Books, Arts & Manners: Per Ardua ad Astra

One of the greatest changes I’ve seen during my lifetime concerns American attitudes toward food, drink, and health. (And, like everything else American, these changes will, before too long, affect the attitudes of the rest of the world.) Here in New York, at least, food and health have become sheer obsessions. People, even those who have other interests, will invariably talk about food, food, and food again, and what it does to them. “In” restaurants multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm; the average lifetime of such restaurants, as the owner of one told me, is two years or less, or the time it takes to get at least one’s investment back. Meanwhile, customers come not to eat, but to see and to be part of the scene, the same person told me, so why should owners bother unduly about the food—meaning, why bother at all? Food and health are to our time what sex and politics were to the Sixties. Small wonder that there is little time, if any, left for canoodling or for the wish to improve the world; however ill guided that wish may have been, at least it did consider somebody besides oneself.

I’m working on a menu cookbook. and have seen some 1,500 or so menus from restaurants all across the country. I was surprised to see that the true food manias—distinguished by exotic and frequently unsuitable food combinations, and by the desperate striving to be different, to the point of the outlandish—are basically New York and California phenomena. The big cities between the coasts all have their one, two, or several trendy eating places, but what most folks eat remains what it was before raspberry vinegar and nouvelle regional hit, although I agree that more fish and chicken are being consumed as compared to red meats. But what is different across the land is the physical getup of the menus. My, how splendid they have become, with lots of special categories, such as Lite Eating, Vitamin-Packed, and so on, to make you think you’re getting something more unusual than you really are.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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One of the greatest changes I’ve seen during my lifetime concerns American attitudes toward food, drink, and health. (And, like everything else American, these changes will, before too long, affect the attitudes of the rest of the world.) Here in New York, at least, food and health have become sheer obsessions. People, even those who have other interests, will invariably talk about food, food, and food again, and what it does to them. “In” restaurants multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm; the average lifetime of such restaurants, as the owner of one told me, is two years or less, or the time it takes to get at least one’s investment back. Meanwhile, customers come not to eat, but to see and to be part of the scene, the same person told me, so why should owners bother unduly about the food—meaning, why bother at all? Food and health are to our time what sex and politics were to the Sixties. Small wonder that there is little time, if any, left for canoodling or for the wish to improve the world; however ill guided that wish may have been, at least it did consider somebody besides oneself.

I’m working on a menu cookbook. and have seen some 1,500 or so menus from restaurants all across the country. I was surprised to see that the true food manias—distinguished by exotic and frequently unsuitable food combinations, and by the desperate striving to be different, to the point of the outlandish—are basically New York and California phenomena. The big cities between the coasts all have their one, two, or several trendy eating places, but what most folks eat remains what it was before raspberry vinegar and nouvelle regional hit, although I agree that more fish and chicken are being consumed as compared to red meats. But what is different across the land is the physical getup of the menus. My, how splendid they have become, with lots of special categories, such as Lite Eating, Vitamin-Packed, and so on, to make you think you’re getting something more unusual than you really are.