Connecting Bay Area food professionals through networking, education and resources

by Rodger Helwig

The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan

From field to plate is the subject of The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan, a groundbreaking book enthusiastically endorsed by all who attended the SFPFS book club meeting on August 2.

During a lively and passionate discussion, we all agreed that McMillan did an amazing job of documenting the human cost of America’s cheap food, while painting an unflinching portrait of the nation’s food workers.

In 2009, award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan set out on an undercover journey to see what it takes for Americans to eat well. For almost a year she worked at below- to minimum-wage jobs, picking grapes and garlic in the fields of California, stocking produce at Walmart and working the line at Applebee’s.

In this well-written, intelligent book she documents the lives and foodways of the people she worked with along the way, as well as detailing how she personally attempted to get by on meager wages.

Her mission was to answer two questions: Why do we eat the way we do? How can we change it?

As she said in a Huffington Post interview, “Most writing about food in the U.S. has come from a gourmet tradition. Very few people dedicate serious reporting to how the food system works.”

Some of her observations:

• Food workers are, in terms of money and time, among the least able to eat well in America. Most are too exhausted to cook wholesome meals and instead eat junk food that makes them hungrier.

• Increasing farm wages by 40 percent would only increase the average family’s produce bill by about $16 a year.

• While 84 percent of produce in America is purchased at supermarkets, many large metropolitan cities have a paucity of these stores. Detroit, a city of 700,000, is without a single store from a national grocery chain

• “Walmart’s produce section is nothing less than an expansive life-support system,” said McMillan. “Most days, when it comes to vegetables, it was like putting lipstick on corpses.”

What does McMillan offer in the way of solutions to these problems?

She argues for small changes, like cooking classes to demystify eating well, and coupons for saving on fresh foods, which is better and cheaper than eating processed food or eating out.

She believes that cooking is a big part of self-sufficiency, and we need to be teaching it to kids. That it’s not only good to know how to feed your self, but it’s also a practical way to learn math and science.

McMillan also feels that “Changing what’s on our plate simply isn’t feasible without changing far more. Wages, health care, work hours and kitchen literacy are just as critical to changing our diets as the agriculture we practice or the places at which we shop.”

Books: Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar, edited by Matt McAllester.
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, by Laura Schenone.

Twelve lucky readers gathered at the test kitchen of Sunset magazine in Menlo Park for the quarterly meeting of the book club in May. Our host, Amy Machnak, Sunset’s recipes editor, toured us through the beautiful Cliff May-designed campus before we sat down for a discussion and a tasty potluck feast of dishes inspired by the two books we read.

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken by Laura Schenone is the memoir of an Italian-American woman who searched for her roots by researching the origins of her family’s treasured ravioli recipe. She went to great lengths, geographically and otherwise, to track down every element of the recipe, including the presumably American addition of cream cheese and the unusual element of uncooked meat filling. Along the way, we were privy to her family’s personal tribulations (both recent and ancient) in depth, prompting at least one of our members to question whether it’s worth reading any more memoirs. Indeed, although we could feel the author’s enthusiasm for piecing together the puzzle of her family’s history and food traditions, we agreed that this book might have made a better long-form article, and could have profited from editing.

Interesting sections of the book included the profiles of some purveyors of regional Italian ingredients such as chestnut flour, as well as of the nonnas who demonstrated the dough-rolling and flipping techniques essential to making the ravioli. We discussed what it is that drives us to resurrect, reclaim, and authenticate recipes from our own family traditions.

Some of the foods we brought to the potluck inspired by this book were pasta with walnut pesto, a chickpea flour frittata, ravioli, pan dulce, and chard torta.

Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar, edited by Matt McAllester, is a collection of essays by war correspondents concerning food in the context of wartime. In contrast to the food writing of abundance and lush description that we are used to reading in the book club, this book presented food in the context of severe deprivation and situations of danger or duress. Many of the stories were disturbing and all of them made us appreciate the abundance of food that we enjoy in the USA. Our eyes were opened to the serious lack of food in countries ravaged by war or by crazy or corrupt leaders. This was not typical “food writing,” because in many cases there was not much food to write about and the writers generally shared the same deprivation diet as those they were writing about. Food in most cases was a matter of survival, with no room for fussing about “whether a recipe worked out.”

The international locales in this book inspired our potluck dishes, including hummus and pita, baba ganoush, burek, Irish stew, and Pakistani coconut burfi.

We finished by celebrating a member’s birthday in American style, with abundant cakes, including chocolate, almond, and lemon.

The Table Comes First by Adam Gopnik
by Frankie Whitman

I was randomly selected to provide this write-up of the SFPFS recent book club SIG. While random, it was appropriate — I was the person who recommended it, having gone to see Gopnik last October in conversation about the book. And, alas, I was one of the very few, or maybe the only person who actually read the book in its entirety. And perhaps that statement sums it up for the book club. Our group was highly critical of this book.

Others have not been so harsh. For example, a review in The Atlantic had this to say:
“It’s history, nutrition, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology all rolled up into one delectable streusel of insight and illumination, in Gopnik’s unapologetically intelligent yet charmingly witty style. …Deeply fascinating and absorbingly written, The Table Comes First is the kind of read you’ll want to devour in one sitting, despite its Thanksgiving-sized 320-page heft.”

And in Slate, in an article titled “Stirring the Pot” (sound familiar?) by Laura Shapiro, she wrote, “I wish this book, The Table Comes First, didn’t have to be a book. I wish it could be a dinner table, instead, with maybe six people sitting around it—not in a jammed-full New York restaurant where everyone is bellowing over the sound system but in somebody’s home, where we’ve all been invited to eat and talk. And I wish Adam Gopnik were at the table, leaning forward intently as the plates come and go, yakking away happily about food and history and Paris and cookbooks and life, just as he does in these pages.”

In truth, not all reviewers loved the book, but none were as critical as our little group. Gopnik is a sort of Renaissance man and so has lots to say about everything. And words are his passion. However, we seemed to agree that the book needed a good editing and could only imagine that his editor was someone just out of college who was afraid to criticize this famous and revered essayist.

We also thought it curious that there were no acknowledgements. Really?

But here were some interesting take-aways:

• Two of the biggest differences between home cooking and restaurant cooking are heat and salt.
• Two secret ingredients that make anything taste better, “but not together, of course,” are anchovies and bacon.

We’ll save you a lot of work: read the book as essays, and pick your essays carefully. They are not all satisfying. We liked his chapter on the whole locavore movement, “Near or Far?” I personally loved the chapter on desserts and El Bulli titled “Endings.” And the chapter on our latest fixation on meat titled “Meat or Vegetable?” was entertaining and worth reading.

So don’t give up. There are some gems here. And there are several copies of the book floating around from book club members who would be delighted to share—or even get the book off their bookshelf!