Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008
A New Way to Think About Eating
By Jason Epstein
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Penguin, 244 pp., $21.95
I was a normal boy growing up in the 1930s, worried about Hitler and the Depression but trusting FDR to take care of such things. I played baseball and tennis, rode a Raleigh bike, liked girls, hung out with boys, read more than I could fathom, had a dog named Terry. But my most vivid childhood memories are of food: my grandmother's old world Russian meals with a Yankee accent; dinner on the Boston and Maine's Pine Tree Limited with padded table linen; lamb chops in paper skirts served under a silver dome; hashed brown potatoes in cream in their own monogrammed serving dish; blueberry pie with rich vanilla ice cream. Then there were family outings to country inns recommended by Duncan Hines, the Zagat of the 1930s. I trusted him too until he sold his name to a pancake mix company. At the age of eleven I had invented my own pancake recipe: buckwheat, buttermilk, and maple sugar.
Review, 2773 words
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