner as a key turning point on the road to the current state of the U.S. diet and the health problems that flow from it:

There are many people who trace the beginning of our national obesity epidemic to the start of the fast-food chain, to a man named Kroc and the Golden Arches that he started in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. While I'm the first to admit that fast food and all of its offshoots played a big role in our current situation, for my money, the story of the Swanson TV dinner holds the real key to understanding why we're so fat. The TV dinner marked a lot of firsts: the first time that we embraced en masse convenience over cuisine; the first time that it was better to be easy than to taste good; the first time that a preprepared (frozen) meal was served ready to heat and eat at home.
     But of all these firsts, perhaps the most important, the one that has affected our waistlines and our taste buds the most, is that the Swanson TV dinner marked the first time that a food industry marketing gimmick seduced what might have been our better judgment. After all, the TV dinner was just a way to boost a company's struggling bottom line and cut its losses. On the surface, from a food perspective, there appeared to be little benefit to the consumer. The taste was awful, the food unappealing, and the choices limited. I mean, seriously, who wants to eat frozen Thanksgiving turkey in February?
     And yet, it turned out that was exactly what a lot of people wanted, and they wanted to do it because of how it had been sold to them. They had been sold on the idea that the convenience of this product was their ticket to a happier life. It had nothing to do with the actual food, and everything to do with the image of the food that had been projected.

As you may have gathered from this passage, Cardello, a former food industry executive, sets his sights squarely (though not exclusively) on the food industry in apportioning blame for the alarming rates of obesity in the U.S. today. Having developed a longer view from Harvey Levenstein's histories of food and eating, I don't think Cardello is right about the TV dinner marking the first time a food industry marketing gimmick had such an effect. Nevertheless, after only a couple of chapters, I'm finding Stuffed to be an eye-opening read. No doubt I'll have more to say about it here when I work my way through to the end.

Detail: The TV Dinner as Turning Point

0 Marion Nestle on Food Marketing, Nutrition, and Personal Choice

Marion Nestle reports on an encounter with a room full of food company executives and, in response, sums up her philosophy on marketing, nutrition and personal choice:

They said: "If you object to the way we market foods, you must be against business." As it happens, I am not against business. But I do have problems with unchecked greed, the use of misleading health claims to sell junk food, and the marketing of foods directly to children—especially when marketing to children undermines parental authority and, therefore, the personal choice of parents. I most definitely do believe in personal choice—when it is informed. To make informed decisions about food choice, you need truth in advertising, the whole truth and nothing but.

From Marion Nestle, What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating (2006).

Detail: Marion Nestle on Food Marketing, Nutrition, and Personal Choice

0 John Glassco on Absinthe

John Glassco on his first experience of absinthe during a 1928 jaunt to Luxembourg:

     We went back to the Grosplatz, where the heavy men had now switched from beer and buns to aperatifs and anchovies. Many of them were sitting in front of elaborate ice-filled glass tanks with little spigots extending over their glasses. When I learned these were filters for absinthe I at once ordered one and was served an aperitif glass a quarter full of pale green liquid over which was fitted a flanged and perforated spoon holding a large domino of sugar. A tank of ice was then brought and the glass placed under one of the spigots. I had now only to turn a little tap to let the iced water drip slowly over the sugar until the glass was full.
     The clean sharp taste was so far superior to the sickly liquorice flavour of legal French Pernod that I understood the still-rankling fury of the French at having that miserable drink substituted for the real thing in the interest of public morality. The effect also was as gentle and insidious as a drug: in five minutes the world was bathed in a fine emotional haze unlike anything resulting from other forms of alcohol. La sorcière glauque I thought, savouring the ninetyish phrase with real understanding for the first time.

From John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse.

To see photos of the absinthe paraphernalia that Glassco describes, check out the Virtual Absinthe Museum.

Detail: John Glassco on Absinthe

0 A Food and Fiction Meme

I'm not quite done with Marion Nestle's What to Eat yet, so I'll save that review for next week, and this week offer up a meme tailored to my Friday food theme instead. Here goes:


Food from fiction that you'd like to sample:

I don't know if my childhood favourite books are more thoroughly laced with delicious food descriptions than more recent reads, or if those just stick in my head because of repeated readings. But I could happily eat my way through much of the food described in the Betsy-Tacy series (Maud Hart Lovelace), the Anne series (L.M. Montgomery), and the Little House books (Laura Ingalls Wilder). From the Betsy-Tacy books, for example: Mrs. Ray’s fried potatoes, cocoa cooked in a pail on the Big Hill, anything baked by Anna, the peach pie at the Taggart's farm, Joe's sour-milk pancakes, and Aunt Ruth's bread. And from the Anne series and the Little House books, see the passages I quoted in last Friday’s post.


A fictional meal you would like to have attended:

There are a lot of contenders for this one but for now, sticking with the Betsy-Tacy theme, I'll go with dinner on the S.S. Columbic, for the food and the conversation (Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and the Great World).


A memorable work of fiction set in a restaurant or a café:

Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place".


Food you've tried that didn't live up to the expectations raised by a fictional account:

Turkish Delight from C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I figured it must be pretty spectacular for Edmund to be willing to sell out his siblings for a box of it, but I was sorely disappointed when I finally tasted some.

Or petit fours which sounded tantalizing in Elizabeth Enright's The Saturdays but turned out to be oddly generic and tasteless (albeit very pretty) when encountered in a bakery. But I gather that in France the term is not confined to the square pastel-coloured confections that I sampled in my youth, so perhaps there's still hope for me and petit fours.


Food from fiction that you couldn't help but want to try even though you knew you would hate it:

I was a very picky eater as a child and wouldn't have eaten sardines or pork pie at any time of the day or night. But when these items appeared on the menu of a midnight feast at St. Clare's or Malory Towers, I wanted nothing more than to join in:

"Golly! Pork-pie and chocolate cake, sardines and Nestlé's milk, chocolate and peppermint creams, tinned pineapple and ginger-beer!" said Janet. "Talk about a feast! I bet this beats the upper third’s feast hollow! Come on—let's begin. I'll cut the cake."

(From Enid Blyton, The Twins at St Clare's.)


An unappetizing food description from fiction:

I'm generally partial to a fry-up, but after enduring one of the most vivid hangovers in fiction, I didn't find this breakfast any more appetizing than Jim Dixon did:

There was a pause, while he noted with mild surprise how much and how quickly she was eating. The remains of a large pool of sauce were to be seen on her plate beside a diminishing mound of fried egg, bacon, and tomatoes. Even as he watched she replenished her stock of sauce with a fat scarlet gout from the bottle.

(From Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim).

Or, moving from the unappetizing to the downright traumatizing, there's the cake from Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman:

The spongy cake was pliable, easy to mould. She stuck all the separate members together with white icing, and used the rest of the icing to cover the shape she had constructed. It was bumpy in places and had too many crumbs in the skin, but it would do. She reinforced the feet and ankles with tooth-picks. Now she had a blank white body. It looked slightly obscene, lying there soft and sugary and featureless on the platter.

A recipe you've tried or a meal you've recreated from fiction:

I've read the odd novel that included recipes but I've never tried any of them out. I guess the closest that I've come to this is the meal made from Lucy Maud Montgomery's recipe book that was served at the last LMM conference that I attended. The main dishes were delicious on the whole, though a tad heavy for the modern palate. But the desserts were teeth-achingly sweet, too much even for me. Different times, different tastes.


Food you associate with reading:

When I was a kid I often snacked on popcorn or cinnamon toast while reading, and now I find myself craving those foods when rereading childhood favourites.


Your favourite food-focussed book/writer:

I don't have a ready answer for this one, but I'm keeping it in the meme as I'm hoping for recommendations!


Tag, you're it!

Detail: A Food and Fiction Meme

0 Histories of Food and Eating

              

In his excellent In Defence of Food, Michael Pollan steers the reader away from the highly processed stuff that dominates grocery store shelves and toward "real" food with this bit of advice: "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." He suggests that you imagine your great grandmother at your side as you make your way through the store, and look at each item through her eyes as you pick it up and scan its ingredient list.

Because my actual great grandmothers are less vivid in my mind than their fictional contemporaries, I found myself adapting Pollan's exercise to consider the meals of some of my favourite late 19th/early 20th century characters as possible dietary touchstones. Think, for example, of the meal that Anne Shirley plans for Mrs. Morgan's visit in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Avonlea (set in the early 1880s):

"I'll have a light soup to begin with ... you know I can make a lovely cream-of-onion soup ... and then a couple of roast fowls. I'll have the two white roosters." [...] "Then I'll have peas and beans and creamed potatoes and a lettuce salad, for vegetables," resumed Anne, "and for dessert, lemon pie with whipped cream, and coffee and cheese and lady fingers."

Or the box of groceries that Betsy and Joe receive as a mysterious housewarming gift in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy’s Wedding (set in 1914):

     Betsy was sitting on the kitchen floor beside a huge box overflowing with groceries. A smiling delivery boy was just closing the door.
     "Who sent them?"
     "He wouldn't say. But they're for us."
     Joe dropped down beside her. He lifted out a dozen eggs, a half dozen tomatoes, a cucumber, some onions—two bottles of milk, a pound of butter, bacon, a slab of strong cheese—a loaf of bread, a coffee cake, doughnuts.
     "Pretty good," he said, devouring one.
     Betsy was pulling out coffee, cocoa and tea, vinegar and oil, salt and pepper, oatmeal, tapioca, molasses, raisins.
     "And coconut!" she cried. "I can make you a coconut cake as soon as I learn how!"
     Next came flour and sugar, baking powder, soda and vanilla. Beside a box of graham crackers stood a jar of jelly and one of pickles. Potatoes and apples spilled from their sacks.

Or, the evening snack that provokes a disquisition on the history of popcorn from a young Almanzo Wilder in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy (set in the late 1860s):

     Almanzo sat on a footstool by the stove, an apple in his hand, a bowl of popcorn by his side, and his mug of cider on the hearth by his feet. He bit the juicy apple, then he ate some popcorn, then he took a drink of cider. He thought about popcorn.

I would be happy to reconfigure my diet along any of these lines.

Alas the pleasure of this exercise can slide too easily into romanticism about the pure and nutritious food people ate in the good, old days. Note that Pollan advises avoiding anything that your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food; he doesn't advocate adopting her diet, being well aware that many of our great grandmothers had very poor diets indeed whether out of choice or necessity. As an antidote to that romanticism and as a means of figuring out how we got to where we are now as far as food production and distribution and the dietary habits that flow from them are concerned, I've been dipping into a pair of social histories by Harvey Levenstein: Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (covering 1880-1930) and Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (spanning 1930 to the present).

I can't give a full account of either yet, but I'm far enough along in Revolution at the Table to tell you that it makes for fascinating reading. Levenstein's premise is that the years between 1880 and 1930 marked a dramatic transformation in how and what Americans ate. In the opening chapter he paints a vivid picture of "The American Table in 1880" and throughout the rest of the book tracks the shift that occurred thereafter and the multitude of forces that prompted it: for example, technological advances that changed the processes of food production and distribution as well as the way people prepared it in their homes, a new ethos of advertising that saw enormous sums of money employed to develop mass markets for new food products to supplant existing staples, and reform campaigns rooted in a burgeoning nutritional science which were designed to persuade people to eat not what they liked but what was good for them.

A particular strength of the book is the attention that Levenstein pays to regional differences and to class. He makes very clear that what Americans ate in 1880 and how the shifts that occurred thereafter affected them had much to do with where they lived, how much money they had in their food budgets, how much time they had to devote to preparing food, and whether or not they had the help of servants in doing so, as well as to dietary preferences shaped by tradition and culture. By way of illustration, here he is summing up a chapter on "the New England Kitchen experiment," a reform effort that sought to improve the diets of the working classes in Boston, New York, and other cities in the northeast U.S.:

It is tempting to regard the founders of the Kitchen as they saw themselves: people of learning and vision frustrated by the ignorance and prejudices of the class they most wanted to help. After all, within decades, much of their message on nutrition had become part of the conventional wisdom. Yet to concentrate solely on the wisdom of their message would be to ignore their manifest failings. Like many reformers of their time, they went about their mission among the working class with the smug assurance that with "science" on their side, they were touting a way of life far superior to that worked out by millions of people in their daily struggle to survive. Once rejected, rather than re-examining their message and its audience, they dismissed the working-class as ignoramuses whose only hope lay in their propensity to imitate their betters.

Note the quotation marks around "science." Here's why:

The great irony of this attempt to bring the benefits of science to the eating habits of the lower-class was that many of the things the reformers advocated were, by the light of today’s nutritionists, both dangerous and unhealthy. As we have seen, one of the banes of the workingman's diet was the dearth of fresh vegetables and fruits. Yet because they preached in the era before the discovery of vitamins, the New Nutritionists denigrated most fruits and vegetables, which emerged from the labs as mostly water and carbohydrates. Atwater urged Americans to eat more white flour and fewer potatoes because the former was a much cheaper source of carbohydrates. The bran of the wheat and the vitamin-packed skins of the potatoes were to be discarded as "refuse." The tomato was dismissed as useful only in small quantities as a flavoring agent with no food value of its own. If one insisted on eating green vegetables, they were to be well boiled, to make them more digestible and lessen the waste of energy necessary to digest them. Only condensed milk, laced with sugar but deprived of Vitamins C and D, was used in the Kitchen. In short, if America turned en masse to follow their advice, rickets, beri-beri, scurvy, and other vitamin-deficiency diseases may have reached epidemic proportions.

There are a lot of strands to the story that Levenstein is telling in this book which can make for a somewhat disjointed reading experience. I think that's inevitable though as a more focussed narrative would require too much narrowing or distortion. In fact, the structure of the book makes it perfect for dipping into and out of as I like to do with this sort of richly detailed non-fiction. I expect I will be sharing more titbits here as I continue to work my way through it and move on to Levenstein's follow-up, The Paradox of Plenty.


Next Friday: Marion Nestle's What to Eat.

Detail: Histories of Food and Eating

0 Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is part memoir, part treatise/meditation on sustainable agriculture and ethical eating. In it, she recounts a year-long experiment in which she and her family opted out of the industrial food chain, eating only what they could grow or raise themselves on their Virginia farm, or purchase from their neighbours, save for a very few fair trade indulgences (coffee, hot chocolate and spices such as cinnamon and turmeric) shipped from afar. Kingsolver explains the endeavour and something of the motivation behind it thus:

This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if it meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them.

The experiment was very much a family affair and so too is the book. It contains sidebars by Kingsolver’s husband, biologist Steven L. Hopp, on relevant aspects of environmental science, the food industry and legal regulation thereof, and local food activism, and occasional short essays by daughter Camille offering up a teenage perspective on the experience as well as seasonal menus and recipes. But the primary voice is Kingsolver's and a very engaging voice it is. I've read a few books in this vein that suffer from an excess of earnestness and a dearth of writing skill. Kingsolver, by contrast, has produced a smart, funny, thought-provoking, and highly evocative book.

A good bit of it is devoted to a day-to-day, season-by-season, nuts and bolts description of the small-scale farming that brought food to their table. In the introduction, Kingsolver is quick to say of this aspect of the book that it is not intended as a "how-to," and making a case for the relevance of it to urbanites like me who lack the resources or the inclination to contemplate growing our own dinners:

...think of the agricultural parts of the story as a music-appreciation course for food—acquainting yourself with the composers and conductors can improve the quality of your experience. [...] Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.

But it turns out that I didn't need to be convinced on utilitarian grounds. The agricultural parts of the story proved to be my favourite parts. They're beautifully written and were frequently something of a revelation to me. Early on, when I found myself reading a lengthy bit about asparagus (pages 26-29 of the hardcover edition) aloud to Eric, it was clear that I was hooked. I've been enjoying asparagus for years but I had not previously so much as pictured how it looks in the ground. Ditto for peanuts. I was so taken with Kingsolver's description of cheese making that I'm contemplating learning how to do it myself despite being borderline lactose intolerant and not even slightly domestic. And who would have thought that there could be such suspense in a tale of turkey mating? The book was truly a pleasure from beginning to end. I highly recommend it.


Soup of the Day: Today's soup was a delicious Lentil and Carrot, made from a recipe in Cooking With Foods That Fight Cancer. It's the third soup recipe from this book that I've tried that has produced stellar results (the other winners are Cuban Black Bean, and Mediterranean Bean) and the Shepherd's Pie proved excellent also. This book is a companion to another that explains the cancer-fighting properties of the various foods that figure in the recipes, Foods That Fight Cancer. I haven't yet read the nutritional science behind it all, so for now I'm recommending the recipes simply on the basis of deliciousness with the healthiness factor in the background as a potential added bonus.

Next Friday: A post on Harvey Levenstein's Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, a most interesting social history of eating in the U.S. that spans the apparently pivotal years of 1880-1930.

Detail: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

0 Food-Focussed Fridays

I’m in dire need of some blogging discipline and to that end I’m experimenting with a weekly feature. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about food lately so I’ll make that my focus. Welcome, then, to Food-Focussed Fridays. Every Friday, I’ll report in on or offer up a quotation from whatever I’m reading on the topic of food be it a memoir, a cookbook, a social history, a food industry exposé, a treatise on nutrition, a manifesto on eating locally, or just a particularly toothsome passage of fiction.

Fridays are also the days that I expect to have a bit of time for cooking this term, so I may double up and report on my culinary adventures here too. Mind you I’m not very domestic, and just turning on the stove is a culinary adventure for me. Nevertheless, in a quest to up my vegetable intake, I’ve resolved to attempt a new soup recipe every week for the remainder of the winter. If I make good on that, I can offer up soup reviews alongside book reviews.

Here are some of the recent acquisitions that I expect to be writing about in the coming weeks:

Andrew Carmellini & Gwen Hyman: Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food;

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life;

Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: the Transformation of the American Diet;

Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America;

Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health;

Michael Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals;

Paul Roberts, The End of Food; and,

Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.


And two new releases that I haven’t got my hands on yet but that I’m keen to acquire:

Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating; and,

Hank Cardello & Doug Garr, Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat.

On the menu for next week then, a post on Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle accompanied by a report on the soup of the day. Right now it’s a toss up between Warm Pea Soup (surely the “Warm” in the title is redundant? would anyone serve cold pea soup?) and Carrot with Red Lentils…

Detail: Food-Focussed Fridays