Real Food Fake Food

Argh. Right up my alley, but frustratingly shallow.

This is a non-fiction overview of the current state of Fake Food. In the early pandemic, I - like many other privileged, low-risk liberals - went deep into glamour homesteading mode. I made my own yogurt. Things like that. Anyway, as I went deep into gourmet food-land, I began to realize that more and more of the food items I had taken for granted as being Real were, in fact, Fake - that is, heavily processed and often containing very little of the things that they said they were. Some examples include maple syrup, vanilla, chocolate, olive oil, most fish, yogurt (!). In addition to that, by random chance that I'm Italian and had spent some years living in Italy and had a transformative moment when I moved from Italy to the US and tried to buy canned beans (BOY WAS THAT DIFFICULT), I also have spicy thoughts and built-in anger about the fakeness of “Parmesan”, “prosciutto”, and basically every other “Italian food” that is sold in the US.

So I was like the #1 super ideal market for this book. And, in many ways, it satisfied me by reassuring me that, yes, there is a Fake Food epidemic and yes, it's mostly in the US and the US's fault. And capitalism's fault. For the moneyed gourmand, the author, Olmsted, includes a “where to buy the real thing” guide at the end of each chapter. That's how I learned about e.g. Zingerman's, which supplies pricey olive oil that they say is real and - after I did a blind taste test - certainly tasted better/realer (?).

BUT. Here's how the book left me unsatisfied. A couple things:

- First, I didn't care for the tone, which was good ol' boy dad jokes. He was trying to connect with the reader and, just for me at least, it fell flat and left me more alienated than connected. Oh well. Tomayto tomahto.
- Second, the vast majority of his examples of “faked” food are European - and the narrative is very much about the EU laws protecting “terroire” products like Champagne or parmigiano vs. US industrial food production wanting to sell you yellow fizz and Kraft saw dust, riding the coattails of well-known high-quality foods. That's all fine and well and I am, in some part, quite curious about how exactly the EU went all-in on protecting its food. (Eating real food in the EU - especially Italy - is much, MUCH MUCH easier and taken for granted and boy do I miss it.) His one non-EU example is Kobe beef from Japan (we have a chapter on this), and some mentions of stuff like Colombian coffee. But that's it. And I was like, well, that's very interesting. Where's the rest of the world? If I may flex my worldliness for a moment: there are some glorious food products from non-EU places that are, I guess, not exported to the US market in the same volumes, and not for the same per-unit price, so they don't get copied? I'm thinking things like South Indian idli, Keralan appam, Ghanaian fufu (or jollof rice, or red-red!). I guess all of these are RECIPES, not terroire products - Olmsted makes an important differentiation there, arguing that that's what should be protected: the land + process of making something like parmigiano. I dunno. Can you find good appam in the US? (If so, plz tell me.)

Oh yes, and this was another book where I recommitted to really, for real not eating fish anymore. That market is just a nightmare.