Jeffrey Steingarten - The Man Who Ate Everything

Whatever hes scrutinizingand no sardine is safethis is a superb, omnivorous collection from an obvious man of taste.

Entertainment Weekly

Obsessional, witty and authoritative brisk and self-mocking unrivaled in the completeness of its basic research.

Wall Street Journal

The man is a delightful writer.

USA Today

This appealing collection of Steingartens writing is full of style.

Saveur Fare

What elevates The Man Who Ate Everything above traditional food writing is the authors innate understanding that eating is tantamount to living, and if one is to do it at all, one should do it well.

New York Magazine

Informative yet hilarious this book serves up generous helpings of laughter.

Publishers Weekly

Magnificent recommended for popular cookery collections.

Library Journal

Relish this Steingartens evident erudition in food science and lore range broadly over numerous food-related topics.

Booklist

It Mustve Been Something I Ate

Jeffrey Steingarten

Jeffrey Steingarten trained to become a food writer at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Lampoon. For the past eight years he has been the internationally feared and acclaimed food critic of Vogue magazine. Recently he has also become the food correspondent for the on-line magazine Slate. For essays in this collection, Mr. Steingarten has won countless awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. On Bastille Day, 1994, the French Republic made him a Chevalier in the Order of Merit for his writing on French gastronomy. As the man who ate everything, Chevalier Steingarten has no favorite food, color, or song. His preferred eating destinations, however, are Memphis, Paris, Alba, Chengduand his loft in New York City.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1998

Copyright 1997 by Jeffrey Steingarten
Illustrations copyright 1997 by Karin Koetschmann

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

Most of the pieces in this collection have appeared, in somewhat different form, in Vogue. Several others first appeared in HG, and one appeared in Slate.

Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found on .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Steingarten, Jeffrey.
The man who ate everything : and other gastronomic feats, disputes, and pleasurable pursuits / by Jeffrey Steingarten.
1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79782-7
1. Gastronomyhumor. 2. Foodhumor. I. Title.
TX631.S74 1997
641.0130207dc21 97-2815

Author photograph Hiro

Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

For Caron, Anna, and Michael

My first impulse was to fall upon the cook, wrote Edmondo de Amicis, a nineteenth-century traveler to Morocco. In an instant I understood perfectly how a race who ate such food must necessarily believe in another God and hold essentially different views of human life from our own. There was a suggestion of soap, wax, pomatum, of unguents, dyes, cosmetics; of everything, in short, most unsuited to enter a human mouth.

This is precisely how I felt about a whole range of foods, particularly desserts in Indian restaurants, until 1989, the year that I, then a lawyer, was appointed food critic of Vogue magazine. As I considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew morose. For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime. I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness. At the time I was friendly with a respected and powerful editor of cookbooks who grew so nauseated by the flavor of cilantro that she brought a pair of tweezers to Mexican and Indian restaurants and pinched out every last scrap of it before she would take a bite. Imagine the dozens of potential Julia Childs and M. F. K. Fishers whose books she peevishly rejected, whose careers she snuffed in their infancy! I vowed not to follow in her footsteps.

Suddenly, intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings, struck me as the most serious of all personal limitations. That very day I sketched out a Six-Step Program to liberate my palate and my soul. No smells or tastes are innately repulsive, I assured myself, and whats learned can be forgot.

STEP ONE was to compose an annotated list.

My Food Phobias

1. Foods I wouldnt touch even if I were starving on a desert island:

None, except maybe insects. Many cultures find insects highly nutritious and love their crunchy texture. The pre-Hispanic Aztecs roasted worms in a variety of ways and made pressed caviar from mosquito eggs. This proves that no innate human programming keeps me from eating them, too. Objectively, I must look as foolish as those Kalahari Bushmen who face famine every few years because they refuse to eat three-quarters of the 223 animal species around them. I will deal with this phobia when I have polished off the easy ones.

2. Foods I wouldnt touch even if I were starving on a desert island until absolutely everything else runs out:

Kimchi, the national pickle of Korea. Cabbage, ginger, garlic, and red peppersI love them all, but not when they are fermented together for many months to become kimchi. Nearly forty-one million South Koreans eat kimchi three times a day. They say kimchi instead of cheese when someone is taking their picture. I say, Hold the kimchi.

Anything featuring dill. What could be more benign than dill?

Swordfish. This is a favorite among the feed-to-succeed set, who like it grilled to the consistency of running shoes and believe it is good for them. A friend of mine eats swordfish five times a week and denies that he has any food phobias. Whos kidding whom? Returning obsessively to a few foods is the same as being phobic toward all the rest. This may explain the Comfort Food Craze. But the goal of the arts, culinary or otherwise, is not to increase our comfort. That is the goal of an easy chair.