The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food [Hardcover]

Sallie Tisdale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2000

An award-winning essayist explores how our relationship to food reflects the ever-changing American identity.

"Sallie Tisdale takes subjects that in other hands might seem mundane or overdone and renders them unforgettable."--San Francisco Examiner

Few things in modern life have the power to shape our lives like food. It controls us as consumers, as social animals, as guilty creatures of appetite. And although we like to feel that our choices about eating are deliberate and rational, so many of our food decisions are dictated to us--by a culture that's more obsessed than ever with how we eat, by a food industry that tells us what we can and can't consume, and by our own unacknowledged food hang-ups.

With disarming clarity and insight, Tisdale urges us to examine both our public and private attitudes about food--as they define family life, ethnic identification, and everyday rituals of eating. And her lively anecdotes and uncanny sense of the relationship between food and personality reveal a distinctive food ideology. Through a mixture of history, sociology, recipe, and memoir, her book deftly pieces together the many contradictory impulses that create the modern American appetite.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sallie Tisdale explores her relationship to food in The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, never once leaving the reader out of the process. It may be her mother she writes about, struggling to get food on the table for three kids and a husband while also holding down a job, but everyone's mother lurks in the shadows just behind. To say The Best Thing I Ever Tasted is a book about food, however, is to miss the point. Food is simply the center of the vortex, the point from which Tisdale embarks on a journey of remembering and setting the forks straight on the table.

What is it to be a housewife in a Betty Crocker world? And what is a housewife, anyway? What is her work? Tisdale noodles around on these avenues, meandering through the past couple hundred years of American and European history, taking special note of the rise of "time-saving" refinements in life--the way vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens are often sold in terms of the time they will save the housewife, too often overlooking the fact that she is at work. Convenience is another theme--what are we giving away simply to have convenient food? And consistency is another--the consistency of experience in a chain of restaurants that keeps satisfied customers coming back for what amounts to no real experience to begin with.

There's a lot of history in here, like how white sugar and white flour were sold to the public as good, its immediate predecessor as bad. Tisdale lays bare the ways in which advertisers get the public to use products they don't really need and might not even want if they took the time to think about alternatives. She has read a lot of the primary texts on the subject (don't overlook the terrific bibliography) and has reassembled a lot of that basic information, adding her own unique insights and organizing principles. Much of The Best Thing I Ever Tasted reads like loosely assembled magazine essays masquerading as a cohesive book.

But the voice is there, the attitude, the Tisdale:

I try to buy fish from one of the few sustained fisheries left, and I look at the seafood counter and realize with a sinking feeling that most people don't care. Most people don't care where their food comes from, who grows, picks, catches, and prepares it. Life is hard; we can't track every unseen cost. We will eat the very last fish in the ocean. I know this. I believe this, and still I compromise. I buy time. I buy gratification. I rationalize. I deny. I turn away. I turn away.

You will find it difficult to turn away from Tisdale's ideas and explorations. As self-involved in bleak vision as she may become, she never leaves the reader's side. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

In this informal book-length essay, Tisdale (Talk Dirty to Me) examines food and our relationships with it. Tisdale's style is casual, yet never aimless; each chapter is a well-crafted part of the intensely thoughtful whole. Tisdale is specifically interested in Americans and their relationship to food: she discusses how eating habits change as immigrants become assimilated. She explicates clearly that cooking has remained "women's work" over the years and relates compelling stories of her mother's lackadaisical attitude toward cooking and the ways in which her own experiences both repeat and differ from those of her mother ("She was bound by routine; I'm bound by change"). Tisdale also explores whether processed foods help women (by freeing them from the drudgery of cooking from scratch) or hurt them (by eliminating a type of knowledge that previously had been handed down through generations). This book is peppered with recollections (Tisdale recently prepared homemade soup for her aging father, who informed her that he prefers the taste of the fat-free Cup-a-Soup) and facts ("People ate more meat and lard in 1839 than they did in 1939"). But in the end, Tisdale's forte lies in helping readers to see the big picture, in which she ties together history, folklore, personal anecdote and sharp analysis to show that we truly are what we eat. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (January 24, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221309
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221306
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,607,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Velveeta and Tofu, December 11, 2003

By 

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food (Hardcover)

Tisdale covers a lot of ground about the meaning of food. She touches on history, such as the first appearances of plates and utensils. But this is mostly about modern food history, specifically Tisdale's history, and by extension, our own.

Tisdale reminisces about the meals she had growing up, meat at every meal, recipes from the Betty Crocker Cookbook and Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book. She contrasts that with the food in her life now, as a Buddhist, organic, small-is-better, locally grown sort of person. On a whim, she makes her macrobiotic daughter a grilled Velveeta and white bread sandwich and is not really surprised when her daughter loves it.

Tisdale discusses fast food (she still makes the occasional, disappointing, trip to McDonald's), eating out, dieting, and supermarkets. In a particularly interesting chapter, she ruminates on what makes Martha Stewart tick, and marvels at the way Martha kept correcting Julia Child on a TV appearance together.

Many of the chapters in this book first appeared as magazine articles, and I look forward to more articles and books by Tisdale about food.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delicious book!, November 3, 2003

By 

tomatojane (Athens, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food (Paperback)

Like another reviewer here, I, too, first read the book and then the reviews. I was surprised to see that the book had only a three and one-half star average, as I found it to be a really thoughtful discussion of how we feel and think about food--a five-star read! Tisdale gives some really good historical insight into the evolution of our food culture and ideas. But, best of all for me, it was one of those books that had the ring of truth with my own psychological, physical, and emotional experiences of eating. Too often food writers come off as uppity and pretentious, even when they are trying hard not to be. Sallie Tisdale quite naturally does NOT have this problem. Like good food, Tisdale's writing is just rich enough to be delicious. Maybe it helps to be middle-aged and to have had some of the same eating experiences growing up as Tisdale had, and, maybe it's like another reviewer says--a person either loves or hates this book. (Another of my favorite books/authors is like that--people seem to love or hate Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's HIDDEN LIVES OF DOGS.)
Anyway, I really love Tisdale's writing style, so much so that I found myself reading aloud from this book last night to my husband, who thoroughly enjoyed the chapter I shared with him.
THE BEST THING I EVER TASTED is yummy!

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dreary and lonely, August 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food (Hardcover)

Instead of being a charming food memoir, Tisdale takes the reader on a dreary deathmarch through her own unending guilt over her abandonment of her glorious hippie co-op past. One gets the feeling that all of the lights in her emotional life have been dimmed by the overhanging cloud of her loneliness for those brown rice and tofu days. I wanted to stop half way through, but came upon one of the only nuggets of intriguing and insightful writing where she discusses her own relationship to food and dieting. Encouraged, I pressed on, but now wish I hadn't so that I could have been spared her assault on every cook from James Beard to Julia Child to anyone who might dare cook anything without spelt and unpasteurized Portland goat milk!