Smithsonian.com

Frank Bruni, who recently stepped down from what is quite possibly the world’s best job–the New York Times restaurant critic–was in town Tuesday night to discuss his new memoir, “Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.”

And as if he didn’t already provide enough star power to pack out Politics & Prose (the independent bookstore hosting his appearance), he was joined by a famous local friend, NYT columnist Maureen Dowd. Although she called herself a “Popeyes Chicken girl” and said she hates fancy restaurants, she had fond memories of dining out often with Bruni on assignment. (He typically dined in groups of four to get a broader sense of the menu, he said, and visited places at least three times before reviewing them.)

The two quipped and quibbled like the best of talk-show hosts, bantering about everything from presidential appetites to Sarah Jessica Parker’s hatred for parsley, but there were some serious moments as well. After all, the book is not only about how Bruni fell in love with food, it’s about his lifelong struggle with various eating disorders: bulimia, laxatives, binging and fasting, fad diets, self-punishing bouts of intense exercise, amphetamines…he’s tried it all to get or stay thinner.

He’s tried living on bread alone (”until I started to feel dizzy”); living on protein alone (which proved unsustainable in the face of Grandma’s fried dough); and living on pre-cooked supermarket chicken (his car became “a little chicken graveyard” of bones and shinkwrap, to the horror of coworkers who rode with him). He’s even cooked and eaten entire meals while sleepwalking! His exploits included “sleep-toasting, sleep-slicing, sleep-chopping, and sleep-broiling,” he writes, but “never branched out to sleep-cleaning,” which is the only reason he figured out this bizarre behavior was happening in the night.

I made my way through the first several chapters of the book just waiting for the event to begin (they arrived late, Dowd explained in a choked-up voice, because she’d been finishing an emotional column about her late colleague, William Safire). Bruni’s writing is certainly frank; the vivid descriptions of his bulimic tactics make me grimace. Overall, though, his wry, likeable voice makes up for the “ick” factor in the book. Anyone who has ever struggled with their own body image can certainly relate on some level–in other words, about 99 percent of us.

Politico has pictures of the event.

Torchon of foie gras, courtesy Flickr user ulterior epicure

Some people consider foie gras, the fattened liver of a duck or goose, one of the finest gourmet pleasures available. Others consider it the product of intolerable animal cruelty because of the way it’s made—by force-feeding the bird through a tube until its liver grows to several times its natural size, using a centuries-old process called gavage.

The debate over foie gras in the United States (where consumption is a fraction of what it is in France) blew up a few years ago, after the acclaimed Chicago chef Charlie Trotter offhandedly mentioned to a journalist that he had stopped serving the ingredient because he had decided it was cruel. The controversy that followed, including anti–foie gras legislation passed in California and Chicago (where it was eventually repealed), and a no-holds-barred campaign by animal rights activists, is detailed in the new book by Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro, The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World’s Fiercest Food Fight.

I just finished reading the book, which took me longer than usual. Somehow, descriptions of force feeding and animals having their festering sores gnawed on by rats (as captured in an infamous, and gruesome, scene in an anti-foie gras video) didn’t make for the most pleasant reading, as thought-provoking as the subject was. Caro thoroughly, and even-handedly, explored all aspects of the issue, visiting foie gras–producing farms in the United States and France, talking to animal rights activists, and sampling enough of the product in question to throw his cholesterol out of whack.

Surprisingly, despite the distastefulness of some of the descriptions and my personal squeamishness about meat in general, the book left me with slightly better image of foie gras—at least as it’s produced on the handful of farms in the United States—than before.

The closest I’ve ever come to eating the stuff was my grandmother’s chopped liver, which I’m sure is not very close at all. My sole face-to-foie encounter was at the Montreal restaurant Au Pied du Cochon, a carnivore’s pleasure palace that my vegetarian-leaning friends and I were dragged to by the foodie in the crowd. He ordered, in addition to an appetizer of poutine (more about that another day), a gargantuan dish containing several stuffed pigs’ feet, each topped with cutlet-sized lobes of foie gras and a rich-looking gravy. At the end of this self-inflicted gavage, he could barely breathe or walk, though he professed to have enjoyed it.

I still don’t have any interest in tasting foie gras myself. But, after reading the book, I’m also not convinced that methods used to make American foie gras, including by the largest producer, New York’s Hudson Valley Foie Gras, are any crueler than other forms of farm-raised meat. Unlike on some Canadian and French farms, the ducks in this country are kept in group pens rather than individual cages during the 3- to 4-week gavage period, and, from the evidence Caro presents, the force-feeding doesn’t seem to harm the birds or cause them terrible distress.

Foie gras is an easy target for criticism, but if you’re going to ban it you might as well ban all farm-raised meat. Despite a growing public belief in the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat (and an awareness of the poor treatment of animals on many factory farms), though, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Can you name a substance that comes from the earth, is refined by heat, and is used daily by millions of people worldwide? Hint: It’s a black liquid.

Nope, not oil. Try what is often called the world’s second-most valuable commodity*—coffee.

Coffee beans, roasted and unroasted (center), courtesy Flickr user cgfan

Collectively, we drink four billion cups of coffee a year, enough to fill Yankee Stadium 85 times, according to Jonathan Silvertown’s book An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds. Silvertown calls coffee beans “the world’s most prized seeds,” and it makes me smile to consider that in that respect, we’re not much different than squirrels or birds, scurrying around in search of seeds to fuel our daily existence.

The appeal of this particular seed for most of us, of course, is caffeine. Sure, I enjoy the taste and aroma of coffee as well, but if I’m honest, that’s not my primary motivation—I drink coffee to wake up (or stay awake). It’s startling to realize that I’m basically drinking poison, from the coffee plant’s perspective:

Caffeine is an all-purpose defensive compound that is poisonous to insects, inhibits the growth of bacteria and fungi, [and] kills slugs and snails,” Silvertown writes. But in human brains, caffeine inhibits something else—a substance called adenosine.

Adenosine acts like a brake on the firing of neurons,” he explains. “So when caffeine gets in the way of this brake, the human machine speeds up.” (And as we learned earlier this year, too much caffeine may drive you crazy.)

Humans have been messing with their own brakes for a long time, apparently. A colleague just showed me a paper he found while perusing an online archive. It’s from an 1879 edition of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and has the horrifyingly antiquated title “Ethnological Hints Afforded by the Stimulants in Use Among Savages and Among the Ancients.”

The author, a pompous (and blatantly racist) chap named A.W. Buckland, points out that pretty much all civilizations known at that time had “found means of manufacturing some sort of stimulating drink” which often “produce an agreeable exhilaration, and an increase of strength and courage.”

Hmm. In other words, coffee is a mark of progress and higher intelligence?

Well, it seems I’ve already accomplished a lot today.

*This “second-most valuable” detail is frequently published by reputable sources, but as a recent article by Mark Pendergrast points out, this may be erroneous. Coffee is definitely a leading agricultural export in most developing countries, but its ranking depends on what factors you include in calculation. Statistics are rarely simple!

Courtesy Flickr user JotoLo02

It’s August, which means many of you lucky bums beloved readers are off lounging in beach chairs and hammocks and such. In case all the actual eating and drinking that usually comes with vacation isn’t enough to satisfy your appetite, here are some good food-themed books to digest.

We’ve written about all of these in recent months; you can click on the highlighted links to revisit those posts. Just for fun (and because I liked this little game when my friends played it on Facebook), I’ll also give you a random excerpt from each book—whatever happens to be the second full sentence on page 22.

1. The Hamburger, by Josh Ozersky, Caravan Books, 2008.

“The day of the dirty, greasy hamburger is past.”

2. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman, Simon & Schuster, 2009.

“Raising more animals than your family could use was always a way to augment the family income; but it was to feed an increasingly urban population in the twentieth century that farmers started raising chickens for meat as well as eggs, and moved cattle and pigs into feedlots, the progenitors of the modern confined and feeding operations (CAFOs).”

3. The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, by Maria Balinska, Yale University Press, 2008.

“For the Jewish community the pull of pastures new was enhanced by the push of the increasing precariousness of life in Germany and France.”

4. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, 2009.

“Their foods were the typical products of modern farming—fruits, seeds, and vegetables all selected to be as delicious as possible.”

5. Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Island Press, 2009.

“The enduring image of a goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain has been used since the time of the ancient Greeks and up through Vavilov’s era and our own to signify abundance, prosperity, and food security.”

6. Potato: A Brief History of the Propitious Esculent, by John Reader, Yale University Press, 2008.

“Among cereals, for instance, the edible grain amounts to only about one-third of the mature plant’s weight, while edible tubers comprise more than three-quarters of the potato plant.”

7. The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies, by Barry Foy, Frogchart Press, 2009.

“Biscuit: Many scholars trace the origin of the popular phrase: ‘Mmmm…biscuits!’ to this item.”

8. Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, by Jennifer P. Mathews, University of Arizona Press, 2009.

“Older trees are easily identified by the diagonal scars that run the length of their trunks indicating that the tree was tapped for latex.”

9. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the American Appetite, by David Kessler, Rodale Books, 2009.

“Science seemed to suggest it [being fat] was my destiny.”

10. The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky, Riverhead Hardcover, 2009.

“It is this perspective that gives the work the feeling of a time capsule, a preserved glimpse of America in the early 1940s.”

What food books have you read lately? Share your own random excerpts—say, the third line of page 33—in the comments field.

Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Courtesy of Flickr user daveblume

Perhaps no world leader’s eating habits have been more scrutinized than Barack Obama’s. The guy can’t bring home a bag of burgers without making the evening news.

But imagine having an entire book written about what you ate throughout your life. That’s what food writer Anna Trapido has done with Hunger for Freedom: the Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela.

At first, it sounds a little odd to write about something as seemingly trivial as food in relation to a hero and Nobel Laureate such as Mandela, who spent years as a political prisoner for fighting against apartheid in South Africa. But, as Trapido explains, “We all reveal our most elementary social, economic and emotional truths in the ways that we cook, eat and serve food. So why not ask those who changed the world what they were eating while they did it?”

Trapido’s “gastro-political biography” traces Mandela’s life, starting with early reminiscences about the simple foods of his Mvezo birthplace, such as the corn porridge called umphokoqo. She explores how apartheid and racial discrimination was manifested in what South African blacks ate. ”In the 1950s,” she writes, “parties given by anti-apartheid activists saw drinks served in very short tots so as to ensure that if the police raided the event black people would not be found engaged in the illegal act of consuming alcohol…. The racially discriminatory food conditions for prisoners on Robben Island and the prisoners’ fights to improve their diet mirrored those of their broader struggle.”

The book includes recipes, such as for the chicken curry smuggled in to Mandela in prison, where blacks were given smaller and lower-quality rations than prisoners of other colors. There are also happier dishes, such as the hearty casserole that was the first meal Mandela ate as a free man, after he was released from prison in 1990, and the sweet koeksisters, an Afrikaans cake, served to him in reconciliation by the widow of one of the architects of apartheid.

Trapido writes, “Mandela media coverage has a somewhat saccharine tendency to deify South Africa’s most famous son. Asking what he had for lunch restores humanity to a living legend.”

It makes me wonder, what other contemporary or historical figures are deserving of a gastro-biography? Any suggestions?