Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World FROM THE PUBLISHER
This is the question at the heart of Gina Mallet's provocative and evocative account of the fate of food. In the last fifty years, we have gone from loving food to fearing it, frightened by food science and spooked by medical doctors, and so old familiar foods and recipes, the threads of community, are being lost. Lingering over every sensual memory of forgotten taste, Mallet traces the vicissitudes of five popular foods, their history and their predicament: how the egg that made the souffle supreme has been brought near to extinction by science and a pathogen; how the war against bacteria is widening the cultural gulf between Europe and America and endangering raw milk cheese, an emblematic food that has emotional roots in the old world; how beef, the symbolic food of the Anglosphere, has now been humbled by disease; why we can't grow a hundred varieties of peas the way the Victorian gardeners did, and why the tomato is surviving technology while the apple is dying in the Western Hemisphere; and how, ironically, fish are vanishing -- before humans ever got to know them.
Mallet grew up on a farm with her family in the English countryside during the Second World War, and afterwards they moved to an apartment in London above Harrods. Food is memory, and although food was scarce in England in the era of wartime rationing and shortages, Mallet never forgot the tastes of her childhood -- Jersey cream, garden tomatoes, and raw milk Brie imported from France -- tastes that gradually vanished as life brought Mallet westward from England to Connecticut and then Toronto. Witty and vividly remembered recollections of her family's feasts, both at home and on trips to France and New York, include an encounter with a memorably grumpy French chef nonplussed by his pressure cooker and her father's shock on discovering that her mother had been purchasing steaks from a "Chevaline" butcher. Mallet's gastronomic adventures appeal to any palate: from finding the perfect grilled cheese ("as delicate tasting as any Escoffier recipe") to combing the bustling Food Hall at postwar Harrods for the making of "an Elizabeth David meal." Her poignant book is as idiosyncratic as the history of food itself, and it includes twenty recipes for such old-time favorites as Sole Veronique and English macaroons.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
This gourmand’s polemic cum memoir may have an unoriginal premise—that cuisine is being ruined by the demise of the local producer, the spread of bland, chemically altered ingredients, and the influence of hysterical dietary fatwas—but Mallet’s impatient scorn for anyone standing between her and the next scrumptious morsel is engaging. At times, it’s easy to lose track of whether she’s railing against the F.D.A., the food industry, nutritionists, environmentalists, or all of them, but her basic dictum is simple: taste rules. Mallet’s strength lies in the sensual evocation of food; even a vegetarian might find pleasure in her rhapsody over the perfect steak. She saves her greatest encomiums for earthy, mammalian flavors that reflect their pastoral origins. An artisanal butter is a “six-ounce roll of golden bliss that melts on the tongue and warms the mouth with a hot, sexy, animal taste.”
Publishers Weekly
Being a gourmet isn't simply about ferreting out the best victuals; it's also about luxuriating in good food the way others might stroke a new mink coat. Toronto writer Mallet is one such epicure. In this combination of memoir and essay, she balances remembrances of growing up in wartime England with zesty opinions on various foodstuffs ("I don't consider cod a fish at all," she writes. "It's like eating twenty-dollar bills"). Mallet opines that in an era of Big Macs and a dizzying array of snack foods, people don't know what they're missing. Rather than delight in a few gulps of richly flavored raw milk, she laments, consumers today simply go for quantity over quality. Readers of this work will know better, however, since Mallet goes beyond describing comestible ecstasy and digs deep into topics like cheese, beef and fish. Like an excellent dinner guest, Mallet lets her thoughts roam freely, yet always with focus and a dose of intriguing fact. In writing about kitchen gardens, for example, she begins with the loss of her mother's vegetables and herbs from an errant German bomb that destroyed land and greenhouses alike. From there, she chats about Versailles, organic farming and supermarkets. This breadth of insight, mixed with Mallet's childhood memories, makes for a tasty treat. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Mallet, a former restaurant and theater critic, has turned her attention to the state of food today. The result is a recipe-sprinkled memoir cum examination of modern agriculture. Five iconic food groups-cheese, eggs, beef, fish, and vegetables-are viewed through the lens of history, including Mallet's childhood in postwar Britain and France, and then compared with the current situation. The book is quite up-to-date, including the discovery of mad cow disease in U.S. beef in December 2003 and the reports of high levels of chemicals in farmed salmon in January 2004. Mallet closes with a grimly futuristic epilog in which beef is outlawed owing to pathogens and home-cooked meals are so obsolete that they are called "granddads." Overall, a well-crafted and engaging book; the reminiscences about food in Europe after the war provide a welcome personal touch. Recommended for public and academic libraries with food collections.-Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Lib., Oxford, OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
In a wistful memoir of her British/American upbringing, a food writer for the Canadian National Post urges us to grab all the flavor we can while we still can. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has a palate that the industrial processes of bringing three squares a day to the modern world, particularly in the US, tend increasingly to suppress flavor and freshness in foods in favor of such economic factors as overcoming the rigors of mass distribution and insuring longer shelf life. Add the repeated blows from this doctor's or that university's medical research confirming once again that what tastes best is bad for you, and there's no more familiar phrase to the average American food shopper than, "You just can't get that anymore." Mallet, unfortunately, chooses to commiserate and document the trend in terms of long-suffering favorites (her first hundred pages are on eggs alone) rather than flesh out any kind of battle plan. Yet her nostalgia may well assist those with a few decades of what passes for gourmandise here in the colonies in realizing how far indeed we've strayed from pastoral European ideals like, say, cheeses made from the milk of a single farmer's herd of cows bred to the task of producing butterfat sans interference from any national health ministry. The author has in fact beaten the bushes to find full-flavored alternatives from free-range egg producers to "illegal" raw-milk cheeses sold over the Internet and "beef boutiques" offering the same Scottish Highland cattle meat that the Queen of England prefers. She also scatters some nostalgic recipes with authentique ingredients along the way, including English clotted cream and sole Meuniere. Most instructive:documentation of health research flip-flops that have indicted and hence crippled the markets for food favorites, then later exonerated said favorites. Pessimistic, protracted lament for the death of food. Agent: Marilyn Biderman/McClelland & Stewart
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