Wednesday, April 9

Wednesday Rant

[Please excuse the venting below. Maybe world events are making me cranky!]

When I saw a teaser on the Food Network for a new Ruth Reichl special, "Eating Out Loud: San Francisco," I made a mental note to tune in.

Not only had I enjoyed her previous special, "Eating Out Loud: New York," but the woman is one of the current goddesses of food writing. She has already held – and left – the plummiest reviewing job ever, that of restaurant critic for the New York Times; is currently the executive editor of Gourmet magazine; and is the author of two food memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples, both of which are very enjoyable reads. Additionally, Ms. Reichl is the editor of a newish series of books published by the Modern Library, through which effort she reprints classics of food literature. It turns out that she and I have much the same taste in books.

After watching the San Francisco special, however, I was disenchanted with Ms. Reichl. Why? Because after expounding for fifty minutes about the "food revolution" that was Berkeley in the seventies (of which, I might add, she was a part – see Comfort Me with Apples for details), she summarized by saying that said "food revolution" is responsible for Americans eating fresh food today.

Hello? Really? I would beg to differ.

I have no doubt that northern California has played a large part in how we eat today. In fact, I agree that many trends in restaurants and food start on the Left Coast. However, I can't agree that Berkeley was the genesis of the current rage for fresh food that Ms. Reichl claims. I would argue that for most of us it's a lot closer to home than that.

My mother has vivid memories of her grandmother, my great-grandmother, cooking on her farm. She made fresh biscuits every day. She cooked vegetables from her garden. She milked her own cows. She raised her own chickens and turkeys. Any chicken my great-grandparents ate for dinner was no more than twelve hours from the coop. Even when they moved to town, my great-grandmother cooked with fresh local ingredients. She canned. And she made the best pecan pie, using nuts from the tree in their backyard, that I can ever remember having.

Since both my mother's parents grew up on farms, they continued to have huge gardens as long as they were able. My grandmother was a wizard with flowers – she taught me how to correctly tamp Miracle-Gro into the flowerbeds and always had a lovely yard. But it was my grandfather who could grow vegetables like nothing else.

When I was younger, I loved to go to their house and help him pick green beans and string them, or water the tomato plants, or harvest fuzzy okra pods. At the time, they lived in a house in a fairly far-out subdivision in Austin that backed to a large greenbelt. (Of course, all that greenbelt has been developed into new houses now.) My grandfather rigged up all sorts of gimcrackery to keep the deer out – in Hill Country summers, water gets scarce, and nothing looks better to a deer than a carefully-tended and watered garden – but to no avail. He finally resorted to waiting up nights and shooting his shotgun into the air to scare them off when they arrived, something that I don't think would fly with neighbors today!

My love of fresh foods was passed on from these family members and others, not because I tasted artisanal goat cheese in Sonoma County. Not all of my relatives were farmers, and those who weren't introduced me to other fine foods – snapper and shrimp fresh from the boat, homemade bread and pastry, peaches right off a tree, freshly butchered beef.

All of us have taste memories, and some of them are not, ahem, healthy ones (see previously posted recipe for Velveeta queso). But I would bet that the way we are raised and the foods we are exposed to as children and young adults have much more to do with how we eat as adults than any food revolution. Has Berkeley's revolutionary Cheeseboard co-op influenced the number of cheeses carried in my local grocery store? Undoubtedly yes. Did northern California have anything to do with my love for ripe red tomatoes, fresh from the vine, sliced and eaten with salt and pepper? Absolutely not.

I'm sorry, Ms. Reichl, but I just can't espouse your "food revolution" as my own.