Food for Thought
--Books Worth Noting reviewed by Meredith Sayles Hughes
Food and Healing, by Annemarie Colbin, Ballantine Books, 1996.
If you missed Annemarie Colbin's fine book, Food and Healing, the first time around, it's back in a revised edition. First published in 1986, it rapidly became a classic exploration in detail of why and how we are what we eat. Reissued in 1996 by Ballantine with a new preface by the author, Food and Healing now incorporates the latest on low fat eating, findings on food combinations and new alternative medicine paths into what remains the Bible of the holistic view of food and health.
Ms. Colbin's view is thoroughly common sensical. She recognizes the fact that we are each individuals, and that once we have digested the facts, theories and proposals in her book we must make decide on what eating choices are best for us.
This is a thoughtful but not didactic book, solid and grounded in research, yet written with an entertaining touch. Rarely have we encountered a book that so well explains the nutritive quality of food, and its effects on body, mind and spirit. Don't miss it.
Jackie Williams is a friend of ours, a fellow collector of spud-abilia and appreciator of the potato, who has written several cookbooks as well as a fine food history work, Wagon Wheel Kitchens, Food on the Oregon Trail. Happily we can say that her newest book is a superb sequel, looking in on the pioneers once they reached their new home bases. Jackie has researched this subject down to the last eggless cake and translates all her findings into pleasing prose.
Starting with all-essential water, then moving from early kitchens--every woman wanted a proper cookstove, but many made do with Dutch ovens over hot coals--to the perils of pickling , Jackie Williams paints an engaging picture of the improvisational skills of early settlers and their appreciation for the bounty of the land when it came their way.
Not a brand new book, but new to us and one of our favorites, The World in Your Kitchen is a window on basic recipes and foodways usually not included in higher brow cookbooks. Filled with vibrant photography including pictures of people growing harvesting, selling and preparing food, this cookbook presents a generous array of recipes, introduced by a brief history of the ingredients involved. Both metric and non metric measures are used in this combination geographic tour and culinary exploration.
Good Food by Margaret M. Wittenberg, The Crossing Press, 1995.
The author says this book is the culmination of her work of 20 years of researching, writing and consulting on food and nutrition and indeed the book well fits its subtitle, " The Complete Guide to Eating Well." This book is exhaustive in its explanations of what constitutes a balanced diet, based on the new revised USDA "Food Pyramid." Taking each grouping of food, chapter by chapter, Ms.Wittenberg analyzes each offering, and in fact ends her book with a detailed almost 40 page appendix which breaks down an amazing array of foods into their nutritional value. The book also includes healthy recipes, each carrying the "New Food Label," as well as basic tips for handling various types of food. Though Ms. Wittenberg is appropriately skeptical of factory-raised meat and poultry, and lays out concerns regarding pesticides, additives and so on, she seems all too accepting of dairy products, perhaps because Good Food is structured around the pyramid and dairy must be served. Her overall tack, however, is laudable--eat variety, eat food that is raised right, and eat appropriately for your own body.
Peppers, The Domesticated
Capsicums/ New Edition
by Jean Andrews, University of Texas Press,
1995.
First published in 1984, Peppers is one of the most beautiful books about any food plant we've ever seen. Author Jean Andrews is not only the artist behind 34 full color plates of the world's capsicums, she is also a thorough historian of food whose work has influenced many books about capsicums that followed hers. Peppers is to the capsicum family what Redcliffe Salaman's The History and Social Influence of the Potato is to solanum tuberosum, with the bonus of color illustrations. Andrews' book explores the origins of the plant, its travels beyond South America, its biological and economic story, its multiple varieties, its most recent high tech implications, and ends with several recipes, and a photographic glossary of botanical terms. Any student of food plants will find repeated value in this book.
The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, Thames & Hudson, 1996.
Anthropologist Sophie Coe's first book, published in 1994 by University of Texas Press, was America's First Cuisines, a wittily written exploration of the many foods, potatoes, corn, tomatoes and chocolate, among them, which the Aztec, Mayan and Inca peoples domesticated, cultivated and served up to their less than grateful Spanish conquerors who ultimately carried most of them back to the Old World. Her interest in chocolate sparked preparations for what was intended to be "the" conclusive work on everyone's favorite western hemisphere food.
Sadly Coe became ill and was able to complete only rough versions of the first two chapters of the book before she died. Her husband, Michael, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Yale, took up the project and finished it, based on Sophie Coe's research. Michael Coe has produced a book as satisfying as the richest cup of well-prepared hot chocolate. He is quick to point out, by the way, that chocolate has meant a drink for all but the latest 500 years of its existence. Starting with the Olmec culture of Mexico, the people who first made chocolate from cacao beans, chocolate became intertwined with the Olmec and the Mayan civilizations, and later that of the Aztecs, before its journey across to Spain and the rest of Europe. By the early 1600's the chocolate drink enjoyed by the Spanish in Mexico was being served up in Old Spain.
The True History of Chocolate covers it all in sublime detail, setting the chocolate historical record as straight as it could possibly get through story-telling based on rigorously researched facts. ( The bibliography is 4 1/4 pages long and set in tiny type.) The book is also entertainingly illustrated with both black and white and color offerings.
The Food System--A Guide, by Geoff Tansey and Tony Worsley, Earthscan Publications, London. (Distributed in the U.S. by Island Press, Washington, DC)
What is "the food system" and do we want one? Reminds me of hospital dining or "mystery meat" in the high school cafeterias of yore. But here we are: the food system describes the biological, economic and political, and social and cultural intertwining of processes by which people and food come together. This is a global construct, "developed, run and promoted worldwide by economic institutions in the rich and powerful nations."
Tansey, a visiting research fellow at England's University of Bradford, and Worsley, director of the Food Policy Research Unit of CSIRO, Australia (and we don't know what that organization is, sorry) have seemingly put together a truly unique book. It examines everything and everybody from the key players in food production, farmers and workers, processors and distributors, and consumers, to legal, scientific and technological control of food, with, understandably, heavy emphasis on findings from the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The book's most easily accessed information comes from numerous fact-filled boxes, so labeled, with headings such as "Ancient Rome's bread and circuses," "breast milk is best milk", " the Euro biscuit," "mind-mapping," "targeting children," "Norway's food policy," "unwelcome food bugs and their effects," "per capita spending on fast food in selected countries, 1992," and so on. Fascinating "bites" on a range of food subjects.
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