John Whiting

Only if you hired a walled-in mansion with a swimming pool, kept the gate locked, and then wrote a book in which you made fun of the natives.

Bux, the decline in average bread standards is due to changing social patterns in which ordinary working people are no longer prepared to work the long hours for the low pay that prevailed among pre-industrial artisans. Accellerated bread manufacture, for instance, such as the Chorleywood process, was necessary as a result of laws (in the '20s I think) directing that French bakers should not be made to work before (I think) 3 a.m. That made long slow natural rising impractical. There are a few dedicated producers who are willing to work the necessary hours, but they quite rightly demand premium prices for their products. Those who want real food must now be able and willing to pay for it. Large families on low incomes don't fall into that category. Real food at prices any but the rich can afford demands, as it did in the past, two societies, one of privileged consumers, the other of poor producers. This is what we now have in the area of raw produce, in which third world laborers grow our fruits and vegetables (as is also the case with most of our clothing). Imported produce is not all that much cheaper for the European consumer than what is grown within the same country, but supermarkets with plentiful cheap foreign supplies force wholesale prices down to the point where domestic farmers can no longer compete. It may not be long before our bread is flown halfway around the world as well.

Nes is also quite popular in Greece. I wouldn't call it coffee, but it grows on you after a while. I've mostly seen it served as an iced blender drink. It's also served in Brazil, I'm told, where it is commonly called No Es Café.

Jane Grigson put it succinctly: "We have more than enough masterpieces. What we need is a better sort of ordinariness."

A cursory glance at Calvin W. Schwabe's _Unmentionable Cuisine_ should convince even the most dogmatic that the world's dietary preferences are about as rational as its religious convictions.

A knowledgeable friend recently commented on this continuing saga: He put his finger, I think, on the most laughable aspect of restaurant reviewing. Menus are as ephemeral as cloud formations -- imagine a journalist who recommended that his readers go in search of a particular interplay of light and shade that he had experienced on a particular mountaintop. One of the things I loved about Poilane and his sourdough was his open acknowledgement that, because of the unpredictable interaction of free-floating bacteria, his bread never tasted the same two days in a row.

Having spent over thirty years as a classical musician in London, I got to know a lot of critics. They usually knew the people they were reviewing, both composers and performers, and they invariably had free press tickets. Sometimes they wrote enthusiastically, sometimes scathingly, sometimes indifferently. On no occasion did they ever mention in their reviews whether or not they knew these musicians, and on no occasion did anyone ever suggest within my hearing that they should do so. A long-established critic might very well know half the members of a symphony orchestra; perhaps he had even slept with a few of them, of both sexes. Any such declaration of interest would have taken more space than his editor would have been prepared to grant him for the entire review. For myself, when I read a restaurant review, I'm interested in food, not gossip.

None of these categories would necessarily lead me to expect honesty, objectivity or even a modicum of integrity. May I recommend a recent book by John L. Hess, who was the NY Times restaurant critic for less than a year in 1974. This was only a part of his journalistic career; he covered many aspects of politics and economics in various parts of the world and came within an ace of a Pulitzer. _My Times: A Memoir of Dissent_ is a carefully detailed and documented account of the shenanegans that went on inside the Times, from the top down, and how many of its greatest moments were achieved by a small rotating minority of idealistic reporters who outwitted their superiors. I've experienced some heavy moments in eGullet over the last couple of years, but compared with the world of journalism out there, it's a Quaker prayer meeting.

Here's a comment on chop suey and chow mein from the "About" website on Chinese Cuisine with Rhonda Parkinson. It corresponds with what I've heard verbally from Deh-Ta Hsiung.

Re balsamic: I meant at home, not in the restaurant. I should have made that clear.

Thanks very much for joining us! Isn't that a bit like "don't drink Bordeaux unless you can afford Petrus"? One distinguished restaurateur of my acquaintance keeps two bottles -- one of them is the best Gold and the other is from Trader Joe's. The first he uses with great discrimination, the second he splashes around like ketchup.

Shock horror! Several people in the food business seem to know each other! Why should people feeding our stomachs be expected to be more loftily objective than those feasting our eyes? S.N. Behrman's _Duveen_ and John L. Hess's _The Grand Aquisitors_ revealed years ago that paintings are bought and sold as corruptly as politicians, and yet people continue to gain pleasure and even enlightenment from these soiled objects. A critic needn't be virtuous, only accurate.

This is by no means a generally held opinion; knowledgable friends have spoken disparagingly of it. I've eaten very well indeed, more than once, at Artigiano in Belsize Village, which was highly commended in this year's PAPA awards. I'm sure there is someone out there who will immediately rubbish it. It's like arguing over blind dates.

There's another aspect to this. A great many of the artisanal foods that are featured by Slow Food require no cooking -- they merely have to be served up on a plate. They are the original fast food -- they are slow only in the making. In France there may be more emphasis on cooking, but local shops and markets feature excellent ready-to-eat food made in-house which may or may not require warming. In other words, in both Italy and France you can be an enthusiastic and discriminating foodie and hardly need to cook at all. Ready-to-eat meals have a bad name in America because they are overwhelmingly mass-produced, but throughout the rest of the world they have many centuries of history behind them. (In parts of Asia they are among the best meals you can get.)

The problem with this discussion has been what Korzybski called "levels of abstraction". The statement "On average, people in Italy know and care more about food than do Americans" is not effectively addressed by "I and my friends are passionately devoted to food, and we're Americans". The latter would only be an answer to the sweeping generalization, "Nobody in America cares about food as much as any Italian." But no matter. We're all having a good time.

Be sure to check out the Family Tradition page. http://www.spanishvillagerestaurant.com/about.html

That must be it, and the spelling is right. But don't revisit on a Monday -- the fairies will have flown away.

I didn't make any of my statements up. They occur repetitively in survey after survey. (I have to read a lot of them these days.) Some of you, I'm sure, use your cars to shop around. You're the lucky ones who can afford the time and the gas. Statistically, Americans are one-stop shoppers, and it's most likely to be Wal-Mart. Except in prosperous neighborhoods, the other supermarkets survive only by imitating them. I haven't even mentioned the sad fact that something like a quarter of Americans (and Brits) can barely afford the cheapest and worst of the supermarket products. Their kids will probably demand branded junk food, so they can't afford to experiment with food that will probably have to be thrown away. Here's an interesting quote from a food industry executive a few years ago: "Two hundred years ago everybody made their own clothes. Nowadays we haven't time to do that -- we go out and buy our clothes. Nobody makes their own clothes unless it's their hobby. The same thing will happen with food: I estimate that in about 50 years time dinner will be something people will go out and buy, and nobody will cook, unless it's their hobby. We in the food industry are working towards that."

I think that the sad truth about American eating and buying habits can be summarized in a few brief statements. 1 Statistically, the mass of the American populace is not seriously interested in the flavor of their food in a critical or comparative way. 2 Average Americans shop by car, and so want to go to a single large store where they can buy everything they need. 3 Economies of scale have produced an expectation of cheap food which has turned into a demand. 4 Americans have adopted a life style which leaves little time for cooking, and so they buy their meals ready made. (Surveys continually bear this out, and the trend is accellerating.) 5 A prosperous and vocal minority resists these trends and has gradually set up alternative sources. They are not cheap. The traditional food of peasants can now be afforded only by the rich. I say America -- but all of the above are increasingly true of the rest of the world as well. America was the first of the modern industrialized countries to become really prosperous, and so they got there first. WalMart is the largest corporation, not only in America, but in the world, and it's still growing. Globally, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the buying public.

There we have no disagreement whatsoever. A theme I keep hammering on is that cuisine, like architecture, must be built from the bottom up. No foundation, no structure.

All quite true, but it's inaccurate to describe the birth of the Slow Food movement in such a way as to imply that its motives were commercial. I know Carlo Petrini well enough to be certain that he was out to save a range of artisanal foods which were (and are) genuinely threatened.

I had a long and interesting conversation last month with Carlo Fiori, the fourth of five generations to head Luigi Guffanti, a firm of traditional cheesemakers and distributors based at Arona since 1876. He explained why visitors to Italy may have varying impressions as to the omnipresence of supermarkets. The biggest single factor, he said, is geography. In the cities which were heavily industrialized, the supermarkets became the dominant retail food suppliers, but in smaller cities and in rural areas where the traditional way of life was not under such violent attack, the farmers’ markets and neighbourhood shops survived. But it’s not just a holding operation, he said. Carlo had kind words for Slow Food. [Which, I should add, was conceived by Carlo Petrini and friends in a wine cellar just a couple of hundred yards from where we were talking!] Their success on every level from the local to the international has brought artisanal foods to the attention of a younger generation who had been seduced by the fast food industry, so that the foods of their parents and even their grandparents are now becoming fashionable. Not only are the older shops once more prospering, but new ones are opening up in successful competition with the supermarkets, which can compete with their smaller rivals in price but not in quality, skill, ambience or personal service. That, at any rate, was his take on the situation. EDIT: I would add, with at least marginal relevance, that in Turin half a dozen years ago I had difficulty in finding aceto balsamico. The Old Turin family with whom I was staying - expert cookers and enthusiastic eaters - weren't quite certain what it was. Last month when I went back to Tre Galli, an old Turin vineria, there was a bottle on the table along with the olive oil. And my friends tell me that everyone is going mad over single estate olive oils, with dozens on offer everywhere. It's all quite new to them.

This is a very astute observation, but it's also due to the fact that Italy's food culture is still closer to pre-industrial patterns of production and distribution. The Wal-Mart steamroller hasn't yet flattened the countryside, as it is rapidly doing in Mexico. If you look at the "authenticity" threads in the Mexico forum, you'll find that the equivalent of "Italian-American" is rapidly taking over. Visit those unspoiled hosterie before they start serving spaghetti and meatballs.

While it is diverting to discuss this topic in the abstract, and to award the palm to the white truffle, anyone who goes to Piedmont this season and orders them in a restaurant is likely to be wasting his money. The extreme drought has meant that, not only is the crop small, but it is also inferior because there has not been enough moisture in the soil for the truffles to develop properly. I was in Piedmont on a press trip last month and was fed perhaps a hundred quid's worth of them shaved over everything in sight. The only one that leapt out at me had just came straight from the earth, and it had faded noticeably within a couple of hours. For most of them, "subtle" would be a kind word - good wild mushrooms would have been much more complex and satisfying. But of course most of those exported are bought and eaten for ostentation, and so the astronomical price this season is set by their rarity, not their quality. I'd rather eat a good black truffle than an indifferent white truffle. And if I'm paying, I'd rather eat something else entirely.

I suspect it's true that a first-class chef in a high-priced American restaurant can obtain almost anything he wants if he knows where to look and is willing and able to pay for it. But compare the ease with which an Italian, or even a visitor to Italy, can find good seasonal ingredients and artisanal products in any local community, with the needle-in-a-haystack search for anything non-plastic in most American cities and towns (unless you're somewhere that's a lucky exception and you have someone to guide you). In other words, as in so many respects, in America it's advisable to be rich.