John Whiting

...unless, of course, you didn't really want to leave home. It's all here - a celebrity-spotter's guide, with short zingy descriptions and no prices. I didn't even bother to download it. Nigel Slater leads his wrap-up with a hearty endorsement of the selection, beginning It could well have been in one of these shop-worn recommendations.EDIT: The same issue has a terrific feature article on the supermarket buy-out of UK local councils at the expense of traditional street markets. It's as if there were two editorial staffs in two parallel universes, each unconscious of the other's existence.

Anatole France, I have read, claimed that the cassoulet in his favorite restaurant had been going continuously in the pot for twenty years--obviously not a cassoulet as we know it. "Lor’, there ain’t no recipe for soup!" a southern cook exclaimed to my father almost a century ago. "It jes’ accumulates!" EDIT: My own take on cassoulet is here.

Only that, in most restaurants, the higher the price, the more international the clientelle. I've never heard anyone argue seriously with that. I'm told that Tailevent's reservation policy is biased in favor of natives, but I believe that's unusual.My own feeling about tourists in restaurants is that, if their garb and their money is deemed acceptable and they behave in a civil fashion, they are entitled to enjoy themselves without being belittled for their ignorance. It's not a matter of religion or morality, but of seeking pleasure along with their nourishment; these are restaurants, not temples.

At 100€ per person, the infestation rate is liable to be pretty high.

A quarter century ago John and Karen Hess, in The Taste of America, documented this trend in expensive "gourmet" restaurants. A dozen years ago, over dinner at a Franch B&B, I talked with a man who claimed that his brother ran a food firm based in southwest France that sold high-end prepared cook-chill and frozen food to Michelin starred restaurants. He had the smell of truth about him. Has anyone thought of setting up a website listing restaurants where Metro, Brake Freres and other such vans have been seen making deliveries? I'm sure that lists of their customers are "trade secrets", as closely guarded as the military variety and subject to equally punitive court action if broken. Photos of deliveries being made would be nice. Post edited by John Whiting and John Talbott at poster's request d/t problems in posting.

These days it's fashionable to criticise Julia Child's recipes for making use of "inauthentic" ingredients, but in the late 1950s when she was writing her contributions to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, American housewives had access to little else. Making extensive use of the U.S. Army’s Post Exchange in Paris, she jointly authored a book which might have been called (as she says in her Foreword) French Cooking from the American Supermarket. Now that the exotic is commonplace, her pragmatism has become a rod with which to beat her.

You're spot on! As for finding your way around in Japan--or anywhere--what you need is a reliable guru. It's the only way to get started in any strange environment. When I transferred to the UC Berkeley English department as an undergrad, a friend of a much-loved professor of mine at College of the Pacific sat down with me and told me which professors to avoid and which ones to enroll with, whatever they were teaching. He was 100% right and he saved me untold anguish.

No, it's only in Ed Behr's subscription quarterly. I put as much online as I thought I could without violating eGullet fair use policy.

Oakapple’s lengthy and literate analysis encourages me to call attention to a review by John McKenna (of The Bridgestone Irish Food Guide) that appears in the latest issue of Edward Behr’s The Art of Eating (2006 Number 71). I haven’t read Turning the Tables, so I couldn’t comment on the fairness of the review, but McKenna makes some general observations about what might be called “restaurant trainspotting” with which I tend to agree. He concludes:

Exactly. It's one of the side effects of our "ten-thousand-year experiment called agriculture", as Ronald Wright explains in A Brief History of Progress: It's unwise to dismiss such analysts as Ronald Wright or Wendy Orent as prophets of doom bearing a political message because they don't offer solutions. (For that matter, solutions to mass survival problems are ineluctibly "political".) If they merely make us aware of global threats about which the human race is collectively in a state of invincible denial, they will have performed a very real service.

As indeed is the case with virtually every natural disaster. Burgeoning population density is not the sole cause of world crisis, but it can be the triggering impetus to all sorts of negative events from mass starvation to global warming. I would not expect barns crammed full of chickens to be a more salubrious environment than slums teeming with the poverty-stricken.

Your example reduces the argument to an absurdity that Dr. Orent was not guilty of. It's like comparing global warming theorists to alien invader nuts. Be sceptical by all means, but choose your subjects with care. A lot of anti-Pasteur sceptics died from not washing their hands. I too am a John L--I could be your alter ego advising caution!

Dr. Wendy Orent argues in the L.A. Times that bird flu started in Italy in the 19th century and that migratory birds are its victims, not its spreaders.

This isn't a competition between publicity-hungry promoters, but a multi-faceted campaign to undo the damage done by years of cynically manipulative advertising. A number of food "celebrities" on both sides of the Atlantic are doing what they do best. In the US, Alice has substantially reformed the attitudes towards food production and consumption of a spectacularly large number of people. In Britain, Jamie Oliver launched a campaign which his popular "cheeky chappy" image made it impossible to ignore, all the way up to Number Ten. At the grass roots level "dinner ladies" like Jeanette Orrey have succeeded in reforming their own schools. My wife Mary, author of half-a-dozen books on children's food, wrote an award-winning book, Dump the Junk!, with tips for parents who are trying to encourage their kids to eat healthily. If we succeed in turning things around, it won't be easy. Eating and exercise habits are an integral part of culture, and ours has been telling us for years that we can have whatever we want, whenever we want it, and without any effort, at least until our credit cards get cancelled.

Just for starters, there's a misapprehension here that should be cleared up. The school--Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School--was (is?) heavily African-American and rather slum-like, which is exactly what attracted Alice--if diet could be turned around there, it could happen elsewhere. She wrote: Details of her Edible Schoolyard project are here.There's more about the project, and about what led up to it, in my history of Chez Panisse, The Green Gourmets

Strictly following the Jainist principle of not taking life has certain problems in the face of modern science. My father once knew a medical missionary to India who had worked alongside a Jainist spiritual leader. Learning of the principle of reverence for all life, he showed the Jainist a drop of water under a microscope, thus revealing that he could not even take a drink without killing thousands of minute life forms invisible to the naked eye. The Jainist was fascinated and offered the doctor an enormous amount of money for his microscope. Knowing that he could buy several new microscopes with the money he accepted. Whereupon the Jainist took the microscope out into the courtyard and smashed it.It’s a common reaction to unpleasant information which persists to this very day.

This is perhaps not the place to pursue the subject at length, but I come increasingly to the conclusion that anyone not yet drawing Social Security should, if merely out of self-interest, give a thought as to whether his eating habits are contributing ecologically to his own demise. I am most interested in those modern gastronomic movements, such as Slow Food, which show some awareness of the environment on which their survival depends. One may argue as to whether their policies are right or wrong, but at least they have their eyes open. Adria and the molecular gastronomy movement seem to exist in a magic bubble, a world as abstract and uncorporeal as higher maths. They seem to give no weight to where their raw materials come from or how they are obtained. They bring to mind the Victorian directors of the Regents Park Zoo, who, following the dietary myth of verisimilitude, decimated the creatures under their care by dining off the brains of as many living species as possible. I wonder where Adria's muse will lead him now that he has achieved virtual divinity. A knowledgable admirer who returned to el Bulli last year tells me that this time he was seriously disppointed. Adrià, he says, is experimenting with processed foods that can be sold ready-prepared, and he suspects that the diners are being made his guinea pigs.

This is the only recent culinary manifesto I've seen that did not include the words "sustainable", "local", "seasonal" or "organic".

My own experience indicates that they are very attentive to their vegetable courses:

My ecstatic response to L'Os and its kid brother across the street is here. It has been confirmed on more than one occasion.

The LA Times comes up with another terrifying feature.

Even better, pick up a copy of Gourmet Paris which is organised around where to find the best version of various foods/dishes... ← The latest edition of this appears to be 2002. Best bet, I've found, is Pudlo Paris, which stays pretty up-to-date. It's in French of course, but it only takes a bare minimum of menu French to make it useful.As for Patricia Wells' Food Lover's Guide to Paris, it contains so many errors, as well as out-of-date entries, as to make it more useful as a vicarious experience than a practical guide.

I’ve spent the last two hours of my blog watching the BBC TV drama, “Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes”. I found it deeply moving--not so much for what it said, as for what it allowed to exist behind the dramatic surface. It covered only the middle part of her life and centered--as all modern biography must--more on her love life than her missionary zeal. But it nevertheless accomplished something rare. It conveyed with remarkable vividness that in order to do what she did, where she did it and when she did it, and to do it with such passionate wisdom, she had to be, like all artists, more than a little crazy. Thank you Elizabeth David: some of us in England, and even in America, are eating more wisely and more joyously because of you.

Mary makes waves...

Warren Leming has sent me a fair copy of his birthday poem. It's here.