Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World
Author: Gina Mallet
A witty and vividly remembered culinary memoir about how eating once was, and still can be, a joy.Food has never been more exalted as part of a lifestyle, yet fewer and fewer people really know what good food is. Drawing on enough culinary experiences to fill several lifetimes, Gina Mallet's irreverent memoir combines recollections of meals and their milieus with recipes and tasting tips. In loving detail, Last Chance to Eat muses on the fates of foods that were once the stuff of feasts: light, fluffy eggs; rich cheeses; fresh meat; garden vegetables; and fish just hauled ashore. Mallet's gastronomic adventures appeal to any palate: from finding the perfect grilled cheese ("as delicate tasting as any Escoffier recipe") to combing the bustling food department at postwar Harrod's for the makings of "an Elizabeth David meal." The search for taste often takes her far from the beaten path—to an underground "chevaline" restaurant serving horsemeat steaks and to purveyors of contraband Epoisses, for instance—but the journey is always a delight.
Author Biography: Gina Mallet, a writer living in Toronto, was a theater critic for the Toronto Star and now writes about food for the National Post.
The New Yorker
This gourmand’s polemic cum memoir may have an unoriginal premise—that cuisine is being ruined by the demise of the local producer, the spread of bland, chemically altered ingredients, and the influence of hysterical dietary fatwas—but Mallet’s impatient scorn for anyone standing between her and the next scrumptious morsel is engaging. At times, it’s easy to lose track of whether she’s railing against the F.D.A., the food industry, nutritionists, environmentalists, or all of them, but her basic dictum is simple: taste rules. Mallet’s strength lies in the sensual evocation of food; even a vegetarian might find pleasure in her rhapsody over the perfect steak. She saves her greatest encomiums for earthy, mammalian flavors that reflect their pastoral origins. An artisanal butter is a “six-ounce roll of golden bliss that melts on the tongue and warms the mouth with a hot, sexy, animal taste.”
Publishers Weekly
Being a gourmet isn't simply about ferreting out the best victuals; it's also about luxuriating in good food the way others might stroke a new mink coat. Toronto writer Mallet is one such epicure. In this combination of memoir and essay, she balances remembrances of growing up in wartime England with zesty opinions on various foodstuffs ("I don't consider cod a fish at all," she writes. "It's like eating twenty-dollar bills"). Mallet opines that in an era of Big Macs and a dizzying array of snack foods, people don't know what they're missing. Rather than delight in a few gulps of richly flavored raw milk, she laments, consumers today simply go for quantity over quality. Readers of this work will know better, however, since Mallet goes beyond describing comestible ecstasy and digs deep into topics like cheese, beef and fish. Like an excellent dinner guest, Mallet lets her thoughts roam freely, yet always with focus and a dose of intriguing fact. In writing about kitchen gardens, for example, she begins with the loss of her mother's vegetables and herbs from an errant German bomb that destroyed land and greenhouses alike. From there, she chats about Versailles, organic farming and supermarkets. This breadth of insight, mixed with Mallet's childhood memories, makes for a tasty treat. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Mallet, a former restaurant and theater critic, has turned her attention to the state of food today. The result is a recipe-sprinkled memoir cum examination of modern agriculture. Five iconic food groups-cheese, eggs, beef, fish, and vegetables-are viewed through the lens of history, including Mallet's childhood in postwar Britain and France, and then compared with the current situation. The book is quite up-to-date, including the discovery of mad cow disease in U.S. beef in December 2003 and the reports of high levels of chemicals in farmed salmon in January 2004. Mallet closes with a grimly futuristic epilog in which beef is outlawed owing to pathogens and home-cooked meals are so obsolete that they are called "granddads." Overall, a well-crafted and engaging book; the reminiscences about food in Europe after the war provide a welcome personal touch. Recommended for public and academic libraries with food collections.-Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Lib., Oxford, OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
In a wistful memoir of her British/American upbringing, a food writer for the Canadian National Post urges us to grab all the flavor we can while we still can. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has a palate that the industrial processes of bringing three squares a day to the modern world, particularly in the US, tend increasingly to suppress flavor and freshness in foods in favor of such economic factors as overcoming the rigors of mass distribution and insuring longer shelf life. Add the repeated blows from this doctor's or that university's medical research confirming once again that what tastes best is bad for you, and there's no more familiar phrase to the average American food shopper than, "You just can't get that anymore." Mallet, unfortunately, chooses to commiserate and document the trend in terms of long-suffering favorites (her first hundred pages are on eggs alone) rather than flesh out any kind of battle plan. Yet her nostalgia may well assist those with a few decades of what passes for gourmandise here in the colonies in realizing how far indeed we've strayed from pastoral European ideals like, say, cheeses made from the milk of a single farmer's herd of cows bred to the task of producing butterfat sans interference from any national health ministry. The author has in fact beaten the bushes to find full-flavored alternatives from free-range egg producers to "illegal" raw-milk cheeses sold over the Internet and "beef boutiques" offering the same Scottish Highland cattle meat that the Queen of England prefers. She also scatters some nostalgic recipes with authentique ingredients along the way, including English clotted cream and sole Meuniere. Most instructive:documentation of health research flip-flops that have indicted and hence crippled the markets for food favorites, then later exonerated said favorites. Pessimistic, protracted lament for the death of food. Agent: Marilyn Biderman/McClelland & Stewart
Read also Assembly Language Step by Step or Pic Robotics
Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds
Author: George W Hudler
Mushrooms magically spew forth from the earth in the hours that follow a summer rain. Fuzzy brown molds mischievously turn forgotten peaches to slime in the kitchen fruit bowl. And in thousands of other ways, members of the kingdom Fungi do their part to make life on Earth the miracle that it is. In this lively book, George Hudler leads us on a tour of an often-overlooked group of organisms, which differ radically from both animals and plants. Along the way the author stops to ponder the marvels of nature and the impact of mere microbes on the evolution of civilization. Nature's ultimate recyclers not only save us from drowning in a sea of organic waste, but also provide us with food, drink, and a wide array of valuable medicines and industrial chemicals.
Some fungi make deadly poisons and psychedelic drugs that have interesting histories in and of themselves, and Hudler weaves tales of those into his scientific account of the nature of the fungi. The role of fungi in the Irish potato famine, in the Salem Witch Trials, in the philosophical writings of Greek scholars, and in the creation of ginger snaps are just a few of the many great moments in history to grace these pages.
Hudler moves so easily from discussing human history to exploring scientific knowledge, all with a sense of humor and enthusiasm, that one can well understand why he is an award-winning teacher both at Cornell University as well as nationally. Few, for instance, who read his invitation to "get out of your chair and take a short walk" will ever again look without curiosity and admiration at the "rotten" part of the world around them. Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds is full of information that willsatisfy history buffs, science enthusiasts, and anyone interested in nature's miracles. Everyone in Hudler's audience will develop a new appreciation of the debt they owe to the molds for such common products as penicillin, wine, and bread.
The Toronto Star - Mary Esch
BE GRATEFUL for fungus. Sure, it's to blame for athlete's foot, mouldy bread and that slimy mildew on your shower curtain. But without fungi, there would be no beer, no penicillin, no Gorgonzola cheese. And we'd be up to our necks in dead plants and animals if there were no fungi to rot them. In fact, fungus has had a key role in human history. Just ask George Hudler, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University. Better yet, read his book.
Library Journal
True, you don't think you're interested in fungus, but when a patron asks for a book on molds and fungi, this is the most entertaining and informative one there is. It's hard to make fungus interesting, but Hudler has done it, just as he has in his popular plant pathology classes at Cornell University. After a review of history and some basic science, Hudler gets into the entertainment: fungus's effects on everything from bread and wine to penicillin, Dutch elm disease, the Irish potato famine, and sick-building syndrome. Edible and hallucinogenic mushrooms are discussed in scientific and cultural contexts. Sidebars on "Humongous Fungus," "Lip-Smacking Smut," and molds in mystery novels as well as numerous illustrations actually make this a fun book. There are no comparable titles in print. While advanced for high school students, this is excellent for college and public library collections, where needed.--Laura E. Lipton, Ctr. for Urban Horticulture, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
School Library Journal
YA-From the history of the potato and its fungal-caused "blight," which resulted in starvation in Ireland and mass immigration to the United States, to the invention of gingersnap cookies by an ingenious miller faced with an abundance of foul-smelling, gray-colored fungal-infested wheat, this book is a delightful trove of little-known facts. Each chapter captures another facet of fungi capabilities; explains how the history of humanity has been effected by these traits; and even brings in pertinent references to movies, books, or articles. From "sick building syndrome" to penicillin to athlete's foot to mushrooms on a salad, people have had a long-standing love-hate relationship with the Kingdom Fungi. Hudler's presentation is an enjoyable read, which most teens will probably find hard to believe, and it's also useful for reports.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Allen Lacy
. . .[M]akes an excellent brief on behalf of the fungi. -- The New York Times Book Review
What People Are Saying
James W. Kimbrough
Hudler's light-hearted approach to the subject of the impact of fungi on human history is refreshing and will attract students and lay people who have some interest in this area. Better yet,it will entice readers who were not concerned with this topic at all before delving into the book. . . . [Hudler] is to be commended for discovering some extremely exciting information,some of it little known even to mycologists.
Table of Contents:
| Preface and Acknowledgments | ||
| Introduction | ||
| Ch. 1 | Classification and Naming | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | What Fungi Do and How They Do It | 16 |
| Ch. 3 | Fungi as Pathogens of Food Crops | 35 |
| Ch. 4 | Fungi as Agents of Catastrophic Tree Diseases | 52 |
| Ch. 5 | Ergot of Grain Crops | 69 |
| Ch. 6 | Mycotoxins: Toxic By-Products of Fungal Growth | 85 |
| Ch. 7 | Mycoses: Fungus Diseases of Humans | 99 |
| Ch. 8 | Medicinal Molds | 113 |
| Ch. 9 | Yeasts for Baking and Brewing | 132 |
| Ch. 10 | Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms | 147 |
| Ch. 11 | Hallucinogenic Mushrooms | 172 |
| Ch. 12 | Wood Decay | 186 |
| Ch. 13 | Interactions of Fungi and Insects | 202 |
| Ch. 14 | Symbiotic Relationships of Fungi with Plants | 217 |
| Epilogue | 230 | |
| Notes | 235 | |
| Index | 245 |
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