Volume 53, Number 10 · June 8, 2006
Eating Out
By Jason Epstein
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford
Knopf, 318 pp., $25.95
My Life in France
by Julia Child, with Alex Prud'homme
Knopf, 317 pp., $25.95
For all creatures survival depends upon moderation, the outcome of millennial adjustments by trial and error to environmental limits: beasts in the wild and birds in the garden neither feed nor reproduce wantonly lest they violate a precarious equilibrium within their specialized habitats and perish. We human beings, on the other hand, whose free will exiles us from the Eden of pure instinct, lack these automatic regulators. Instead we suffer guilt, invent stern gods, pass sumptuary laws, and obey sexual taboos: when these fail we atone in gyms and twelve-point programs or visit therapists or become Buddhists struggling to impose upon ourselves the limits observed instinctively by our fellow creatures.
Review, 4352 words
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