Customer Reviews

Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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!

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!

I have been reading her books for years, but this time she has outdone herself. This is at once incisive social commentary about food and famine, asceticism and dieting, an elegy for a way of eating (and being) that is gone (and may never have been), and a memoir of her family's (especially that of her mother) history that continues to sadden her.

About The Zone diet, she says, "What he [Barry Sears] does is tell his readers again and again...how to get the body we evolved to protect ourselves from having--that lean, mean, hungry look." You should read this book.

After reading the first few chapters I told my mother about this wonderful book I was reading, and said I'd pass it along once I was done. I later realized that she would probably feel put on the defensive by my recommendation and wouldn't enjoy the book at all.

Why? Because Tisdale asks her readers to reflect upon things many Americans don't want to think about. That the decision about what to put on (or leave off) the table for dinner might be in any way influenced by advertising, social history or the government isn't something my mother really wants to consider.

I have always counted on Tisdale to make me think about everyday life differently, and this book is no exception. I found it to be well researched and a thoroughly enjoyable read. I believe it would be great for people interested in gender studies, American studies and sociology.

I read the book, then I read the reviews, and was amazed at how contatradictary they are: Either you hate this book or you love it. Tisdale asks us to examine our appetites, and that makes some folks very touchy-- so touchy they didn't even finish the book! I think that's a shame. I found it well-researched, well-reasoned and well-written.

Tisdale here uses humor, history and her own insights to explain the lust for food and flavors, examining how this instinct controls eating conception habits and choices. From the extravagance of medieval feasts to modern culinary trends and including the publishing industry's winners, Best Thing I Ever Tasted is lively, fun and informative.

This is the first book I have read by Tisdale, but it will not be the last. Despite flaws, Tisdale's book contains passages, sentences, that stopped me dead because they were profound insights. In her introduction, she captured a moment of small despair and ennui -- the kind of moment that haunts you from childhood -- and identified its context and revealed at least one meaning. This is rare. I was happy to continue to find similar gems throughout the book.

As to the harsher critics' comments: I agree that the book would benefit from another edit, but that is not a fatal flaw. I agree that this is much more of a group of essays than one cohesive work; however, I think that this is a rather doctrinaire criticism, and the structure of loosely related essays was not at all troubling to me. I agree that Tisdale leaves the reader with questions rather than answers. I'm not quite sure why that is a problem -- I welcome writers (artists, actors, philosophers, etc.) who are willing to shed light on the shades of grey, rather than explain to us why their "black" is preferable to someone else's "white." I tend to think of such work as provocative and demanding. I also tend to think that it is a rather appropriate tone to take with the subject -- perhaps it's not as easy to recognize and appreciate as a Happy Meal, and perhaps that's part of the point. It is a somewhat academic book -- but it's readable and approachable. For example, I think Tisdale likely has, through this book, instilled core theories of semiology in people who would otherwise never encounter them, and she does so gently, in plain English, long before she ever mentions the name of Roland Barthes.

Perfection is far too much to ask of anyone. This is a lovely book, provocative and interesting, in which the writer avoids self-indulgence, whining, proselytizing, or placing herself beyond reproach.

Ms Tisdale has written for us a most sensitive, intelligent and well researched personal account of her relation to food in our present society. With so many others who have come to see the hate/love relationship we have towards what should be a high point of daily life, she has touched upon the delights that can be had from a well thought-out meal without torturing ourselves about the high pollution of pre-prepared foods nor about the amount of calories, fats or additives that each 'new' scientific discovery tells us to be aware of. One would almost get the feeling that Ms Tisdale tells us: 'dare to live'. I highly recommend this book for lifting up your 'hunger' spirits and I have bought several copies for friends. PS The averse reactions of this wonderfully warm and loving book speak for themselves as obviously Ms Tisdale gets often too close for comfort.

Tisdale has always written from the heart informed with an eagle's eye view of whatever subject she focuses on. Food just happens to be the latest target. There is a lovely seduction in reading her prose, whether she's writing about the milling process and its evocation of "whiteness" to her nostalgic recollections of her mother's venture into the brave new world of food processing. The blurring of regions, globally and nationally, is something we take for granted and her commentary on the inevitable effect it has, homogenization, is keen and precise. She writes with wisdom and insight and I've read almost everything she's ever written. She just keeps getting better with time.