Born Round by Frank Bruni

I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted when I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except I wasn't so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

-Born Round

"Born round, you don't die square." So believes Frank Bruni's grandmother: that kind of change isn't possible in a lifetime. What does that mean for Bruni, though? He's a born eater, a self-professed baby bulimic who has struggled with food issues his entire life. At the beginning of the book, he's working in Rome as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. After a rough period during which he covered the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush and piled on the pounds, he finally seems to have his weight under control. A life-changing opportunity comes his way: the position of Times food critic is open, and he's up for consideration. But can he handle the intense commitment to food that the job requires without falling back into his old habits?

Having posed the question, Bruni travels back to the beginning of things. He details a childhood filled with food and love, with the former seen as an appropriate way to express the latter. His beloved grandmother, born in Italy, never makes anything short of a feast for her family, and Bruni is happy to partake. He does notice that his appetite outstrips that of his siblings, and even at a young age he's bigger than his older brother. His mother begins to devise diets for the two of them to try, but it breaks his heart to turn down one of his grandmother's fritti.

Bruni is able to (temporarily) leave diets behind when he finds he has a natural affinity for swimming. His rigorous practice schedule keeps his weight in check, although he still finds himself eating more than anyone around him. When he goes off to college and quits swimming, he scrambles to prevent his overeating from affecting his weight, eventually turning to bulimia. Although he manages to recover from that, his weight problems continue to plague him. He's intensely self-conscious about his weight, going so far as to repeatedly postpone dates so that he can lose just a few more pounds before he's seen. It may come as no surprise that these dates often never happen.

Things change for Bruni, but slowly, and they get worse before they get better. Born Round is not only a very personal account of  his struggle with weight, but also a moving story of his family life and the sweetness of his professional success. He really lays himself bare before his reader. It breaks my heart to think back to one story he tells, of a family gathering when he was at his heaviest. The siblings are sniping at one another, and one of his brothers calls him fat. It's everything he fears and hates about himself, and he flees the room, finding an out-of-the-way place where he can cry. It's hard not to be drawn in by a writer who is willing to show such vulnerability.

I very much enjoyed Born Round. I spent awhile reading it, but I could easily see how someone could delve in and read for hours. Bruni is a very likable narrator, and in addition to all of the personal stories, he also has some good inside dirt about being a food critic. I think it would be an excellent book to travel with. I would love to read more by him—maybe I'll dig up some old reviews, if I can find them. I'm pretty jealous of his facility with words, I must say. His prose seems effortless. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he was thirty, and you can see why. Pretty remarkable.

Up next: The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos (Wire shout-out!).

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you're making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don't think that's asking a lot—and I don't ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you're putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as "meat."

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I've eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I've eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I've eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to "tastes like chicken" than space-age polymer.

-Medium Raw

I recently moved halfway across the country and—perhaps this goes without saying—it's been stressful. The day before I flew out, I was looking for the perfect book to accompany me on my trip. It needed to be light and entertaining but also totally absorbing—something that would take my mind off of what I was doing. I stumbled across Medium Raw and was relieved immediately: I couldn't have asked for a book that better fit the bill.

Medium Raw is Anthony Bourdain's followup to the bestselling Kitchen Confidential. Since that book's publication, he's gone from a journeyman chef to a household name. In that time he's been on about a million international adventures, divorced and remarried, and reconsidered that whole "no fish on Monday" thing. (His new rule is to use your discretion, keeping the chef in mind: you're fine at Le Bernardin; think twice at TGI Friday's.) Medium Raw is discursive, touching on everything from the consideration of meat (as in the excerpt above) to a slightly terrifying encounter with Sandra Lee.

I read the bulk of the book in the airport and in flight; I was definitely disappointed when it came to a close. Bourdain is a devilishly good travel companion, funny and knowledgeable, but self-deprecating at the same time. I would have picked up another book of his immediately had I had one in my possession at the time. Instead I read New York magazine, which was fine, of course, but not particularly informative about Vietnamese cuisine, Top Chef, or the art of cutting fish*. Sigh.

Up next: Moonshine by Alaya Johnson, a vampire novel set in Prohibition-era New York City. Great so far!

*I'm once again forced to lament the passing of Gourmet magazine, gone before I ever got to snag an issue on the newsstand. Thank goodness for back issues!

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed too wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. [...] The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.

-The Botany of Desire 

A pretty scene, isn't it? (Well, I'm not sure if the giant tortoises would agree.) There's something so magical about a beauty that transcends time, something boiled down to the essentials of color, shape, and light. The beauty of a tulip bathed in the radiance of candles as opposed to that of, say, some shiny new high-tech device, however nice its contours or its color. Of course, I'm a former art history student, so I tend to get a bit excited over color and light.

I also get excited about books about food. The Botany of Desire is a little different than other food books I've read, because it mostly focuses on the development of plants; specifically, how they have evolved to fulfill certain human desires. Pollan looks at apples (sweetness), tulips (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and potatoes (control). Each plant/desire leads him in a different direction, some of which I found more interesting than others.

 We begin with the apple. How can you not? Adam and Eve, Johnny Appleseed—the apple is so woven into our mythology. Even so, I found this to be the driest section, although I did appreciate the look into the importance of biodiversity of the species (also addressed in the potato section).

Pollan then moves on to the tulip, with a look at the tulipomania that struck the Netherlands in the 17th century. Again, I didn't find this particularly compelling—but luckily things pick up once Pollan starts in on marijuana. He shares his own pot-growing high jinks, but also considers why/if the plant encourages intoxication.Throughout, Pollan speculates on plants developing in ways that would encourage people to grow them. With the discussion of marijuana, I thought this became more interesting, possibly because the idea of intoxication itself merits a lot of attention—thus scientists continuing to look into how marijuana works on the brain.

And then we came to the potato.

The toxin, which is produced by a bacterium that occurs naturally in the soil, is generally thought to be safe for humans, yet the Bt [Bacillus thuringiensis] in genetically modified crops is behaving a little differently from the ordinary Bt that farmers have been spraying on their crops for years. Instead of quickly breaking down in nature, as it usually does, genetically modified Bt toxin seems to be building up in the soil. This may be insignificant; we don't know. (We don't really know what Bt is doing in soil in the first place.) We also don't know what effect all this new Bt in the environment may have on the insects we don't want to kill, though there are reasons to be concerned. In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch butterflies. Monarchs don't eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. Will this happen in the field? And how serious will the problem be if it does? We don't know.

I can't lie, the potato was my favorite chapter. Pollan looks into the development of potatoes that are resistant to the potato bugs—not because of anything sprayed upon them, but because of their genetic makeup, as designed by chemical giant Monsanto. It's a fascinating, troubling look at the difficulties facing farmers today. Some of the issues addressed came up during the tail end of Food, Inc., when the topic turned to the burgeoning field of patents on particular varieties of corn—once again, designed by Monsanto. I certainly imagine you can't help but look at the potato differently after reading this chapter—I know I'll be thinking hard about where the next potato I buy comes from and what might be in it.

Overall, I didn't enjoy this one as much as In Defense of Food, but I still found it to be a worthwhile read. I'd also be interested in checking out the television documentary of the same name (currently streaming on Netflix!).

Up next: Good question! There must be something lying around....

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea - destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do - and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obesession with healthy eating.

The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so-called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can't fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat diets. Maybe it's time we confronted the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.

-In Defense of Food

It's possible that, in lieu of a review, I could just post seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's Michael Pollan's oft-quoted mantra, the heart of his argument in In Defense of Food. Anyone who's been paying attention to food news in the last few years may also be familiar with some other pieces of Pollan's work: the idea that you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, for example, or anything with more than five ingredients in it. Still, even if they're not new to you, these are easy-to-remember points that could really stick in people's minds and affect how they eat. Pollan elaborates quite a bit, and provides a lot of useful information about how our relationship with food has changed over time, how it's hurting us now, and what we need to change. It's a matter of spreading awareness and education, and helping people believe that they are capable of achieving better health.

It's not quite so easy, of course. Pollan admits that good food - actual food, that is, as opposed to processed food products - is likely to be more expensive and, in some areas, less available than the junk. Still, it's a matter of people who do have the luxury of making these choices doing so. Individual choices add up, and can gradually change the culture.

It's really easy to be snookered by food. I spent years eating veggie burgers, thinking that they were both tasty and healthy. In retrospect: the soy. The hexane (recently in the news). The ingredient list that runs way longer than five. More and more, I'm reevaluating everything. And continuing to read books like In Defense of Food only reinforces the aversion that I'm developing toward processed foods.*

I'm biased, for sure. I think everyone should read In Defense of Food and Fast Food Nation, and watch Food, Inc. and Super Size Me. Or just pick one - In Defense of Food would be an excellent place to start.

As for me, I'm going to be leafing through back issues of Gourmet, looking for something I could cook this weekend. One of the great side effects of avoiding processed food is that I'm becoming a more adventurous cook. More work? Sure. But it's awfully nice to really know what went into you're eating - and that there was no soy lecithin or high fructose corn syrup required to turn it into "food."

Up next: Stephen Fry's autobiography, Moab is My Washpot.

*Replacing my aversion to blueberries, which I am in the process of dismantling, hooray.

Food in the The New York Times

The Dining section of The New York Times - including their new "superblog" - has been on fire recently. Some selections:

-Food critic Sam Sifton documents a week of his meals. Whew. He then addresses readers' questions - Round One, Round Two, and Round Three.

-Meanwhile, Michael Moss tackles questions on food safety - Round One and Round Two.

-I really loathe cilantro. This week, The Times informed me that it's not my fault.

-And to round things out, a recipe: Chickpea Tagine with Chicken and Apricots, from Mark Bittman. I just made it and it's absolutely delicious.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners - and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society - to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

-Animal, Vegetable, Miracle


The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-"The World Is Too Much With Us," William Wordsworth

Oh yes, I'm back to write about food some more. I had no idea when I started this blog how many food-related books I would be reading. It's an interesting development for me.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingsolver and her family document the year they've pledged to spend eating locally. Month by month, we follow Kingsolver and her family, who have recently relocated to a farm in southwestern Virginia. Kingsolver tells the bulk of the story, which is supplemented by short articles by her husband, biologist Steven L. Hopp, and by essays and family recipes from her teenage daughter, Camille. The going is tough, at first. When they begin in March, they are heavily reliant on the local farmers' market, and there's not much there, either. They persevere, allowing only a few non-local exceptions in their diet: coffee, quite understandably, and flour to make their daily bread. As the weather gets warmer, they are able to plant and reap their own crops, though they remain dedicated customers at the farmers' market. They are overjoyed when their first asparagus starts tentatively pushing its way above ground.

It is Kingsolver's belief that people are too disconnected from the sources of their food. (Hence my inclusion of the Wordsworth poem about the growing alienation of man from nature. Oh, snap.) When people consume food grown locally, they know where it came from. It's as simple as that. Eating food from far away is unhelpful in a lot of ways. It's worse for the environment, since it takes energy to move the food around. It's worse for animals, who are often existing in appalling conditions prior to their slaughter - and non-local animal meat generally comes from these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). It's worse for family farms, who are being edged out by large corporations. And it's worse for us, the consumers, since we are often getting inferior food, already days old before it's available in a grocery store. Pretty much the only winners in this system are the corporations - and with some corporate giants practically twirling their mustaches as they tie farmers down to the railroad tracks, it hardly seems like helping them out is our best choice.

So what to do? Kingsolver has ideas, and I especially love that she is not so militant that she expects everyone to do as she and her family have been able to do (see the excerpt above). She's not Jonathan Safran Foer, either. Eating animals is okay, but there is a line to be drawn. Yes, you have to kill an animal to eat it. But do you need to support, through your buying power, the existence of a system that allows such suffering? No. I'm trying to take the advice of Camille, who warns against self-righteousness when talking about food. It's something I feel more and more strongly about, though. I'm not perfect (I'd have a hard time turning down a Chik-Fil-A chicken sandwich), but I'm becoming more aware of my choices. Once you have the information, I have trouble understanding the lack of motivation (assuming you have the means and opportunity) to choose food more deliberately. For me, it's like trying to understand another person's politics. Logically, I can understand having different ideas, but really I only understand what feels right to me. Maybe it's sanctimonious of me, but that's why I am going on about it in my blog and not as much in real life. Perhaps it's more forgivable if you think of it as a particular pet peeve of mine. I mean, everyone's allowed to have a few of those, right?

I always tend to go on and on when it comes to food books. Obviously I enjoyed this one a lot, although it wasn't a particularly quick read. It was informative and it was entertaining (the section on breeding turkeys comes to mind). I actually think I enjoyed it more that either of Kingsolver's novels that I've read (The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible).

Related: I thought this profile of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was really interesting.

Up next: Remember my mentioning an eclectic haul from my last library trip? Well, I've just started Underground London by Stephen Smith. It's a nonfiction book about...underground London. Well, it's something I know very little about, so I'm preparing for a lot of (potentially useless) knowledge coming at me.

The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler

The International House of Pancakes recently put a stuffed French toast combo on its menu. Cinnamon raisin French toast (made with eggs and milk) is stuffed with sweet cream cheese; smothered with powdered sugar, fruit topping, and whipped topping; and served with two eggs, hash brown potatoes, and a choice of two strips of bacon or two sausage links. Breaking it down, the French toast is a load of fat on fat on fat and sugar that's then layered with fat on sugar on sugar and served with fat, salt, and fat.

-The End of Overeating

Sounds really lovely when you put it like that, right? It does seem that it's much easier to make choices about food if one turns a blind eye to its origins, its processing, and its nutritional value (or lack thereof). As David A. Kessler notes in The End of Overeating, the foods that we generally consider the most palatable (that is to say, those that "stimulate the appetite and encourage us to eat more," per Kessler), are those with a happy mix of fat, salt and sugar - none of which we need too much of. One of the big problems that has mired our country in an ongoing weight loss struggle, of course, is that we are constantly given opportunity to eat mind-boggling portions of all of those things.

In his book, Kessler describes some of the elements that have led to the current obesity crisis. He is particularly interested in the idea of conditioned hypereating (just what it sounds like), and how people are cued to engage in it. Much of the book is spent on this (bring on the rat studies), in addition to a look at the workings of some restaurants and food corporations. He also presents a plan to end overeating.

In a way, I found this book to be common sense - for example, if you like the way something tastes, you eat more of it. If you walk by the restaurant that serves a favorite meal, you will be more inclined to crave that meal. Kessler offers behavioral reasoning for why we do these things, but it still can sound less than revolutionary (although he does overturn some widely held ideas, such as people having a set point for weight). He lays out all of the science in a very clear, easily understandable way.

I found the plan to end overeating itself to be the most interesting part of the book. His plan, which involves retraining your responses to stimuli, is a natural progression from his ideas on hypereating. It's definitely not a quick fix - Kessler describes the battle against conditioned hypereating as a lifelong one. His plan involves structure - the same structure people go for when they choose "shake for breakfast, shake for lunch." The difference is, a shake-based diet is not a sustainable long-term plan. Kessler's could be.

I'm not sure how what I've learned from this book will affect my eating - I imagine it will help to sustain the awareness I'm trying to maintain about what foods I buy, if nothing else. I am not a huge overeater myself, although I certainly have many, many food weaknesses* - plantain chips, baguettes, ice cream, etc. I was actually hoping that this book would have more personal anecdotes about how people respond to food and information about the evolution of eating in this country rather than the self-help information (although that ended up being interesting). I guess I will have to look for another book to get into those other things - perhaps one of Michael Pollan's books, which are still on my to-read list.

Up next: I'm about halfway through my first Inspector Morse book, The Way Through the Woods - the 10th book in Colin Dexter's series. Ideally I would have started at the beginning, but since the opportunity presented itself, I thought I'd give Morse a try.

*Not French toast, incidentally. I think that IHOP selection above sounds disgusting - to each his own.

My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme

In Pasadena, California, where I was raised, France did not have a good reputation. My tall and taciturn father, "Big John" McWilliams, liked to say that all Europeans, especially the French, were "dark" and "dirty," although he'd never actually been to Europe and didn't know any Frenchmen. I had met some French people, but they were a couple of cranky spinster schoolteachers. Despite years of "learning" French, by rote, I could neither speak nor understand a word of the language. Furthermore, thanks to articles in Vogue and Hollywood spectaculars, I suspected that France was a nation of icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures, the men all Adolphe Menjou-like dandies who twirled their mustaches, pinched girls, and schemed against American rubes.

I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian. The sight of France in my porthole was like a giant question mark.

-My Life in France

I love Julia Child. I didn't know this before reading My Life in France, but it turns out that it's absolutely true. I totally understand where Julie Powell was coming from (although now that I can compare Julie with Julia, it doesn't do Julie any favors).

I don't see how you could read this book and not love Julia. My Life in France commences with Julia moving to France with her husband, the artist and diplomat Paul Child. She falls in love with French cuisine immediately, but it takes some time for her to develop the idea of cooking herself. She enrolls in Le Cordon Bleu, and takes to it with what one quickly discovers is a characteristic zeal. This is Julia Child becoming Julia Child.

As Julia takes on cooking, she meets Simone "Simca" Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who are writing a cookbook on traditional French cuisine. Julia gets involved, and the book quickly becomes a new obsession. Cookery-bookery (as Julia refers to it) involves enormous amounts of time spent developing, testing, and writing up recipes, then conferring with her co-authors (mostly Simca, as time wore on). Although the book did not originate with her, over the years it becomes Julia's baby. She brings stacks of manuscript with her when Paul is transferred from France to Marseille, then again to Plittersdorf, Germany; Oslo; and finally back to the States. We follow her throughout this epic undertaking, sharing in her delight at a recipe perfected as well as her disappointment when her publisher does not want to produce the finished work.

When I think of Julia, words like "pluck" and "moxie" and, inevitably, joie de vivre come to mind. Although her life was privileged, it wasn't always easy - particularly in the way her husband was treated by the government (he was interrogated during the McCarthy era). She always made the most of it, though, and I loved reading about her journey.

As much as this book is about Julia's love of food, and of Paul, it is about Julia's love of France. Although I am no cook*, I wholeheartedly identify with this love of France, which I've shared almost as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, I used to take most of the money I received at my birthday and Christmas and put it in a jar marked "Money for France." I spent it in college - not in France, alas (though I did go to Italy). I still haven't been to France, but reading this book was a lovely vicarious experience. I highly recommend it.

A note on the film Julia & Julia: In my review of the book Julie & Julia (which I linked to above), I recommended the film over Julie Powell's book. My Life in France provided the inspiration for the Julia sections of that movie, and although Meryl Streep is delightful as Julia, this book is the most essential of the three works.

Up next: Land of Lincoln by Andrew Ferguson, a study of the ways in which Lincoln is still part of our lives today. I love Lincoln, so I'm excited for this one.

*I do think reading books about food is inspiring me to experiment a bit more, though. This weekend I made an apple pie - it had plenty of butter in it, so I think Julia would have approved. This is the next thing I want to try:

YouTube - Julia Child Makes an Omelet.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

I took a fateful cab ride many years ago. Rolling back from the Lower East Side with a bunch of close friends, all of us fresh from scoring dope, I jokingly remarked on an article I'd seen, detailing the statistical likelihood of successfully detoxing.

"Only one in four has a chance at making it. Ha, ha, ha," I said, my words ringing immediately painful and hollow as soon as I'd said them. I counted our number in the back of that rattling Checker Marathon. Four. And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I wasn't going to let these guys drag me down. I didn't care what it took, how long I'd known them, what we'd been through together or how close we'd been. I was going to live. I was the guy.

I made it. They didn't.

I don't feel guilty about that.

-Kitchen Confidential

Tony Bourdain is not a rock star, although it would be an easy mistake to make. He's a (now-famous*) chef, and reputedly quite a good one. Kitchen Confidential details his misspent youth as a cook-for-hire, and how he cleaned himself him up, got serious, and started running Brasserie Les Halles here in New York.

Kitchen Confidential also, famously, tells some tricks of the trade - I've been hearing the "never order seafood on a Monday" advice for years now, based on this book. That's really only one chapter, however, as Bourdain mostly hops from kitchen to kitchen, giving a behind-the-scenes look at some of the many places where he has worked. I especially liked the chapter in which he takes the reader through a day in his life at Les Halles, giving a comprehensive look at every thing a top chef must juggle, from ordering food to managing staff issues to, of course, actually cooking. It only reinforced my belief - initially brought on by reading the excellent Heat by Bill Buford and by watching bits and pieces of Hell's Kitchen - that I would make a lousy chef. Not only because of my absolute lack of culinary skills, although certainly that would be a problem, but because of the lightning-fast pace. Also, the yelling. I prefer slower, yelling-free environments. This is one of many ways in which Bourdain and I differ.

Despite the fact that I find the prospect of ever encountering him in real life slightly terrifying (the man is intense), I really enjoyed having Bourdain as a guide in the world of cooking. Kitchen Confidential is actually not the first book I've read by him**, so I knew to expect the cursing and the chain smoking and the jibes at vegetarians. I assume many people are also familiar with his persona from his show No Reservations which I, not having cable, have never seen. I mean, it took me this long to read the book. Clearly I'm a little behind.

Up next: Although I have My Life in France by Julia Child sitting here, I've decided I need a little breather from cooking. I'm rereading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Another reread, I know. Why, you might ask? Surely it's not just an excuse to post pictures from the miniseries, like this:


No, of course not. That would be terribly shallow of me. You'll just have to wait a bit to see why I think Mr. Thornton is perhaps a better catch than Mr. Darcy. Oh yes, I said it.

*He passes the dad test: If my dad knows who someone is, that person is really, truly famous (as opposed to Us Weekly-famous or only-on-music-blogs-famous).

**A Cook's Tour, which follows Bourdain around the world as he seeks out the perfect meal, is highly entertaining and informative. I believe it was also a tv show on the Food Network, which I'd love to see, if only because in the book he'd occasionally go off on great tangents about the hazards of filming.

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

The kitchen was a crime scene. Eggshells littered the floor, crackling underfoot. What looked like three days' worth of unwashed dishes were piled up in the sink, and half-unpacked boxes had been shoved to the corners of the room. Unseen down the dark throat of the trashcan, yet as conspicuous as tarpaulin-covered murder victims, were the mutilated remains of eggs. If the purplish-stained shreds of yolk clinging stickily to the walls had been blood spatters, a forensics specialist would have had a field day. But Eric wasn't standing at the stove to triangulate the shooter's position - he was poaching an egg in red wine. Two other eggs sat on a plate by the stove. These I had poached myself before Eric's and my impromptu reenactment of that scene in Airplane! in which all the passengers line up and take turns slapping and shaking the hysterical woman, with Eric taking the roles of all the passengers and I the part of the hysteric. These three eggs were the sole survivors of the even dozen I had begun with three hours before. One incoherent gurgle of despair escaped me, seeing those two pitiful things lying there, twisted and blue as the lips of corpses. "We're going to starve, aren't we?"

-Julie & Julia

I've been flipping through Julie & Julia, which I finished last night, trying to find a passage that would best demonstrate Julie Powell's writing style. Although the one above does not illustrate her tendency to go off on tangents (my head was spinning in the opening pages, when she seemed to be cramming in every thought that flitted through her mind), it does give you an idea of the level of drama you will contend with throughout the book. It's not just some broken eggs, oh no, it's a massacre.

On the one hand, I can sympathize with Julie. She embarked upon an extraordinarily difficult project: to cook the 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, and to blog about the experience. She lives in a crummy (although spacious, and in New York that can't be dismissed out of hand) apartment, she hates her job, she's worried about turning thirty. These are all concerns that foster some sympathy.

But wow, is she ever melodramatic about it. See, Julie Powell is kind of neurotic, which I can identify with, but she is also super loud and in your face about it, which I find pretty obnoxious. To be fair, she is quite up front about acknowledging her own faults. However, after just the second or third tantrum over cooking, I felt my sympathy withering away. I mean, really. I guess I've never had a lot of patience for overly dramatic people, and I found her actions in a lot of instances to be so over-the-top as to be almost incomprehensible. Open to any given page and you're just as likely as not to find her crying over aspic or yelling at her long-suffering husband, Eric*. It gets a bit tiresome.

I feel like it's rather unkind for me to rag on Julie, considering she's a real person. But this is the way she chose to present herself to the world, for better or worse. Is it what she's like in real life? I have no idea. If you choose to read this book, though, you'll be spending time with this Julie, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Onto the food. The food was interesting. I'm not really a foodie, and I'm certainly far from being a competent cook, so I was a bit out of my element. I cannot imagine making even one recipe out of MtAoFC, let alone all of them. To be honest, most of them did not sound that appetizing to me. There is a lot of offal involved, folks. And even putting that aside, it's hard to get excited about eggs in aspic. I mean, that's a culinary challenge, for sure, but what a nauseating result.

The food looks better in the film, which I saw prior to reading the book. Looking back, it was a great adaptation. Julie is played by Amy Adams, who has enough charm to temper her character's more obnoxious tendencies. And of course the real star of the show is Meryl Streep as Julia Child. Julie Powell invented little fictional passages from Julia's life and inserted them throughout the book; I didn't feel that they really added anything. The film gives a more fleshed-out account of how Julia came to cooking, and her struggles to first succeed in a male-dominated world, and then to work on the behemoth that was MtAoFC. I wouldn't normally say this, but in this instance I would recommend the film over the book. Not that the film is any masterpiece, but it's pretty enjoyable, and I predict it will cause far less eyerolling.

Up next: As I suggested in my last post, the food trend will continue, at least for a little while: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, which I have wanted to read for years. Exciting!

*In the film, Eric, played by Chris Messina, finds it irritating that Julie portrays him as so saintly in her blog. Obviously no one is perfect, but if Julie is being reasonably accurate in her book, the man put up with a lot of hysterical crying and screaming. A lot.

I Want To Read: The Omnivore's Dilemma & In Defense of Food

I have been a busy moviegoer recently, and I've been lucky to see a run of good films, including Up, The Hangover, and Away We Go.

And then there's Food, Inc. A much tougher sell, I realize. It's difficult to talk about the food industry, I feel, because I don't want to sound pedantic or shrill. Yes, I was the kid who mooed at her parents when they ordered beef at restaurants, but I like to think that I've become more mature in understanding people's food preferences. On the other hand, that beef probably came from a cow who spent its whole life eating corn and standing in its own manure before being killed and sprayed down with all kinds of fun chemicals. Not to sound like a jerk, but: that's gross, right?

There are two well-known authors who offer commentary in Food, Inc.: Eric Schlosser, who wrote the excellent and highly recommended Fast Food Nation, and Michael Pollan, who wrote the two books I indicated in this post's title. Fast Food Nation covered the rise of the fast food industry, the state of farms that supplied the industry's needs (especially for beef, chicken, and corn), and the conditions for workers in slaughterhouses*. These topics are covered in Food, Inc. as well; it is my impression that Pollan's books cover other aspects of the food industry, including differences between more highly processed and organic foods.

Some people don't want to know where their food came from. Perhaps it's just because I am naturally curious, but I'm not one of them. I love to know these things, and try to adjust my grocery store purchases and restaurant choices accordingly. So these are on my to-read list, although I'm not sure when I'll get to them. Now that summer is in full swing and I'm at my summer job, I've realized that I may not have a lot of energy for books that require critical thinking. We'll see.

*To me, this was the most powerful part of Fast Food Nation. Again, not to be overly didactic, but even if you don't care about the treatment of animals or how food is processed, I think it is important to be aware of the people who do highly dangerous work so that we can have readily available meat.

PS - I promise my next post will be more lighthearted. Pinky swear.