The Edible Garden: Read It!

Posted in Exhibitions, Shop/Book Reviews, The Edible Garden on June 24 2009, by Plant Talk

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

With apologies to Cicero but with respect to American eating habits: O tempura! O morels!

The Western diet—based on fats, processed foods and convenience foods, and industrialized agriculture—may be responsible for a host of ills. In the last hundred years or so, it “has changed in ways that are making us increasingly sick and fat,” one food journalist recently commented. Ever more frequently and from many quarters, it is being questioned, rethought, reinvented. So it is that The Edible Garden, the Botanical Garden’s summer-long celebration of growing, preparing, and eating great food, comes at a propitious moment. With the current debate and state of eating in the United States, what do our on-site exhibitions bring to the table? Here are a few sources for perspective on this issue.

Journalist/gardener Michael Pollan is one of the pioneers in sounding the alarm about the American diet. His most recent book, In Defense of Food, argues thoroughly, convincingly, and very readably that good health will come when we reject the current reliance on fast food, food substitutes, food byproducts, engineered food, overpackaged food, overprocessed food, or any comestible with an adjective attached. His manifesto is very close to the mission of this institution—to be an advocate for the plant kingdom—and it boils down to: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

What to Eat by Marion Nestle takes this advice and turns it into a field guide for the supermarket. What is fresh, organic, low fat, reduced fat, no fat, trans fat, polyunsaturated fat, fat free?? For the consumer trying to “do the right thing,” the grocery chain is ground zero in the food chain, but it is a mine field, with marketing, packaging, and processing tripwires that can land you with eggbeaters all over your face. What to Eat analyzes the claims, counterclaims, labels, small print, jargon, subtext, and easy-open cartons to uncover the real truth about the dairy case and the frozen food aisle to make shoppers more savvy.

In any good debate you must first define your terms, and Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst’s The New Food Lovers Companion is an engaging, absorbing volume that describes and/or explains foods, food lingo, cooking idioms, tools, and techniques. It ranges from the basics to the more esoteric; I know what a mojito is but mojama? Fluffernutter is in here as is Ferran Adra and El Bulli, so we know that this updated fourth edition is as wide ranging as its predecessors. There is also a welcome new emphasis on ethnic cuisines and health foods. If you can’t fall asleep because your hosts served regular instead of decaf mocha java, this is the perfect way to pass a wakeful hour or two.

And why do we bother with all this? The Edible Garden is about being healthy through healthful eating, but there is something more, and it is what you glean from reading Beaumont’s Kitchen, edited by David Chickey, with an introduction by David Scheinbaum. Around mid-century, Beaumont Newhall, one of America’s finest museum curators, was nearly peerless in the field of photographic history. He penned a column entitled “Epicure Corner,” elegantly and amusingly, and dozens of his best pieces are anthologized here. (They remind me of the work of another great columnist, Henry Mitchell, who wrote with dry, wry amusement about gardens and gardening like no one else.) “Epicure Corner” was sometimes about recipes and sometimes about food philosophy; almost all of Newhall’s sentences are in the second person, as they should be, for eating began as and most often still is a communal endeavor. There is someone across the table, breaking bread with you. The joy of cooking, the joy of eating, and the joy of how good food brings people together and lifts them up suffuses this beautifully produced book. This sense of celebration that underlies all good meals is fundamental to The Edible Garden.

These books are availabe at Shop in the Garden.