Much Depends on Dinner, Margaret Visser

Before Michael Pollen, before Eric Schlosser, Margaret Visser investigated the relationship between food, industry and our dinner table, and did so with wit, insight and simplicity. She has us imagine an 'everyday' meal of chicken, rice, corn, salt, butter, lettuce, olive oil and lemon juice, with ice cream for dessert, and then tells us the history, right up to present day industrialized production, of each item on the menu. When I say "present day," I mean 1986, before genetics entered the argument, but let's face it, the argument hasn't changed much in the last few decades: the people who made the last generation of technology, things like fertilizer and pesticides, are now into genetics anyway, so even the players are the same, and none of it takes any more consideration of flavour, nutrition, the environment or workplace safety than it did then. Anyway, this book isn't an indictment of the food industries, this is a book about dinner, about what we eat, how we get it, and how our choices affect the world; because in many ways we are what we eat.
     I got this copy when I was living in a Zen temple uptown that made most of its annual budget from two big rummage sales a year, and I confess I excused myself from the fifty cent cost penciled on the first page. I recognized the name of the author as someone I had known as a kid, so I picked it up and found it fascinating.
     I'm really torn about this one. Because I read it in the monastery, it carries along some waft of its chilled dawn silence and incense, and that is the kind of memory you keep things to preserve, so I'm holding on to her.
Score = +3 (5 released, 8 saved)