Eat All About It

The new book by James McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, set out to be provocative, and I guess I got provoked. My review of it is in today’s Christian Science Monitor here.

My review of Michael Perry’s “Coop” is up now on the Christian Science Monitor’s books page. The book is subtitled “A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting,” which covered a remarkably large percentage of my own interests in seven words.

Perry’s website calls him a humorist, and the publicity materials stressed the book’s slapstick elements — or they seemed to me to be stressed; anytime you talk about things like getting bitten in the rear by a pig, I suppose they’re going to seem outsized. The book turned out, though, to have a hefty thread of seriousness and sadness running through it along with all the jokes and pleasure and joys. That would make it a lot like real life, just more self-aware and sharply observed than most. It’s worth a read even if you’ve never craved a pen of backyard chickens. Full review here.

 
Of course having children changes our lives in fundamental ways. But what writers so often fail to remember are all the ways children don’t change us.

So if you knew Matthew Amster-Burton’s writing before his daughter, Iris, was born, I can tell you he’s still one of the sharpest, funniest food writers around. He operates with a scientist’s sense of kitchen adventure, a well-rounded palate (know anyone else who enrolled in a Thai language class because he liked Thai food?), and a well-calibrated bullshit meter for his own foibles as well as those of others. All these things — smarts, humor, perspective — seem to vanish when otherwise sane people start writing about children and food. That’s what makes Amster-Burton’s first book, Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater, a find that should be required packaging with every high chair. 

The subtitle talks about raising an adventurous eater, but the book is mainly common sense perspective for anyone who plans to raise any kind of eater. At childbirth classes, I would hand out the chapter where he talks about the “terrible lie” that most new parents hear about breastfeeding (i.e., that it’s automatic and instantly fulfilling.) For any new parent investing in a blender and baby food purees, I would share Amster-Burton’s recipes for pad thai and bibimbap. And for anyone who doubts whether 5-year-old Iris can be for real, or whether a kid who eats what adults eat  is as charming a literary creation as Sal or Frances, I would refer them to Boom Noodle. That was Iris’s restaurant of choice when I asked Amster-Burton if I could meet them both for lunch, and it’s where Iris politely requested a bento box of “crunchy shrimp,” while my own 2-year-old scarfed down his first plate of okonomiyaki. (Next I want to see if she’ll take my boy to Jerry Traunfeld’s Poppy, her next favorite.)

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