It would be silly to imagine that “no one” had written about food in quite the way I had wanted to do so, but I didn’t find the work that really spoke to me until I began my personal education in U.S. culinary history. Laura Shapiro, author of the current book club selection Perfection Salad; Leslie Brenner, whose 1999 American Appetite has been absolutely energizing me (we’re hopping on a call today to talk more about it); and Janet Theophano, who explored women’s cook and scrapbooks in Eat My Words are just a few of the culinary historians who have added so much to my understandings—and done so in ways that get into the narrative cracks of popular food media.

That is what culinary historians do, really: They fill in the gaps that food media makes. Media’s role is fulfilling capitalist content demands; it is by design incomplete and hyperbolic. (This doesn’t mean it’s worthless, of course: It tells immediate stories and provides an essential lay of the land.) While academic food studies is extremely important in its analyses, it’s locked up in databases and not written for a broad audience.

I have sought to work somewhere in the middle of these, but it’s funny—culinary history is a sort of thankless task that only bears out in the future, and really only intellectually.

I said and will continue to say about No Meat Required, that it was a book I wrote so that someone else could use it one day to build upon, so that I could point to people and books and ideas that I didn’t want lost to time, and especially not to narratives that would not look at veganism and vegetarianism with as much openness and earnestness. You might think these are the opposite of “objectivity,” but to me it means that I have respect for practices that are otherwise misunderstood and derided. The food media content landscape did not take these things seriously enough, so that it was always dazzled by lab meat or some new-fangled thing; I had to put an alternative—and to me, more true—perspective on paper. (The Kitchen Arts & Letters write-up of it does indeed conclude: “An insightful book which we suspect will be useful to future historians for the way it illuminates such a diversity of trends and interests.”)

As I read culinary history books from the last 50 years, I am able to understand things I otherwise would have no evidence for, no thread to follow. I’m often embarrassed (but maybe more so relieved!) to realize that understandings I had come to based on rudimentary research and analysis have been discussed repeatedly in books I can only get on eBay. Perfection Salad and Shapiro’s other great work of culinary history, Something From the Oven, brought to light so much that I was pasting together with incomplete understanding. So did Sweetness and Power. So, too, is American Appetite, which has shown me that so many trends broadly associated with the 2000s were, of course, already taking root in the 1980s.

Perfection Salad and Shapiro’s wry humor in all her work have actually made me want to keep doing food writing, because I have found that there’s a way to do so that isn’t either the media or studies model. It’s been especially important to me in how it takes domesticity and women seriously, but doesn’t let them off the hook: The “scientific cooks” of the late 19th century set us up for industrialization and a same-same food supply that we’ve been suffering the effects of ever since—gastronomically and ecologically.

The notion in the U.S. that nutrition must rule and pleasure is denied? It’s this Puritan ideal that Shapiro expounds upon. When I talk to university classes, I am often tasked with giving the reminder that the industrial food system wasn’t a natural occurrence; it didn’t “win” because big ag “efficiency” really feeds everyone—it certainly doesn’t, and certainly not “well”—and most often, communities of color have long been the biggest champions of growing and sharing their own food. Shapiro’s book provides a clear, sharp through line from which to add further critique and analysis.

She’s also been invaluable to my thinking around domesticity, appetite, and the cultural mandate to be “dainty” that I’ve never been able to embody. Perfection Salad is an essential text to food writing. 

I was writing this up and my inbox pinged with news of Shapiro’s next book: Big Appetites: Five Couples Who Dreamed Up a Revolution in Food. A sign!

I can’t wait to discuss the book tomorrow with folks at 2 p.m. EST on Zoom. To bring the history into contact with the present, if you have time, definitely read this New York Times Magazine piece “The Proponents of ‘Dark Nutrition’ Think Everything You Know About Food Is Wrong” (hat tip to Alice Driver—if anyone wants to fund a podcast about meat, let us know).

Feel free to attend even if you haven’t read or finished the book but want to talk about food culture. The button below should be visible to paid subscribers, and it will open up the room—I’ll also, as always, alert the Discord.