Jeffrey Steingarten
Last night Melissa and I went to hear Jeffrey Steingarten speak at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. Jeffrey Steingarten is the food columnist for Vogue magazine, and his last compilation of articles The Man Who Ate Everything should be required reading for, well, everyone. Steingarten is obsessed with all things related to food. And he's thorough when researching a topic. Rather than reading the press's interpretation of a medical report, he reads the source material itself.
His newest compilation is titled It Must've Been Something I Ate and he continues his trend. He debunks most of the food issues people are so concerned about. Think you have a food allergy? You probably don't (only 1% of people do, and when they do, it is highly dangerous). Think you're lactose intolerant? You're probably not, and even if you are, you can easily eat cheese and drink up to a quart of milk before having problems, and if you drink a little milk each day, you can in all but the most unusual cases build up the lactase which breaks down the lactose. He is very dismissive of the "fatty food causes heart problems" view of the world, citing significant evidence that this is all hogwash. And he is very hard on the FDA's ban on raw-milk cheeses aged less than 60 days.
But it's not just about scouring the field of medical research for the truth about food issues. The first article in the book sees him fishing for bluefin tuna so that he can eat toro, o-toro as freshly as possible. He decides to start cooking for his dog, realizing that dry dog food is only about 100 years old, and only in common use for the last 50 years or so.
And he does it all with tremendous wit. Here is my favorite passage so far in the book (just since
last night, I've read through a significant amount of it). He is contesting a definition in a medical
paper that gourmandism is about lack of impulse control (he is also unabashedly immodest).
We passionate eaters elevate, we ennoble the bestial impulse to feed into a sublime activity, into an art, the art of eating. And some of us create what might even be called literature whle we're at it. We transmute what animals do into what the angels would do if angels ate food, which I don't think they do, at least not in their official capacity. This is what Freud called sublimation, the highest form of impulse control. Yes, Doctor, I plead guilty to an obsession with beauty, edible or otherwise. I am guilty as charged!
And, once we have turned eating into an art, and we see that it is good, then we practice this art as often as possible. And if, on occasion, an observer sees what appears to be nothing nobler than me wrestling with the wrapper on a giant package of miniature Fun Size MIlky Way bars, this too is the art of eating. For isn't art nothing more nor less than whatever an artist does?
I was in tears reading this to Melissa, I was laughing so hard. And there are numerous phrases, passages, or observations that had me chuckling out loud on the BART ride home and reading it in bed later that night. Even having read through somewhere around a fourth, I highly recommend it to anyone who eats.
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