Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World

Book by Gina Mallet

I was reviewing restaurants for a Toronto newspaper, in the midst of a veal chop, in fact, when I stopped eating. I was bored with food. I had so looked forward to dining out at someone else’s expense, but how quickly it palled. This was in the late 1990s, when restaurants were matching the giddy excess of the stock market, and fresh foie gras was de rigueur on the menus of even modest establishments. It wasn’t that the food and cooking were bad. No, there was something missing, something I couldn’t put my finger on.

Not until I went backstage at another restaurant–and as a former theater critic, a restaurant was always theater to me–did I realize what it was. It wasn’t the ­no-frills French restaurant itself but the chef, a tight-lipped Breton, who I knew right away had sorcerer genes. His food wasn’t generic the way so many restaurants’ food was, menus put together by opinion polls, or consultants. It was just the food he personally knew: fish soup, pan­fried red snapper laid on a bed of saffron fennel, a little apple tart that sprang to life in the oven and melted in the mouth.

This wasn’t critics’ food; it wasn’t trying to make a splash; it wasn’t imaginative or exotic, as so much restaurant food was; but it tasted so good that it touched the emotions. It was in its way soul food. As I left the restaurant, I looked through the glass storefront at the few customers left with their wine in the candlelight. I wondered what they were talking about because I realized that that, too, had been missing from my usual restaurant experience. Conversation. Then came the first prick of memory. Around my parents’ dinner table, talking about food was at the top of the menu. And the talk wasn’t so much about how a dish had been cooked, or the food itself; rather, it came out of the experience of enjoying food with others, a sense of companionship that prompted confidences. I must have been about twelve when Piper, my father’s bibulous cousin, advised me gravely that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, “not, as so often thought, through sex.”

As I walked home, I felt exhilarated by the memory. But the problem of restaurants remained. They all served the same food. The menus were short and always included a veal chop, a steak, rack of lamb, pasta. But why did that matter? It doesn’t matter that all over France, bistros still serve steak frites, escargots, onion soup, skate and black butter sauce, lemon tart. It doesn’t matter that a sushi bar serves tuna and yellowtail over and over again. In fact, it’s reassuring to keep running into old friends.

I thought at first the difference lay in the cooks’ commitment. In North America, and also in some of the most praised and expensive restaurants in France and Britain, the cooking may be good, but it is presented in a summary way. That’s that. When I read about Escoffier, the chef who made the Edwardian age a pinnacle of ­over-­the-­top food, I felt so hungry. Eating out at the turn of the century had been an unabashed binge: Escoffier’s à la carte menus could include as many as a hundred dishes. The customer had to be wooed and won. Perhaps the froideur of the modern restaurant arises because no restaurant can afford to be prodigal on the Escoffier scale, or because cooking is not so much a vocation as a career choice for the middle class, and this leads to a certain detachment from the consumer.

Then the real answer came into focus. The art of cooking is dying. Once, it was the heart of home and evoked a dense web of feeling. But now the communal family meal has dissolved into individual eating units. More and more, cooking has been marginalized as an add-on to home decoration, a branch of fashion. As I traced my eating life through the sixties in Los Angeles, the seventies in New York, the eighties in Connecticut, and the nineties in Toronto, I realized how ineluctable the march to fast food and solitary eating has been. And it isn’t just Big Macs, but ­high­end takeaway, and the cold and cured delights of the Mediterranean. Non­cooking has reached the stage where there are now self­styled “rawvolutionaries” who believe that all cooked food is dangerous: ­forty ­thousand years of perfecting grilling and baking tossed overboard.

Paradoxically, although cooking seems doomed, it is being promoted today in an unprecedented way–more cookbooks, more columnists, more star chefs, the Food Network on TV, the slow food movement–but woven into the bright chatter is a baleful leitmotif: food as death. Food is shaping up as the single greatest threat to life. The first assault on food as pleasure came from food science, which parsed ingredients for nutrition, reducing food to fuel. Further scientific discoveries were more sinister. The old saying, a little learning is a dangerous thing, turned out to be true–even for biochemists.

The first big scare was the dear little egg, an esteemed natural food for centuries. Eggs, it was alleged by food scientists, were bad for your heart. That turned out not to be true, but the scare dented the public’s confidence in food safety. A second, unsubstantiated scare about an inorganic chemical sprayed on apples virtually destroyed the American apple industry. Just this year, the public, which was gobbling up farmed salmon, tasty, cheap, and full of the valuable Omega-3 fatty acid, was advised to cut its consumption to a few ounces once a month. A single small study had found that the farmed fish had higher levels of potential poisons in it than did the wild salmon. The levels, however, are well under the safety limits set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Beef, a food of symbolic grandeur, has been brought to its knees by mad cow disease, caused by the traditional practice of cattle cannibalism–even though the chances of getting the disease are about as remote as the average person getting to the moon. Each day another food is declared suspect. We are now in the throes of a food fear frenzy.