Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World [Hardcover]

Gina Mallet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2004

A witty and vividly remembered culinary memoir about how eating once was, and still can be, a joy.

Food has never been more exalted as part of a lifestyle, yet fewer and fewer people really know what good food is. Drawing on enough culinary experiences to fill several lifetimes, Gina Mallet's irreverent memoir combines recollections of meals and their milieus with recipes and tasting tips. In loving detail, Last Chance to Eat muses on the fates of foods that were once the stuff of feasts: light, fluffy eggs; rich cheeses; fresh meat; garden vegetables; and fish just hauled ashore. Mallet's gastronomic adventures appeal to any palate: from finding the perfect grilled cheese ("as delicate tasting as any Escoffier recipe") to combing the bustling food department at postwar Harrod's for the makings of "an Elizabeth David meal." The search for taste often takes her far from the beaten path—to an underground "chevaline" restaurant serving horsemeat steaks and to purveyors of contraband Epoisses, for instance—but the journey is always a delight.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Being a gourmet isn't simply about ferreting out the best victuals; it's also about luxuriating in good food the way others might stroke a new mink coat. Toronto writer Mallet is one such epicure. In this combination of memoir and essay, she balances remembrances of growing up in wartime England with zesty opinions on various foodstuffs ("I don't consider cod a fish at all," she writes. "It's like eating twenty-dollar bills"). Mallet opines that in an era of Big Macs and a dizzying array of snack foods, people don't know what they're missing. Rather than delight in a few gulps of richly flavored raw milk, she laments, consumers today simply go for quantity over quality. Readers of this work will know better, however, since Mallet goes beyond describing comestible ecstasy and digs deep into topics like cheese, beef and fish. Like an excellent dinner guest, Mallet lets her thoughts roam freely, yet always with focus and a dose of intriguing fact. In writing about kitchen gardens, for example, she begins with the loss of her mother's vegetables and herbs from an errant German bomb that destroyed land and greenhouses alike. From there, she chats about Versailles, organic farming and supermarkets. This breadth of insight, mixed with Mallet's childhood memories, makes for a tasty treat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This gourmand's polemic cum memoir may have an unoriginal premise—that cuisine is being ruined by the demise of the local producer, the spread of bland, chemically altered ingredients, and the influence of hysterical dietary fatwas—but Mallet's impatient scorn for anyone standing between her and the next scrumptious morsel is engaging. At times, it's easy to lose track of whether she's railing against the F.D.A., the food industry, nutritionists, environmentalists, or all of them, but her basic dictum is simple: taste rules. Mallet's strength lies in the sensual evocation of food; even a vegetarian might find pleasure in her rhapsody over the perfect steak. She saves her greatest encomiums for earthy, mammalian flavors that reflect their pastoral origins. An artisanal butter is a "six-ounce roll of golden bliss that melts on the tongue and warms the mouth with a hot, sexy, animal taste."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (August 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058417
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058413
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #687,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging mix of memoir, history, and polemic. Recommended, November 4, 2004

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World (Hardcover)

`Last Chance to Eat' by Toronto culinary journalist Gina Mallet is an uncommon mix of memoir, culinary history, and polemic against the march of agribusiness and the resulting loss of important artisinal foods in the name of hygiene, often masking the interests of big businesses. It's an odd mix of Ruth Reichl's memoirs with Eric Schlosser's `Fast Food Nation' and Mort Rosenbloom's `A Goose in Toulouse'.

First of all, the book is very engaging to read. Like Reichl, the author has had an interesting family and life, so her childhood stories are entertaining.

Then, the book covers the history of several major food sources. These stories often amaze me when they show how recent (or how old) many major food developments have been. One interesting story is the breeding of beef cattle to yield an animal that would reach full market size in the shortest time. This is not a 20th century agribusiness development. It was done in the early 18th century in Scotland, before the American Revolution. A parallel development was the breeding of a cow that will produce a lot of milk. This story is directly connected to endangering a classic artisinal product, Normandy butter, produced from cows that give a very high butter fat milk. Unfortunately, these cows produce a very low volume of milk, so they are not profitable except to produce a high priced product.

Finally, it pokes its nose into corners of international food business in politics that most people probably don't even know exist. Most food channel junkies know about the wards against importing raw milk products into the United States. The current often ignored law limits import of raw milk cheeses to those that have been aged for at least 60 days. While there is bootleg cheese importing and small family run raw milk cheese operations in the united states which violate this regulation, the prospect which is not well known is that there is an interest in changing the ban to prohibit all raw milk cheeses. I felt a distinct jolt when the author stated that that would ban the import into the US of Parmesano-Reggiano! I felt a distinct discomfort in the pit of my stomach over that one.

The biggest surprise comes with the author's stories about the development of a food Codex that codifies how all food products are to be made worldwide. Although proceedings take place in Brussels, this is not just a European Union party. American representatives play a big part in the deliberations and the American reps are primarily representatives such as Kraft Foods employees who have a vested interest in putting down anything which will compete with American products.

Other stories are equally dismal, such as the deep drop in the egg business in the 1970s when the awareness of cholesterol dawned on us and superficial studies gave the egg a bad rap because its role in the good cholesterol / bad cholesterol picture was not well understood. In the same essay, the author repeats many of Eric Schlosser's muckraking descriptions of production henhouses. The author's egg story is leavened with a great tale of her family's attempt to raise chickens in food rationed England just after World War II.

Each of the five major essays on eggs, milk and cheese, beef, vegetable gardens, and fish combine personal observations with current and historical trends in food business. My only reservation about Ms. Mallet's polemical content is that unlike Schlosser's writing and the famous Rachel Carson book `Silent Spring', both of which Ms. Mallet quote, all of her warnings and charges are undocumented except by secondary sources rather than primary sources with notes giving chapter and verse on the sources. I believe Ms. Mallet is on the side of the angels and nothing she says disagrees with anything I have read elsewhere, but please note that her essays are more informed opinion than they are research.

This is a highly engaging read for all foodies and anyone else who enjoys good memoir writing. Recommended.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tasty food porn, November 29, 2004

By 

Misty A. Smith (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World (Hardcover)

Last Chance to Eat is a great book for Alton Brown and Jeffrey Steingarten fans, for people who love good food but hate the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding so much of it today, and for people who read cookbooks like novels. The author, in the context of her own experiences growing up in several different countries with a well-to-do family that centered around food, takes five important foods (eggs, cheese, beef, fish, and tomatoes) and chronicles their tragic decline. She enriches her personal narrative with enough scientific information to keep any kitchen geek happy, and while some of it's stuff most foodies already know, some of it's pretty surprising--and depressing. While cheese is by and large my favorite of all the foods discussed, my favorite part of the book was about eggs, from the hundreds of delicious ways Escoffier used them in his cooking in the early 1900s to the cholesterol scare of the 80s and the BS "science" that was behind it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys eating, cooking, and talking about food.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Left, Right, and Center-Cut, September 5, 2005

By 

Valjean (Orcas Island, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World (Hardcover)

Attempting to get a book published under the banner "people don't eat right"--even with great gobs of anecdotal evidence--would probably elicit little enthusiasm from potential publishers. Who wants to be scolded, especially about all those Big Macs you're tucking away? Ah, but wrap this theme around a weighty political or social commentary theme--say, people don't even know what food *tastes* like anymore and evil forces are conspiring to keep it that way--and you might have something to sink your teeth into. Consciously or not, Gina Mallet is in a scolding mood in "Last Chance to Eat" and while I appreciated her broadsides against food hypocrisy the barely-concealed "you people don't know what's good for you" tone was often hard to, well, stomach.

This perspective sours, for me, an otherwise superb extended essay on good, basic food and why we love it. The author is at her lamenting best when skewering nonsensical food regulation; the bit on a chapter dedicated to eggs (`The Imperiled Egg') displays in naked terms how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other bureaucratic dimwits drove the egg market to the point of extinction--for absolutely no scientific reason. This expose comes after a long paean to eggs in history, how gourmands from Escoffier to Julie Child have feted them, how wonderfully nutritious they are (eaten *properly*, of course), and segueing into their ill-deserved bad rap. Ms. Mallet's equally loving descriptions of beef, fish, cheese, and produce clearly show her love of The Real Deal; it's when she starts tut-tutting what's happened to the apparently glorious near-past of cuisine that she loses me.

Simply put, Mallet's gripes against her imagined food villains--the FDA excepted--hold little water (primary source references and research--not to mention footnotes--are nowhere to be found) and undercut the backside of her argument: that good food and "taste" are imperiled in our fast food/agri-business-dominated culinary wasteland. That a huge food conglomerate may strive to extend irrational bans on unpasteurized cheese, for example, might be no surprise. But to rely on "my friend Guy" as an authority (hey, he lives in *Paris*!) on the evils of big food business doesn't pump me with confidence. (For good measure we find Guy's politics are hardly confined to the food business: the cheese chapter culminates with a bizarre non-sequitor that importing can't be more diverse because according to him "this is all about trade." I've heard plenty of unsupported anti-trade arguments but this reaches a new low.)

The author uses a family narrative context--interspersed with interesting recipes--to present her arguments. This works reasonably well, though the uniqueness of her youthful experiences (daughter of a director of luxury hotels!) makes cozying up to her culinary perspective a bit difficult at times. Harder to swallow is the relentless "Philistine America steamrolling Noble France" subtext that I hope will even bore the French before too much longer.

Given how politically charged all our lives have become--from what we drive to what toilet paper we use--I appreciated Gina Mallet's attempt to stake out the high ground on food. (I like to think it's mine too.) When she stays optimistic--relating family stories, history, and her clear love of good food--I found her book very enjoyable and even inspiring. It's most of her pessimistic side--especially some very ill-informed economic rants--that drag down an otherwise intriguing effort.