book gave me a lot to think about, and I'm still digesting it, I never realized how long ago 'convenience' foods began coming into our lives, Long before I was born or my mom for that matter, What is a regional cuisine Or are there any out there anymore Lots of food for thought in this book sorry I couldn't resist a bit academic.
. . a bit conversational all together interesting.
the last page being the best, Though the description of the book sounded quite interesting, I just couldn't get into it, Maybe another time This book traces the evolution of technology and how it influenced our culture's view of cooking and food and does so in a wonderful way.
Anyone interested in The Omnivore's Dilemna should also check this out, Anyone who has tasted a supermarket tomato and wondered why it doesn't taste like the tomato from a roadside vegetable stand will develop an increasing appreciation for how wonderful fresh food can be.
But unlike many food critics, ST also has a fond memory and loving appreciation for the comfort food of her childhood, in all its unhealthy glory.
And the honesty in that is one reason I loved that book even as the description of some of those foods horrified me, never having been from a WonderBread family myself! Paused on pageWe've all been told "never judge a book by its cover", and sadly that is true here.
Based on the title, I was expecting and hoping for a book like Laurie Colwin's "Home Cooking", but I was sadly disappointed.
Like many other reviewers, I only finished about half of the book because I was very tired of the author's whining.
I kept waiting for the good part where she told us about the best things she ever tasted, but she wasn't writing a food memoir.
I'm not really sure what she was writing about all I got out of it was a disjointed collection of complaints and unintelligible thoughts about fusion, fisheries, and Zen Buddhism.
It has some very interesting information about food and cooking and the way individuals and cultures relate to it over time.
But the information is dated, It doesn't
include recent developments: e, g. , meals kits, home delivery from restaurants,
It also tends to bog down in places, Sallie Tisdale writes books that are pretty impossible to categorize, and that's what's so darn good about them! In this one, Tisdale offers a melange of memoir, social history of food, cooking and the fashion of food, philosophical rumination and social critique.
Throughout, she offers many fascinating facts about food, the sociology of food and food preparation, but the fact that she is a Buddhist teacher, though Buddhism is never mentioned, comes through in her reminding us of the significance of food and the eating of food.
As the first of the Five Food Contemplations in the Meal Gatha puts it: "labors brought us this food we should know how it comes to us.
" Then of course, there is the reminder that we should live in such a way as to be worthy of it: that is to say, mindfully!
Contemporary 'culture' is the culture of the Hungry Ghost personified, writ all too large.
"There is something hellish and creepy in our prosperous luxury, our raw hunger, like some fiendish limbo, Too much is never enough, Perhaps we lost, if Americans ever had it, the ability to eat with understanding, More important, we lost the ability to tell the difference between excess and sufficiency, between what is enough and what is more than enough.
Tomatoes were ruined because we wanted them all the time, and so with our lives each single thing ruined because we want everything at once.
"
If you feel like you 'never have enough time' and it seems you have to plan weeks in advance to meet a friend for a cup of coffee, THIS is what she's talking about.
The only way out, it seems, is to wake up! history, economics, geography, culture, personal anecdotes, pleasure, . . this book has it all, I enjoyed this a lot, although it's a bit of a mishmash of different foodie genres, Tisdale looks critically at the American food supply and diet like Michael Pollan and how it got that way like Laura Shapiro while also acknowledging some of the legitimate reasons convenience foods have taken hold and how they symbolize freedom to women like Barbara Enhrenreich and giving credit to the mysterious pleasures and attractions of food that is, objectively, crap.
And yet somehow it's more than the sum of its parts maybe because she is able to look at food and culture and love and tradition and femininity from so many viewpoints, without dogmatically clinging to one.
Plus, she dishes a lot about foodworld personalities, which is always fun,
I read it a few months ago and little of the specifics of what she discusses has stayed with me, probably because the book is a bit unfocused and elliptical.
But the tone and the generosity of the book remain and I will probably reread at some point.
I'd read her book about sex years ago, and I think this one is far more successful in rounding up if not resolving all the contradictory ways that modern urban Americans feel about a highly charged topic.
While reading The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, I felt a little disappointed in this odd memoir/history/polemic/lament about eating and cooking in millennnial America and what it all means.
My disappointment was mostly due to the fact that I had been so dazzled by Sallie Tisdale's collection, Violation, earlier this year.
It was a little unfair to expect to be similarly blown away, The essays in Violation, while erudite and intellectually fecund, were models of distillation and revision, This monograph, which boasts comparable creative thinking and comprehensive research, seemed, by contrast, sprawling and diffuse and tonally inconsistent and even a little uncharacteristically hectoring.
But I have to confess that it has lingered with me, I've been thinking for days about Tisdale's issues and concerns and, once again, I find myself repeatedly citing her in conversation after seemingly unrelated conversation.
I have lamented a great deal about how, as I get older, I feel such a temporary ownership of texts.
I used to remember everything I read in exhaustive detail, Now I find that even the books that I like and am convinced by are forgotten in short order.
So I've learned to pay attention to the ones, like The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, that have a troubling afterlife.
It may not have been as tight as I wished, but this exploration of one of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers was not without considerable satisfactions.
Tisdale is a reader and a completist, so we are treated to an armchair history of food production and distribution in America and an eclectic and wideranging survey of American food writing.
I learned about a number of books that I want to explore, most notably sitelink The Taste of America by John and Karen Hess.
I, for one, had never questioned Julia Child's sacrosanct place as probably the most important figure inthcentury American food culture, so I'm more than a little intrigued to read a book that asserts, "She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV.
" In addition to all the tasty history, I enjoyed Tisdale's attention to the emotional meanings of food, even and, perhaps, especially, the industrially processed pseudofoods characteristic of the midthcentury American diet.
One of Tisdale's favorite treats as a child was a grilled cheese sandwich prepared with Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip and Velveeta.
Yearning for an infantile satisfaction and curious if it is even possible in light of adult sensibilities to scratch that itch, she prepares the Krafttastic delicacy for herself and her daughter.
Her daughter, "raised on sandwiches made from wholewheat bread and local wholemilk cheddar and homemade mayonnaise," is astounded at the resulting deliciousness.
"This is great," she says, "How did you make this"
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted is many things, as I've said, but most of all, I think, it's a mournful elegy for our humanity in latestage capitalism, a lament for the ways that the pernicious values of an untrammeled marketplace have pervaded and degraded our lives, cheapening and undermining even this most basic of human activities.
Food as nourishment in the sense of both literal nutrition and social reification has been undermined in essential ways, she argues, by food as commodity.
The abundant but flavorless and homogenized food that we eat is emblematic of our simultaneously gluttonous and denuded existence.
"Tomatoes were ruined," Tisdale writes in my favorite sentence in the book, "because we wanted them all the time and so with our lives: each single thing ruined because we want everything at once.
" I enjoyed pieces of this book such as the first person narratives and memoir sections, but I couldn't get an overall sense of who this author was, as I have never read anything by her before.
I also enjoyed reading about how Betty Crocker was not a real person, and how recipes have changed throughout the years of Joy of Cooking depending on food trends and health views.
I feel this could have been an interesting book on its own, I read this after finishing Kingsolver's sitelinkAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, so I was hoping for something similar.
I didn't find that the history and academictype commentary was unified well with the memoir pieces, The only thing that really united them in my mind was the theme of food, I think the book could have benefited from a unifying theme and structure, I wanted to like it, I really did. It has its moments of excellence, and of whininess, Eating is the most common way to celebrate in our culture, the most visible way to indulge ourselves.
And yet few things have such power over our livesit controls us as consumers, as social animals, as guilty creatures of appetite.
Through a lively mixture of the history of eating, memoir, sociology, and family recipes, Tisdale explores our public and private attitudes about and relationships with food, drawing a rich portrait of the many forces behind our American appetite and demystifying the everyday miracle of eating.
Lots of interesting info about food, and some memoir type info thrown in, but it meanders a bit much.
Enjoyable, but not as good as some of the other food lit I've been reading lately, sitelink jackvinson. com/archives/ Wonderful nonfiction such sensuous writing, and a great combination of personal and historical info, If you've ever pondered what food means socially, culturally, historically, and what changes in what we eat in thethst century mean then this would be a great book for you.
It touches on marketing, leisure saving devices, convenience foods, restaurants and Nouvelle cuisine, gender roles amp food, Betty Crocker, dieting just fascinating and all over the place, which is also one of its drawbacks, since there isn't an index.
I would have liked footnotes or endnotes, too, but I think most of the book was previously published as short magazine pieces.
this was a great cultural perspective book,
excellent Fairly boring. It took me a while to get through this, as it wasn't really all that exciting, Food, you'd think I'd just jam right through it, In the book Tisdale mixes scholarly research examples with personal stories and observations to discuss the changing landscape of food over the past hundred years or so.
Sallie Tisdale is the author of Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way, She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the year.
Her work has appeared in Harpers, the New Yorker, and other publications, Sallie Tisdale is the author of Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way, She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the year.
Her work has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, and other publications, sitelink.