On becoming a Calvinist

Reading Calvin Trillin’s delightful and mouthwatering paean to all things gustatory, “Alice, Let’s Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Reader” left me wondering if his wife and the title’s namesake, Alice Stewart Trillin (whom he humorously laments limited their family to merely three meals a day—but never missed dessert) had ever met the other Alice, Alice Waters.

The Alice Waters, who, according to some food historians, single-handedly invented modern American cuisine in Berkeley California, circa 1971. In most circles, this is considered a good thing, because after Alice corralled French food, subsequently making things like pistou and arugula part of every aspiring gourmand’s vernacular, good things started to happen. Like, a few hundred thousand restaurants and cookbooks spawned, small family farms reinvigorated, and—why stop now—on the sixth day, Alice invented the Food Channel.

No, before Alice there really wasn’t much left to eat in America the Beautiful besides Captain Crunch, frozen waffles (inexplicably named Eggos) and this thing called a Big Mac. OK, there was corn on the cob and milk. But not much else was fresh and wholesome. It had been taken away by the post 1950s industrial high that came from winning the war and reinventing the wheels of commerce so that it all rolled straight to the garage on Easy Street in the new suburbia, on roads made of golden grain grown with not only the goddess, but scientists, chemists and a helping hand from a man named Diesel.
(And now, a moment of silence and reflection on what life would be like without organic foods, produce isles larger than a small airport concourse and heritage breeding of farm animals may now be observed… )

So, certainly, Alice Waters is deserving of the many accolades and awards she has received, but is it true that by 1970, America had been taken over by Jiffy Pop popcorn and the Pillsbury Doughboy? Not according to Trillin.

Reissued this year, “Alice, Let’s Eat” is considered a food essay classic, consisting of a series of vignettes and anecdotes published in The New Yorker from 1973 to 1976, and compiled originally in book form in 1978.

Trillin giggles and regales with travel and food memories, searching out the best each region offers—from barbecued mutton in Kentucky (as a flimsy excuse to seek out illegal country hams in a town called Horse Cave) or, pre-Federal Express, air freighting crawfish pies from New Orleans to Manhattan—all with his beloved wife playing the straight gal to his food-obsessed clown bent on crazy culinary adventures. The musings themselves are entertaining—especially if you would gladly spend the better part of your vacation sussing out the perfect taco while your wife lays on the beach—or, in Trillin’s case, obsessing over dinner on Martinique, then gently cajoling his wife from the beach with the phrase that became the book’s title, “Alice, let’s eat.”

The book has aged well and, with the sharp focus of hindsight, is at times interestingly prophetic. He does gas a bit regarding environmentalists “going on about our dependence on electricity” and “mad-dog” vegetarian schoolmates corrupting his children, which can sound a bit provincial taken out of context, but the barbs are in good spirited jest. By far the most compelling portions of the book are the pearls that lie in the food yearnings and descriptions. Trillin then uses these stops to make wry comment on the state of the culinary union.

There is one soliloquy regarding the diligence and passion needed to make great fried chicken and mourning joints long (even in 1975) closed. The author then half-jokingly chides what he calls the “vertical integration of the chicken industry by which one mass producer controls everything from hatching to marketing, keeping strict control on tastelessness.”

In another chapter he makes augury observations of the burgeoning ubiquity of fast food outlets and subsequently coins its opposite, Slow Food, (the name now taken by an organization founded in 1989 to preserve cultural cuisines throughout the world). Likewise, his reference to “franchisers and décor mongers” beating the culinary landscape into one homogenized lump of Super Americas serving flat pop in paper cups coast to coast seems strangely apropos.

Not to let such matters become the too-heavy anchor, Trillin’s trademark gentle humor buoys such gloomy and misty nostalgia. In fact, it is now known that his wife, who passed away in 2001, was gravely ill during the writing period for these essays, yet nowhere is there a trace of bitterness—perhaps that is the real joy of reading Calvin Trillin. Perhaps knowing that makes the best line from the book, “Thank God for capacity.”