Writers about the important questions of gastronomy

There are, of course, diverse and good reasons to write about food, from aesthetic pleasures to consumer advocacy. Many books in which food is the central subject have had an extraordinary impact on the way we think about food, and our lives–Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, of course, but also books by writers such as Paul Greenberg, Tracie McMillan, Mark Kurlansky, Barry Estabrook, Rowan Jacobsen (there are now too many to cite) that explore how our world is changed by the way we grow, distribute, buy, and cook food.

Food writer Monica Bhide posed this question–does food writing matter?–on her blog, and I was heartened to see many smart responses from writers. Chief among the commenters was journalist and author Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (in which she writes, “I cook to comprehend a place I’ve landed in”). In response to Bhide’s question, Cizadlo simply quoted George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier, a book about class structure in 1930s England:

“I think it could plausibly be argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at the end of the middle ages, and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners.”