Last Chance for Good Food: The Tragic Fate of Deliciousness in the Fast Food Era

Author: (Canada) Gina Marche
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-02-01
Features: Where did all the delicious food go? In this book about the fate of food, Gina Marche relentlessly seeks answers. Over the past fifty years, we have gone from loving food to fearing it. Food scientists and doctors have constantly frightened us. As a result, those ancient family recipes and dishes, the bonds that hold our communities together, are gradually fading away. Leisurely reminiscing about forgotten tastes, Marche traces the rise and fall of five popular foods, their histories, and their dilemmas: How were eggs driven to the brink of extinction by science and bacteria? How did bacteriological warfare deepen the cultural divide between Europe and America? And how did it make raw milk dangerous—this iconic food with deep emotional roots in the old days—into something perilous? How did beef, this popular food, lose its vitality to diseases? Why can’t we grow a variety of peas like the gardeners of the Victorian era? Why is the apple on the verge of extinction in the Western Hemisphere, while the tomato miraculously survives under the grip of industrial technology? And as we are learning to cook fish correctly once again, how did fish ironically become increasingly distant from our sight? This book is sharp and witty, just like the history of food itself, which is unlike any other. It also includes twenty retro private recipes, such as braised flounder with English macarons. Open this book, and those lost golden days, the elegance and deliciousness that seem to never return, will greet you the moment you turn the first page.