Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives by Carolyn Steel
Filed under: Food History, Food Industry, Food Science
This is not a gastro-book. Neither is it an escapist holiday page-turner about the joys of food. It’s much better than that. It is a thorough, well-researched, broad-reaching and entertaining essay about how we in Britain have come to have our current relationship with food. This relationship is carefully characterised with a wide range of sources as disconnected, lazy and at times purely nonsensical.
In order to get there, the author takes us through the history books drawing relationships between how we eat (and have eaten) and a myriad of factors such as our predominant mode of production, the architecture of our kitchens, fashion and even our attitude to waste.
It is clear from this well-constructed argument that the author feels not only that there is something fundamentally sick at the heart of our current relationship with food but that just as the Thames Embankment was built under Victoria’s reign to rid the capital of ’the great stench’ via enormous sewer pipes, so we can do something to remedy our current predicament.
She talks of ‘vertical food cultures’ such as in Italy where, although with influences across history and world cultures has a core food tradition which makes home cookery and professional cheffing bind together into one self-perpetuating whole. We have mostly lost this according to the sats in the book and having followed the American model of dining out and getting our the food to ‘perform’ and seemingly ‘offer the world in every mouthful’, we have become an obese, bite-sized, MTV-attention-spanned society who widely admit we cannot recognise basic ingredients - let alone cook.
In among the thorough study is peppered numerous food facts including that the French invented the restaurant (not really a surprise and does explain a lot about Parisians) and that the now ubiquitous tomato didn’t make an appearance in Italian cookery at all until the 17th century when it was imported from Peru as an ornamental fruit
This is more than an academic manifesto for foodies who will no doubt when reading it sagely nod their heads in agreement about obesity statistics and feel quietly smug about the fact that they know exactly where their meat is sourced from - most of the time; it is well-informed, well-thought out and well written. I challenge anyone to read it and not learn something surprising about how we got to where we are through numerous wars and industrialisation. If not just food facts then maybe something of how disconnected we have all become as a culture, not just from our food but from each other.
Carolyn Steel is not the first to say it but change does start with us. If Jamie Oliver was even half as informed on the subjects covered here - I reckon he’d be dangerous enough to initiate some real change.
Doing without Delia: Tales of Triumph and Disaster in a French Kitchen by Michael Booth
You have to give Michael Booth some serious credit for this escapade. Rather than just refusing to use recipe books, he ritualistically burns all those he owns (except one) and moves along with his young family to Paris, a notoriously difficult and inhospitable place in itself to live or even get a flat in, and enrol in the world’s most highly acclaimed, difficult and expensive cookery courses in the world run by some of Europe’s grumpiest men; Le Cordon Bleu.
It’s quite the adventure as you see his progress, his daily stresses, his myths being busted and some of his dreams dismissed, although, as with many books in the travelogue/adventure genre one never knows as a reader how much of the background is kept from you - like just how poor are they really if they can afford to move to an apartment which sounds like it would make Carrie Bradshaw swoon in a heartbeat?
Michael Booth describes in great detail not only his personal motivation for the course itself and place he may go beyond it but also how it unfolds at every step in some detail. From being taught how to wash his hands properly to what it is like working for free, but on very public display in a Three Michelin Starred Paris restaurant. One of the most telling comments for me comes from a chef at this establishment whose view of the production-line nature of such cooking - all beit prepared by highly trained professionals and presented in pristine surroundings - is ‘like McDonalds but with better ingredients’.
Fans of Masterchef - which personally I don’t count myself among due to the overly clinical way that food is judged out of any