and I watched Mom making Julia Childs recipe, or rather spectated, because she brought the making of béarnaise to the level of entertainment: The more butter, the better, but add too much and the sauce would break, the thick emulsion collapsing into soup no one understood why.
Mom insisted on giving the sauce a sporting chance to break and so always added more butter, to our alarm and excitement, Bam! Gasp! Cooking could be entertainment,
Ruhlmans Grocery exploresyou guessed ita subset of the American grocery store, Ruhlman focuses on small groceries, although his definition and mine and perhaps yours differ: hes looking at size from an economic perspective, which is to say that the margins and profits are small even if the company is a chain with many stores spread across a large geographic area.
Groceries changed as food supply changed, and its that shift that Ruhlman tracks more than, say, the daytoday work that goes into keeping a grocery running.
Hes less interested in operations than discussing what we eat, and what we cook, and what we cant be fussed with, Take broccoli: A child growing up in the early twentieth century probably didnt know whether he or she liked broccoli, because it didnt really exist in America.
Thomas Jefferson is said to have brought seeds back from Italy, where it has grown for centuries, and planted them here in, But American farmers didnt start growing it until thes, And major production didnt begin until after World War II, Now we each eat on average nearly six pounds of it a year,
Not until thes! But Im also over here thinking, what Only six pounds a year
Some of it I found markedly less interesting.
Ive read enough books that go into the benefit of whole foods, and the rise of process foods, that at this point Im looking for something new if thats what a book talks about, and I dont think this really offers that newness.
Theres a very long wander into nutrition and wellness, and its fine and all, but its not so much about groceriesits about telling people whats good for them.
This is not a judgment on what you choose to eat, If you hunger for a cheese product grilled between bread thats been stripped of its nutrition, along with a bowl of Campbells tomato soup made with tomato paste, corn syrup, and potassium chloride, fine.
It was one of my favorite childhood meals, Just be aware. Buy fatfree halfandhalf if thats what you like, but know what it is youre putting into your body and your childrens bodies and why.
Because, and this is the judgment call, fat isnt bad, stupid is bad,
Take out the second parenthetical there, and I think you can get away with saying that quotation isnt a judgement, butbut youd have to take out the second parenthetical.
There ends up being quite a lot of opinion in the book and what is and isnt worth eating, and a deviation into whether or not meat is ethical, whichI dont know.
If even the writer admits that his arguments for eating meat are facile, maybe heshouldnt be making those arguments Im saying this as someone who has been vegetarian for almost the entirety of my lifeI dont know what meat tastes likeand also someone who knows there are more and less ethical ways to consume meat, and that people should make up their own damn minds.
But I cannot read I believe existence is an end in itself, and if we didnt raise pigs and chickens and cows for their meat, eggs, and milk, they would exist, if at all, only in the wild, a more cruel and unforgiving place than a farm or feedlotand take it seriously.
Is it really better for chickens to have short lives pressed together in an overcrowded production house than to have short lives out in the wild Animals did just fine in the wild before humans entered the picture.
Okay. Rant over. Lets get to themeatof the thing, or at least what could be the meat but wasnt: impact of gender roles, Ruhlman touches on it, again and again, and then backs off,
This was the beginning of a cultural shift, the rise of the working woman, that would help transform our food supply and arguably the quality of the food we served our families.
But Balzer has noticed another major change in his lifetime, “We discovered that men can cook,” he said, And who was promoting this “Every wife in America was telling her neighbors that nobody can barbecue like her husband, And for only one reason, Then and today, the number one person preparing the food is a woman, And she wants to do one thing, which the ages of humanity were trying to solve, and that is get out of it.
So supermarkets come along and say, you know what Were going to start preparing food, because we are a foodservice operation,
“The history of mankind always follows one path when it comes to eating,” Balzer concluded, “and it never deviates from that path.
And thats whos going to do the cooking, The answer to that now is the same as it was since we began cooking: not me, ”
Or to repeat his words to Pollan: not going to happen, because were cheap and lazy,
“Right now prepared foods account fortopercent of our sales,” Carin told me, “In Chicago, that number ispercent, And I expect it will see doubledigit growth, which is unheard of in any other department, ”
“What accounts for the growth” I asked,
“The driving force is women in the workforce and how much time people have,” she said, This seems intuitive, but her second reason for the growth was, to me, ominous, “Also, nobody knows how to cook anymore, Its mindboggling. Some women dont even know how to hold a knife, ”
“Interesting that you single out women,” I said, “Why is that”
“Because, like it or not, women are still the ones who are mainly responsible for the meals at home.
”
But what of the increasing number of prepared foods It is surely a good thing, no A range of nourishing, allnatural, goodforyou dishes that require no more preparation than a frozen dinner.
Perfect for the busy dualincome family that has little time to devote to cooking, But it also means we have even less reason to cook, We have no need to share the work of preparing the food because someone else can do it for us, But with work comes a heightened appreciation of that works result, so when we bring home prepared food and heat it in the microwave or on the stovetop, theres no one to thank or be grateful for, theres no deeper appreciation of the food other than whether it tastes okay, and the house is without the relaxing aromas of food cooking.
Growing up in thes I ate a lot of green beans, because thats what Mom cooked while Dad was outside grilling the steaks.I know it wasnt the point of the book, but I ended up really wishing that Ruhlman had gone deeper into this rather than into what people should and shouldnt be eating.
Becausewhat Im seeing is a suggestion that once women had more opportunities in the workforce, they put less time and effort into cooking, and men dont want to do it either: that its a chore.
And Im left wondering: who does Ruhlman think should be responsible for cooking Is the answer to learn to love it, or learn to get used to it Why do we so often see cooking as a chore Its not a bad thing for anyone to spend a lot of time in the kitchen if cooking is something they enjoy, but its also not a bad thing for women to no longer feel pressure to spend so much time cooking for the family.
But what then Ruhlmans stories from childhood suggest that his father did the shopping because he enjoyed it but his mother did the cooking because it had to be done, but Id have liked more.
Feels like a can of worms that is opened but notI dont know how to finish this analogy, Not fed to the fish
Two tangents, and then Ill lay this review to rest, First, on store organization and produce: Produce also needs to be near the refrigerated storerooms behind the walls, Not only do half the products need to stay moist and cool, much of the produce must be removed from the bins and shelves after the store closes and properly stored overnight, so the closer they are to the back storage coolers, the more convenient it is.
This is why you will never find produce in the center of a storeit would be impractical,
Id actually love to see statistics for this, Ruhlmans aim is to refute the claim that groceries put produce at the front of the store so that people feel like theyve started off healthy and thus arent bothered by putting processed foods in their baskets later, but its pretty anecdotal, and I have some anecdotes of my own: my mothers favourite independent grocery has produce in the centre of the store.
Its an upscale grocery, probably markedly smaller than the places Ruhlman discusses, and centre store there is in fact within easy access of the back storage.
The WalMart, of all places, that is near my parents, also has produce in the middle of the storeand thats not a small place.
Meanwhile, a number of the grocery stores near me in Germany have produce at the back of the
store, or tucked away in a cornerjust depending, I suppose, on where it made logistical sense.
So Im perfectly happy to believe that produce needs to be near the refrigerated storeroomsbut Id like a better argument than youll never find it in the middle whenI can.
And I have. And I currently cant set foot in a grocery without evaluating where the produce is,
Lastly: Is this or is this not the most random, amusing flex you have seen in a while I did see some monster bills when I was bagging, evenand I myself have personally spent more than,during a single grocery store run when cooking for a large group over the course of a week at the Publix in Key West.
I once filled four whole shopping carts, twice what my dad would buy in thes to feed a family of three for a week.
All in all, its well written and clearly a product of passion, Not really what I was hoping for, but then, do you really know what youre getting into when you pick up a book about grocery stores
I received a free copy of this book via a GR giveaway.
Quite enjoyable, interesting, with a balanced tone but a tendency toward repetition and confused structure,
It's not easy to write with a conversational feel in a factual book with source citations, but this manages it, I have at times in the past been harsh in my reviews of Ruhlman's books, because he can't seem to keep himself off the page in places he doesn't need to be.
Here, finally, he's found a theme and style where his presence in the narrative makes sense and isn't a distraction,
I did find myself irritated by some of the points repeated ad nauseam, Constantly it was mentioned that consumers now have many places to buy the same items, when that used not to be the case.
Uncountable sentences reexplaining the diversification of product lines, Again and again it was pointed out that Costco, Sam's Club, and WalMart came on the scene offering better prices, and that Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, with their specialty goods, went national.
Every single time these things were written as if they'd never been mentioned before, Add in the contradictionshe says Whole Foods sells a version of Froot Loops, which he lists the ingredients for to point out that it's sugar and stripped carbs, andpages later says you can't buy Cap'n Crunch at Whole Foods because the chain offers food that supports healthand I find myself going round in confused circles.
There was a lot of meandering, all of it on interesting subjects I mean, I gave this four, so I clearly found it fascinating, but much of it seemingly barely related to what preceded it, and a lot of very suspect ideas were given much page space without being justified by the central idea of the book.
An entire chapter is devoted to the opinions of a very negative analyst, presenting them as proven fact, despite their not matching life as I've known it in the four states I've lived in.
In the end, I enjoyed the book and was glad to read it, but there was no cohesive thesis behind it, and I found it exceptionally difficult to explain to others just what this book I was reading was about.
Appreciation to the publisher for the ARC, which in no way affected the content of my review or the rating, .