Nora Ephron’s effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter’s back, and margarine’s been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, “I trust cows more than chemists.”
Any film (or book) that gets Americans psyched about cooking real food can only be a good thing, of course. But when Julie Powell hatched the Julie & Julia Project, latching on to Child’s old-school continental cuisine to lift her out of a dreary day job, she hitched her blogger bandwagon to a diet dominated by meat, eggs, and dairy.
Back in the day, that was OK: in Child’s era, phrases like “manure lagoon,” “gestation crate,” “battery cage,” or “bovine growth hormone” would have sounded even more foreign than “boeuf bourguignon” or “sauce béarnaise.”
But a half century or so later, I’m less excited about dishes that require preheating the oven to 350 degrees than I am about recipes for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million (ppm). That’s the level of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere that scientist James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree that we need to achieve to avert catastrophic climate change. We’re at nearly 390 ppm now.
We won’t get back to 350 on a diet of denial and duckfat; a better blueprint for eating green would be meals centered around foods grown through photosynthesis, not fossil fuels–i.e., fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains. But before you can say “Bittman, ” I’d like to nominate someone less well-known, but uniquely–and supremely–qualified to be this century’s Julia Child. Read More
