Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: B
David Kamp, The United States of Arugula: B+
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: B

Growing up, I lived, without grasping its significance, in a foodie’s paradise of local produce and meat and poultry, an abundance of natural goodness supplied by an ecological- and health-conscious family. Lately, I’ve been reminiscing on that, and thinking about sustainability and cooking, and all that good food that I miss from my childhood. These three books helped vet the curiousity and the nostalgia both.

Pollan, if he wanted to impress me, started The Omnivore’s Dilemma from a deficit. By the time I got to page five, I was already prepared to dismiss his major theses: I didn’t think “we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine our dinner menu;” I was (and remain) dubious about evolutionary biological justifications for diet; and what’s more, Pollan has already annoyed me once with his shallow approach to food science.

I’ll give him his best success first. It turns out I appreciated greatly his explorations down the industrial food chain. I mean, I knew it had a lot of corn in it, but I wasn’t quite cognizant that it had that much corn in it, didn’t really grasp the deep foundation that a single plant culture has on the agrigultural economy. Not only does it feed cattle (and turn into meat) and become cereal flakes, but it’s the number one sweetener, thickener, and all-around plant component in foods. Pollan does an excellent job of presenting this at a macro level.¹ Corn overproduction is subsidized: the result is low prices (encouraging more yield), and cheap commodity corn for the industrial users. The excess pushes for new markets, and the latest is ethanol for auto fuel. It’s hell on the growers (the biology of hybrids being that they produce plantable seeds in small yield and with productivity improvements tied into expensive new technology), but great for the segments of the economy that use the commodity. Even growing and burning ethanol might be an eventually workable approach if we weren’t pumping oil into the field to get it.

Pollan moves on to consider organic farming (these days meaning without pesticide and with limited external nitrogen sources) as well as some more sustainable grass-based farming models. The farming practices he highlights at the Polyface farm in the Shenendoah valley are, to be honest, ecologically brilliant, utilizing domestic animal and plant symbiosis carefully, and recognizing seasonal cycles, to create a sustainable food-producing five hundred acres, even if it takes a great deal of attention. But when he starts talking grass, Pollan shows the first hints of the evolutionary romanticizing that he’ll struggle with at book length. Is the agrarian pastoral the real ideal of nature? That depends a lot on where you are. Western Virginia² is one thing. New England is another. The Amazon (grass-fed, at the expense of the trees) another still.

One reason that corn has made it so big in this society–in addition to the energy density–is that it’s easily storable and transportable. Do we have enough space for an arable 50 acres per person in this country? Probably not, and there’s a logic at this population excess centralize people and to maximize output of farms. Now it could be more community based, and it damn well should be much more sustainable. What prevents this? Subsidies of centralized agriculture, of highways, and cheap oil. Policies matter, everybody.

I’ve developed over the years an allergy to science-critical non-scientists. There’s a fine line between questioning motives and means, of questioning philosophy, but in order to question results, to doubt the process itself, some sufficient minimum of understanding is necessary.³ Local farming and biological congruence are perfectly good heuristics, but Pollan is constantly tempted to treat them as dogma. “Science” is his frequent enemy, those nasty chemical engineers. Like any politician or miracle-believer, however, he’ll throw his deepest rhetorical support behind scientific studies that support his views. He’ll gladly pick and choose those lucky few early ecological types that struck it with prescience while criticizing every chemist alive for the state of the art in 1945. It’s bloody annoying. (The saints at Polyface, I’ll add, are still practicing empiricism.)

One symptom of that sort of writing is a heavy reliance of psychological generalizations and treating them as empirical fact, but except for some prosaic countryside meanderings, Pollan succeeds pretty well at navigating the psychological territory (with some exceptions: his clueless surprise that hunting could be a visceral experience was annoying). The last third of the book is devoted to exploring the natural and modern relationship between humans and nature, from which we must unavoidably consume. He avoids the traps of anthropomorphosis of animals, and paints a reasonable-sounding ethical dodge for eating animals as part of a certain evolutionary symbiosis. That’s evolutionary anthropology at its most dubious (or maybe at its most basic), but I found myself trusting him on it.

Pollan notes that elite chefs have played a big role in bringing sustainable and quality food to the American table, and this is the ball that David Kamp takes and runs touchdowns with in The United States of Arugula (even if he really should have thought of a better title).

Kamp’s is a good popular history, but please do take the point above people have been eating wonderful traditional fare for as long as there have been immigrants. I’ve got a fine memory of Polish delis and genuine Italian breads even in my recent youth–even this silliest excesses of the postwar years didn’t choke them quite out of existence. Kamp doesn’t ignore this perspective, but even before he skims the nineteenth century, he counterbalances the food movement against the most ridiculous point of American culinary history, at the height of the marketing boom for awful, awful processed foods. And he’s got a point: no amount of ignored immigrant communities can excuse the chemical horrors of Wonder Bread, Velveeta, and Spam. Though the U.S., late in its history, does get some credit for developing homegrown artistic cuisine,⁴ Kamp’s is less a history of the existence of good food, and more a history of its entry into popular (which is to say, marketed) culture. Or maybe it’s just a history of culinary publications.

If you think about it, the colonials and frontiersman were unlikely epicureans, whether dour Puritanical sorts or rugged individualists, and with a mostly English cultural heritage, food was, without a plantation and a slave economy at least, an unenjoyed duty. We poor Yankees especially suffered through long winters of salted meat and withered root cellar fare, even if we still managed to invent chowda (say it, Frenchie!) somewhere along the way. Kamp breezes through a hundred fifty years of early food history, nodding briefly at Fannie Farmer, Gilded Age gentleman’s clubs, Delmonico’s, and W. K. Kellogg before taking a grand anticipatory gasp at the 1939 World’s Fair, where (then-modern) French cooking was finally introduced with ceremony to the clueless American masses.

From there, The U.S. of A. grows into an entertaining history of the culinary movement, a series of miniature biographies basically, of seminal kitchens, restaurants, and writers. There are quite a lot of people in there, and too many footnotes,⁵ but Kamp’s got a snappy style (he could almost be writing a good blog), an odd focus on sexuality (or maybe not, food is a sensualist medium too), and a refreshing optimism about our whole foodie culture. His basic point is that we’re lucky to have all this good sensibility and good product available, catching up to western Europe after centuries of overcooked meat and potatoes, and if most of the country still eats the enriched, bastardized, processed schlock, then even that is more gastronomically informed, and there is, thank god, a viable alternative for people who care.

There are a couple of interesting trends that Kamp observes over the twentieth century. One is that, despite the fact that a number of women were influential in the movement, American conceptions needed to veer away from the female kitchen and get man-ified for epicureanism to take off as a cultural force. Another gradual trend that Kamp describes is a sense of quality that moved from (French) technique to (local, fresh, seasonal) ingredients. Which isn’t to say we didn’t steal that idea from the Europeans too–pretty much every figure profiled in this book had a gastronomical awakening during a trip to France–but, though it kills me, you do have to credit those California boomers for stressing locally produced fresh ingredients (which, of course, is an easy pedestal to preach from where it’s summer eleven months out of the year), and I think the seventies-vintage Golden Staters also deserve some credit for popularizing authentic American cuisine too, grown out of idealistic hippie enthusiasm, even though you’d think that the moldering ghosts of Battle Creek must have been casting some karmic shadows in that direction too.

According to Kamp, we continued to steal classics from rustics throughout the seventies and eighties, as well as more urbane fare from France and, a little later, Japan, mixing and matching over the later years with wild and delicious abandon as chefs became celebrity cool. What’s the future? Since the world doesn’t have too many more peasant cultures to exploit (maybe east African food is coming up next), and since the days of terrapin and caviar (and Chilean sea bass and probably stuff like cod too) are behind us too, I fear, frankly, that it’s going to be back to the lab (and callin’ it haute–which I think is already the “past,” actually), and an explosion of offal, and, depending on how things shake down with the oil and the topsoil in the next century, maybe it’ll be anything we can get our hands on: fresh food by necessity.

Not that you have to be environmentally conscious to be a chef, you can also be really self-absorbed. And what journey to the kitchens of America could be told without a visit to their seamy commercial underbellies? Chef cum author cum personality Anthony Bourdain writes a 300-page rant of a memoir of the pretty-good professional kitchen, complete with drugs, sex, cursing, alcohol, and what I came in for, the food.

The blessing and the curse of this book is, really, Anthony Bourdain. Maybe it’s worse that I’ve seen him brooding on television a handful of times, a lanky bag of hung-over looking scowls. He describes himself as a mouthy punk at heart, a guy who learned workplace survival skills the way a teenager learns life lessons in an S. E. Hinton novel. His formative point as a cook, if you can call it that, is young Bourdain showing up for his first real gig, armed with the proverbial little knowledge, with a ton of smug in each of his 1974 vintage lapels alone. He goes on for another 250 pages about the colorful path down to humility and then back up, breaking the punk attitude and then owning it. The obnoxiousness is not something you miss. It never stops shining through even in the writing. But you have to give the man credit for self-recognition.

I enjoyed the kitchen scenes, and he captured the organized chaos, and the quick-fire mental organization, the commitment (he answered my question once and for all why chefs smoke), the loyalty. The scandalously delivered background sections were great too (why your food doesn’t taste like his, revealing the dirty secrets of re-used bread and Monday fish specials). But the fundamental misdirection of Kitchen Confidential is that Bourdain isn’t just a cook, he’s a writer too. He’s not half-bad at the job (for some reason, I’ve got a soft spot for self-deprecating wiseasses), but the writer in him can’t hold back on the whole life’s journey bit. He can’t resist the urge to make a story out of it all, a rough tale of sin and redemption, but he fails to hit all the notes with the force that he’s swinging for them. Love of food: check, but needed more of that, really. A bullshitter lets the coke and the booze get the better of him for a while as he chases a string of failures: yes, but okay already, and okay already. Rock bottom epiphanizing: it’s not missing. Back to that basic foodie goodness and the balancing of the life: yeah yeah, now tell me more about the food in Tokyo.

I don’t know how much buy all the frightening restaurant exceptionalism, really. I mean, I don’t doubt that cooking, like any not-too-visible trade, attracts some rough practitioners, who are forgiven their sleaziness or extralegality for capability. I can’t imagine your typical construction site has a significantly different cast of characters, nor your typical body shop. I even recognize some of these assholes from summers in the part-time dungeons. I don’t doubt Bourdain’s anecdotal veracity, but by his own admission, he’s drawn to certain work environments, and, habitually, drags along the same talent from place to place to create them. But I also don’t doubt that other people run a tighter ship. Hell, I know people who do.

…and the chefs are still stressed.

1. As an aside, I’ll try to remember to keep an eye for more information about the Ever-Normal Granary plan: it seems a reasonable, sustainable, hedge against market fluctuations, but I’m not sure it would work without adjustment against large-scale macroeconomic trends.
2. I lived in the DC area for awhile, so I can call it that.
3. For example, don’t say things like “a form of butane” when describing the horrors of t-butyl hydroquinone. Within pages, he’s extolling polyquinones as glorious antioxidants, but simpler ones, hydroquinone say, are nasty. (I think alkylated phenols are a lot worse, but you know, the point is that these distinctions matter.)
4. Though he focuses on California as the origin of a gourmet movement, it’s also unfair to gloss over the home-grown “peasant” food traditions that developed in the States, whether that’s New England seafoods, Louisiana Creole, southern soul food, barbecue, or whatever. And to be fair, this was the seminal chef and food writer Jim Beard’s earliest focus, which Kamp does mention.
5. I should talk!

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