Books Reviewed.....
In Defense of Food: An Eating Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin $26,50 231 pages

An Apple a Day, the Myths Misconceptions and Truths about the Foods We Eat
By Joe Schwarcz, Phd
Harper Collins $32.95 367 pages

In 1983, Julia Child and Robert Mondavi started the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF)to highlight the pleasures of eating. But soon a schism opened among board members, notably between Child and Alice Waters. Child objected to Waters’ evangelizing organic food and the “endless talk of pollutants and toxins” because she thought that it would reinforce “the country’s ingrained fear of pleasure”.

How right the Great Julia was. Today, fear of food has replaced joy in eating. Child awakened the American palate to the taste of food cooked in the deliciously French way, but today, taste, which is why we lucky Westerners eat, is overwhelmed by doubts about what we’re eating. It’s odd to recall that people cooked Julia’s recipes using the supermarket food which is now routinely trashed. In those happy days, the skill of a cook transcended food’s provenance.

I picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto hoping it would put pleasure back in food. But Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is a posterperson for the new food writing: he’s a nanny. Tapping into North Americans’ anxiety about the processed food we eat, he has come up with an “algorithm”, a set of instructions of how to eat healthy and without environmental angst - and without much fun either.   more »

To my mind, middle eastern food is the most misunderstood food in Toronto. That’s the trouble when you make irresistible fast food. Sure the streets are full of middle eastern food like the ubiquitous falafel, fried veggie fritters packed into a pita, doused with hot sauce, adorned by tabule, parsley salad, and eaten easily on the run if you don’t mind the hot sauce dribbling down your chin. The dips humous, babaganouj, tzadiki are now MOR and Pitas pushing aside Wonder Bread. The wannabe ME gourmand may not be as enthusiastic about the Giro/Shawarma, meat sliced from a vertical revolving roaster, slapped into a similar pita, more hot sauce and parsley salad - because it’s so often dry.

Who’d know from local Shawarma how superb vertically revolving roasted meat can taste? At the Iskender Doner Kebab on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, a third generation of Iskenders are roasting organic lamb grown on wild thyme in Anatolia, cooked tender and pink, served on a bed of pita, yogurt, tomatoes.   more »