Julia Child, food, cooking, and the environment

Not having grown up in North America, I hadn’t heard of Julia Child until a few years ago and hadn’t actually watched any clips of her show until last night (!). But I’m catching up. I’m now in the middle of reading her memoir of her years in France during the 1950s, when she finally discovered her life’s calling. The book has brought me to tears many times as I understand exactly what she means when she talks about how a particular food can blow your mind. But that’s not what I want to write about right now – I want to review the book when I finish it. This post is more about listing some interesting articles and videos about the food industry I’ve come across recently.

One of the interesting aspects of Julia Child’s memoirs is precisely her disregard for the then new industrialization of food production in America. She doesn’t measure words when describing her disdain for pressure cookers (“the stinking, nasty, bloody pressure cooker… [i]t made everything taste nasty!), margarine (which she called “the other spread”) or even the quality of produce and meats. When researching poultry for her cooking book, she came to the conclusion that the “American poultry industry had made it possible to grow fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.”

After books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or films like Food Inc., we now know that the process made more than simply make food taste bad. In the video below, Bill Maher interviews Michael Pollan on the subject:

Also interesting is this article on the NYT in which Pollan talks about how “American cooking became an spectator sport” in which we have become completely fascinated with cooking shows and celebrity chefs while fewer of us actually cook. Most people assume cooking is complicated, time-consuming, and not worth the effort since it is so much cheaper to simply buy ready-to-eat food. That’s very sad. As Michael Pollan points out in the video above, “what happens on your plate represents your most important engagement with the natural world.” It is also our clearest engagement with ourselves and mental and physical well-being.
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While Pollan is great and I’m a big fan, he’s not always right, of course. For some interesting critiques of Pollan’s latest article, take a look at this and this.

Michael Ruhlman offers another interesting comment on Pollan’s article and the influence of Julia Child. Take a look here.