The Man Who Ate Everything

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.