The Man Who Ate Everything

Dated but some essays are very amusing. I like his writing voice. Skip all concerning the health qualities of good and diet. And best enjoyed in small doses rather than all together.

If the book were half as long, it would be 5 stars. It was a collection of essays, with no narrative, which made it difficult to read almost 500 pages. Most essay collections are shorter, for good reason.

I don't understand this book. The premise seemed to be that the author had lots of different foods that he would not eat (kimchi, Greek food, etc.) and he decided he didn't want to live that way anymore. He didn't want to be someone whose eating phobias made it difficult for his dining companions, like vegans or those insufferable people who choose to go gluten free. So he basically gets over it. He says that it takes between 8 and 10 exposures to a new food for a child to embrace it, and that it took basically that same amount of exposure to the foods he hated for him to get over those phobias. All this in the introduction to the book. The rest of the book is a snooze fest. The first chapter is about making bread, and he does diary entries for the journey he took in trying to make his own delicious bread. This could have been interesting, but it was not. After that I skipped ahead to a random page and skimmed it to see if the book got better. The page was simply a bullet-point list of ketchup brands, their prices, and a single sentence of review of the product. I turned ahead a page, then two, and found that he literally was listing his personal reviews of 35 different ketchups. Is this a joke? I cannot tell you how little of a shit I give about ketchup brand reviews.

In sum, it seems that someone has forgotten to tell this author that books are supposed to be interesting. Avoid.

The entire time I was growing up, my feminist lawyer mother had a subscription to Vogue. I can't completely explain it myself, but woman does love her shoes. Anyway, I spent elementary school reading Steingarten articles for the mag, where he is still the food columnist. My conclusion for this book is that he is probably best in small doses. Like, monthly doses. But, if you've never read any of his stuff before, I'd check this out in one-essay-at-a-time stints. Steingarten is obviously brilliant (like, went to Harvard Law brilliant, got an order of French merit for his writing on French cuisine brilliant), and very funny (particularly when reporting on his wife's reactions to his crazy food experiments; when his quest for the perfect french fry left their NYC loft full of 100 pounds of potatoes and three deep-fryers, she muttered while walking past his mess, “Smile and the world smiles with you. Fry and you fry alone.”). And I think he's at his best when he convincingly argues that pretty much every dietitian and nutritionist ever wants to suck all the fun out of eating (he is side-splitting when talking about the toxic potential of salads), and champions instead for everything in moderation and that pleasure in the preparation and consumption of food is a critical part of true health. I think it's just that over a 300-page span, each individual essay gets lost, and the cleverness, which is definitely there in each stand-alone essay, starts to seem twee from over-crowding. If I could do it again, I'd use the index to make this the funniest reference book I've ever read–or hope to read–about food.