Food Notes

Even when I am busy friends keep me supplied with links, somehow especially FOOD links. Reid sent me this link to a pretty good LA Times review of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema. But I'm not sure the reviewer "gets" hunting-- not as much being down on it as simply uncomprehending. "Pollan sets off on a quest for the foraged meal. Among other things, he needs to get a gun license, learn to shoot, hunt for chanterelles and pan for salt in San Francisco Bay. No sooner has he hit the Berkeley Hills than he drops his entire tone and point of view. He meets an Italian who makes salami, and the book starts reading like bad Castaneda. Moreover, it's hard to believe that a writer with Pollan's gimlet eye can consider a meal that involves hunting in a private forest, crossing California in an SUV and the use of ATVs and GPS technology as living off the land" Huh? He explicitly explains his heightened perceptions-- feelings all hunters know, which is what I assume the writer means by "bad Casteneda" (and what could "good Casteneda" be?!. And while all non- subsistence hunting in today's world has some aspects of artificiality, how else would a Berkeley English prof who has never hunted start?

Reid also sent this one to a review of Julia Childs' lifelong love affair with France and French cooking. France may be in a decline, but any civilized person must be thankful for its food, wine, and shotguns!

Finally, from Tom McIntyre, a restaurant review with recipes from the New York Times. Chef David Chang of Momofuku has a refreshing attitude: "Momofuku's pro-meat attitude goes even deeper than that. The menu warns off vegetarians, and Mr. Chang, 28, said: "It's hard to order anything here that doesn't have meat in some form or other; we just try not to make anything vegetarian. We're just doing the food we like, and we like meat. We don't make a vegetarian broth, because we don't want to, and we don't make vegetarian versions of things because they just don't taste as good as the versions we do make." "