Gifts for Cooks: ‘Just Food’

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Where the food we eat comes from — how and where it was grown and sold and by whom — has become one of the hottest topics in the United States today. Lectures are given, books are written, documentaries are made. Yet somehow with all of that exposure, it’s hard not to feel like there’s something missing.

Maybe the word is “balance”. Here’s the deal: Food is not just an object of culinary fetish; sometimes it is, well, just food. And with a rapidly increasing global population, that’s something we really need to think about.

While I wholeheartedly agree that what industrial agriculture has done to the strawberry is pitiful (to say nothing of some of the things it has done to the environment), when we’re theorizing about cures, we need to be careful of the law of unintended consequences. After all, the goal of the last “Green Revolution” was feeding humanity, not creating berries that bounce. So before we go too far down the road to fixing the strawberries, it seems we ought to be very careful that we’re not also creating an even bigger problem.

Everyone who has read up on their Michael Pollan should also read James McWilliams’ “Just Food,” a passionate, informed take on the current food craze. Williams is a bit of an oddball: A recent fellow at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale, he’s a sometimes cranky vegetarian and an all-around contrarian. He delights in pointing out that a lot of what seems intuitively correct about food turns out not to be so. For example, he pulls out a study that found that it actually is far better energy-conservation-wise for the English to eat New Zealand lamb than lamb that is locally grown. (In addition to figuring the energy costs of the transportation, you also need to figure in the energy costs of production, and there’s a lot more cheap green grass in New Zealand than in Britain.)

It’s doubtful that anyone will agree with Williams straight down the line. He sometimes takes his contrariness to extremes. It seems to me to be missing the thread to criticize farmers market produce for sometimes being no different than that found in supermarkets — the point of farmers markets is that you have a choice between good and bad. But even when you disagree, Williams has challenged the accepted wisdom and given you something to think about. And that is something that sometimes seems to be in short supply these days.

“Just Food” by James E. McWilliams; Little, Brown; $25.99

— Russ Parsons