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New Food for Old
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18766 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1991 |
2,132 Words |
| Author
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William Woys Weaver
William Woys Weaver is the author of America Eats, The
Christmas Cook, and other books. His new book, Up-Country
Dutch: Eating Well from the Land, is scheduled to appear next
year. |
WHY WE EAT WHAT WE EAT
How the Encounter Between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats
Raymond Sokolov
New York: Summit Books, 1991
253 pp., $22.00
Postmodern American cuisine is now upon us. The tentative novelty of fondue in the 1960s; the deconstructive impulse of nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s; the present forays into the primitive, the vegetarian, and the natural--all of these bewildering and dizzying changes have done more to alter the American palate than the coming of the cookstove or the invention of the peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.
Indeed, as we enter the quincentennial of the discovery of the New World, it has taken our cookery nearly as long to catch up with the other American arts, a process of delayed maturation that has given our brand of culinary postmodernism a curiously Victorian twist in its buoyant eclecticism, in its exotic gastronomic bric-a-brac a la japonaise, and in its yen for the raw robustness of the handmade look of old-time arts and crafts, now styled down-home American.
This new American cuisine will doubtless continue to carry us forward into the next century, both as a rediscovery of a national self through regional identities, and as a decidedly radical shift away from traditional European roots. Raymond Sokolov, in his new book Why We Eat What We Eat (Summit Books, 1991), views this shift as revolutionary. Much like a lunar probe, Columbus brought back sample of his newfound world: plant, animal, and human. It is difficult to imagine that the greed which initially motivated him opened his eyes to the full implications of what he eventually wrought in terms of world diet (think of chocolate, vanilla, capsicum peppers, maize, the potato.) If he is indeed a food hero, as Sokolov claims, it is completely in inadvertence. Columbus may have unleashed a floodgate of change, but he did not care a pittance about the peoples he destroyed or the commercial possibilities of any of his culinary discoveries beyond what might impress his financial backers in Spain.
Yet the upcoming 500th anniversary has become a platform for retrospective analysis, pro and con, that has raised its head in a plethora of new books all racing toward 1992 like Spanish galleons in search of gold, the jackpot going to the first or the wisest, the most beautiful or most
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