While the past few years of culinary publications have been dominated by the kinds of shocking and illuminating exposes that make you afraid to eat anything but what you grew yourself in the organic garden out back, 2011 marked a subtle shift away from the horror of the modern food supply chain. Not sure if that's for good or ill, but it's nice to have a little break from guilt whenever I buy a bag of cheezy puffs at the corner store.
2011 still had a few zingers to throw, along with the continuing parade of chef's memoirs that have clogged up the food book pipeline over the past few years and a few of those egregiously expensive coffee-table-sized books that seem to be competing for the highest price tag in the business. $625 for Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking? The five-volume boxed set looks like textbooks, isn't bound in stainless steel, doesn't cook the food for you and you can't eat the pages when you're done reading. That's hardly modern enough for the price.
Thankfully, there were plenty of food books worth a read, edible or no. Here are a few of my favorites from 2011:
Tomatoland
This one hit a little too close to home, thanks to the ongoing practices of the Florida tomato industry. Barry Estabrook journeyed far past the Immokalee Workers' claims and discovered human trafficking and actual slavery in our backyard, perpetrated solely to make sure your burger has a bright red slice for a nice price. Even worse, depending on your perspective, is his explanation of how modern agriculture has systematically turned the formerly nutritious and tasty tomato into a mockery of its former self, with barely enough nutrients to measure except for a 14-time increase in the amount of sodium in the fruit. And Estabrook manages to tell his true tale in a style that reads more like a thriller than food history. Guilt? There's plenty of it to go around in Tomatoland.
Blood, Bones and Butter
Foodies often think that they love food — it's inherent in the term, isn't it? — but it's only when you read a book like Blood, Bones and Butter that you realize what love truly is. Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of the acclaimed Prune restaurant in New York City, isn't another of the tough and damaged male chefs or female food-lovers on a journey who seem to populate culinary memoirs. Instead, she's a crazy cat lady of food who also happens to be an incredibly energetic and compelling writer. Blood, Bones and Butter is worth reading if only for the glimpse into Hamilton's slightly disturbed and incredibly loving mind.
Life, On The Line
Grant Achatz could have written a wonderful culinary memoir merely based on his amazing success — by 2007 he was easily one of the best and most innovative chefs in the United States, thanks largely to his Chicago restaurant Alinea. That memoir wouldn't have been nearly as engrossing as this one.
Achatz was diagnosed with stage four tongue cancer and his doctors advised removal of his tongue in order to get all the cancerous cells. Unwilling to give up his best working instrument, Achatz instead opted for a less sure course of serious chemotherapy and radiation. It worked, but he lost his ability to taste and, even though he spent every day he could in the kitchen, he stopped eating because he couldn't stand the idea of consuming food he couldn't taste. Although Achatz himself isn't the most endearing or engaging character, his story is incredible.
My Last Supper: The Next Course
By this point, when restaurant staff start talking over their picks for best final meal — death-row style — it's almost a cliché. That doesn't make it any less interesting an exercise, or a read. Following up on her first book — My Last Supper — from 2007, photographer/author Melanie Dunea visits 50 chefs, from high-end folks like Joel Robuchon or Emeril Lagasse to "celebs" like Rachael Ray, to find out which foods make their list and why. Soothing, simple and destined for your coffeetable, My Last Supper is the kind of book that makes everyone who picks it up ravenous.
The Oxford Companion to Beer
Have to give some credit to author Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery. Beyond the guy's many accomplishments, excellent beer and previous books, he visited Tampa just a few months ago to hold forth on his favorite topic: food-and-beer pairing. The Oxford Companion to Beer isn't a delightful read — at 900 pages its best use might be as a weight to press the moisture out of tofu — but it is damn comprehensive and will likely sit on your bookshelf for decades, coming in handy every so often to settle a bet or brush up on continuous hopping so you sound smart at your next craft brew party.
Lucky Peach Magazine
A creation of wunderkid mega-chef David Chang, cookbook collaborator Peter Meehan, and the people behind Bourdain's No Reservations, Lucky Peach is right at home at a publishing company like McSweeney's. It reads as if a bunch of teenage boys — who also happen to be excellent chefs, interesting writers and opinionated food lovers — got together and decided to print a 'zine in old man Bourdain's barn. Loaded with vaguely disturbing alt-comics, gutted fish with word balloons, brilliantly deconstructed recipes, and titles like "Miso Horny," it's the best "magazine" you can subscribe to, if you can even subscribe anymore to McSweeney's pretend periodicals. I just order from the bookstore.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2011.