[.ca] Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World (ISBN 0771056532)

Amazon.ca:
Gina Mallet doesn't beat us over the head with her urbanity, but she's travelled a lot in Europe and North America. She also seems to remember everything she ever ate. A former drama and restaurant critic, she delights in stating her opinions. Last Chance to Eat is an unsentimental celebration of lost tastes, including a clear-eyed appraisal of industrialized and genetically modified foods and a critical assessment of organics (she finds that, in some instances, they don't taste any better than those raised with chemicals). "What has changed most is our taste," she writes, adding that we "prefer food that tastes reliably the same each time we eat it." Mallet also plays consumer advocate. After visiting with a canny kibitzer at a fish market counter, she concludes that shrimp from Louisiana are "the best," while Tiger shrimps "taste of nothing." This willingness to engage, to do the digging, to find the right people to talk to, to ransack the memory so as to record and compare her distant and current tastes of foods is the hallmark of her text. It sizzles with little polemics about wild versus tame strawberries, wild versus farmed salmon, farmhouse versus factory cheeses, dry-aged versus wet-aged steak (the latter is stored and shipped in cryovac; try to find the former, she says, since the latter tastes tinny). Mallet muses about the disappearance of excellent sole and salmon: "There must be a philosophical reason for the saying that all good things come to an end. I just haven't found it." Too frequently, food books present recipes with little or no comment on the ingredients used. Mallet's directions for her occasional recipes, however, are intensely personal, clear, and immediately practical. The dishes themselves are a mix of the conventional and the weird: Sauce Verte (herbs stirred with mayo) on the one hand, and Parmesan Crème Brûlée with Black Pumpernickel on the other. She closes with a plug for buying provisions on the Internet; not one to worry about the cost of air freight and other punishing economies of scale when it comes to the food we eat, she calls the Web "the best place to order the greatest food." The contradiction of using thoroughly modern means to shop for artisanal goodies doesn't go unnoticed: "It isn't nature restoring balance in food, it is technology." --Ted Whittaker

don't go anywhere without it:
don't eat out or anywhere without this book .Last chance to eat is a guide to modern eating, controversial, funny and stuffed with the kind of information i wasn't quite sure i really wanted to know - until i read it.