From: mad4@ellis.uchicago.edu (Bill Maddex)
Subject: Re: Book review: Appetite for Change
Reply-To: mad4@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Pranksters for Peace
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 23:33:59 GMT

In article <altar.726860998@sfu.ca> altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar) writes:
>"Right on man!"  "Enpower the people!"  "Grow your own!"
>
>Seriously Bill, it does look like a good book.  Thanks for
>the review and drawing our attention to a good read.
>
>It is sad that Westerners have become so detached and
>removed from nature that many of us have become entrained to
>the sorry state of not being able to even cook for
>ourselves.  What an achievement of the food industry!  It is
>really astonishing that there has been successfully fostered
>such a widespread dependency on processed convenient foods
>that people have actually become habituated to even prefer
>their taste over whole foods.  "You deserve a TREAT today,
>eat at MacDonalds or microwave that TV dinner!"  Some
>"treat"!  The result has been a whole population of people
>that swear by the "better" taste of vitamin reinforced,
>spongy white bread over whole grain bread.  Or consider how
>people have become so tethered to the greasy and salty taste
>of animals fats on practically all their foods that I'm
>surprised that they don't add it to their orange juice.

Hey man (;-), they put *calcium* in OJ; that's almost as gross and stupid.  
A friend of mine told me he had once met Julia Child @a trains station and
they had a conversation about upper class/upper middle class women being SOL
in the kitchen, and that Julia was in the vanguard against this.  That was
thirty yrs ago, and as best I can tell things have got progressively worse
since then.  It's rather funny that when Pravda or Newsweek or some other
'official' rag does a piece on what schmendriks people are about food these
days and the boom in caterers on Long Island and low budget grease shacks in
the ghetto (OK that doesn't make the papers, but my experience in South Chicago
indicates that poor people can't feed themselves either--I've been to shelters
and talked to nutrition teachers who said it's just a lost cause) there's 
little or no mention that veg's tend to be a bit better about this.  Remember
the cross posted nonsence from soc.singles last spring?  One point that 
Belasco makes well is that the food industry big wigs way back in the '50s
were trying to bring this about.  For some reason I'm reminded of the Philip
K. Dick novel in which he parodies '50s domestic by having pople w/over 
managed lives take. psychedelics and play w/"Perky Pat, the perfect housewife"
for entertainment.  a lot of people know about the concurent rise of fast food
and the freeways, but the story about TV and TV dinners isn't so well known.

>Cyril Joad in 1953 said,
>
>    "It will be said of this generation that it found
>    England a land of beauty and left it a land of beauty
>    spots"
>
>Not even this much can be said about the availability of
>good, tasty whole foods in our average supermarket.

Tell me about it.  The variety of decent produce you can get here is pretty
awful, even in the summer.

>>He starts out by giving you a somewhat boring personal account of his (and
>>his wife's) becoming health conscious as grad students in the late '60s, his
>>father having a heart attack being a galvanizing event.  He then moves to the
>>story of food becoming an element of the '60s rebellion rejecting the entire 
>>'straight' culture.  
>
>Bill, I think you're maybe being too hard on the author for doing
>what, after all, is a kind of counter-culture "confessio fidei"
>in which one states at the beginning where one is "coming from".
>Didn't they frequently ask in the 60's, 
>
>	"Hey man, where are you *coming* from?"
>
>This kind of personalized disclosure is, I find, useful for context
>and to maybe even inspire others that the author's insights did not 
>come from some mysterious arcane study or special power, but from merely
>the thoughtful reflection of everyday events and ordinary life.
>"You too, can be move to experience what I experience, think
>what I have come to believe."  Having said that, I will concur that
>sometimes these kinds of personal opening statements can be tiresome,
>especially when coming from a narcisstic personality.  But even
>that is useful to me, since then I know in advance what kinds of
>quirks of thinking and self-centered outlook one might expect from
>such a personality.   

Uh, maybe, but I don't buy it.  Some of these bits are downright offensive,
Tom Hayden's coming most readily to mind.  Hayden probably means well, which
is more than you can say for self serving assholes like Peter Colyer, David
Horowitz and Ron Radosh, but what a sap.  Even the best stuff '60s memoirs,
like Todd Gitlin's, don't really come alive for me, which seems to be what
you value them for.  The oral accounts I've got from my parents, some of my
profs, Ken Kesey et al seem not just mor animated but a lot less annoyingly
hagiographic.

>Bill, I also think that in your review you were also being too hard
>on good olde Francis Lappe, just as earlier you were too fast to 
>dismiss Lewis REgenstein.  Just consider this as my "confessio
>fidei"  ;-)
>
>						ted

Regensteing I'll get to in another article.  I guess I didn't say what I meant
to about Lappe, which is part of the reason I'm following up my own article.
In terms of really awful food, Lappe is clearly a lot less to blame than,
say, Adelle Davis, but a ton more people 1)read her book, and 2)followed her
advice.  I know a lot of people who own _Let's Cook it Right_, but I don't
know anyone who's used it more than once or twice, but most people you talk
to about veg'ism will talk to you about complimentary proteins, and I can cite
three cookbooks written in the last two years that make a big deal about 
complimentary proteins.  Lappe deserves credit for opening a lot of eyes
and even more credit for admitting she was wrong.  Unfortunately, the people
who read _Diet for a Small Planet_ twenty years ago don't believe it.  My
mother still goes on about complementing proteins, and it drives me nuts.
All this is incidental to my original point.  Come on-don't you remember
those awful loaves and soybean stews and everything?  Yuck city.  If you
want to see a perfect example of what I mean, go find a copy of the first
edition of _The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook_, from like '72 or so.  (I rather
stupidly didn't pick this up for a buck a while back because it had NO 
recipes that looked worth a second reading, let alone actual preparation.
I'll never become a real bibliophile)  That edition has a preface or intro
by Gaskin, who rather presumptuously calls himself 'Stephen' (for a while
he said the Dead wrote 'St. Stephen' about him) who says something to the
effect of 'Being a vegetarian is cool, it's really spiritual and neat.  *You
just have to eat a lot of beans.* (paraphrased, but close to verbatim, and
the spirit is right.  The emphasis is mine.)  People were more hung up on
protein than anything else, and the result was often food you needed a chisel
to eat.

Billy Magic

"Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool."
					The Residents