The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance [Hardcover]

Thomas McNamee (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 8, 2012

In the 1950s, America was a land of overdone roast beef and canned green beans—a gastronomic wasteland. Most restaurants relied on frozen, second-rate ingredients and served bogus “Continental” cuisine. Authentic French, Italian, and Chinese foods were virtually unknown. There was no such thing as food criticism at the time, and no such thing as a restaurant critic. Cooking at home wasn’t thought of as a source of pleasure. Guests didn’t chat around the kitchen. Professional equipment and cookware were used only in restaurants. One man changed all that.

From the bestselling author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse comes the first biography of the passionate gastronome and troubled genius who became the most powerful force in the history of American food—the founding father of the American food revolution. From his first day in 1957 as the food editor of the New York Times, Craig Claiborne was going to take his readers where they had never been before. Claiborne extolled the pleasures of exotic cuisines from all around the world, and with his inspiration, restaurants of every ethnicity blossomed. So many things we take for granted now were introduced to us by Craig Claiborne—crème fraîche, arugula, balsamic vinegar, the Cuisinart, chef’s knives, even the salad spinner.

He would give Julia Child her first major book review. He brought Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Paul Prudhomme, and Jacques Pépin to national acclaim. His $4,000 dinner for two in Paris was a front-page story in the Times and scandalized the world. And while he defended the true French nouvelle cuisine against bastardization, he also reveled in a well-made stew or a good hot dog. He made home cooks into stars—Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, and many others. And Craig Claiborne made dinner an event—whether dining out, delighting your friends, or simply cooking for your family. His own dinner parties were legendary.

Craig Claiborne was the perfect Mississippi gentleman, but his inner life was one of conflict and self-doubt. Constrained by his position to mask his sexuality, he was imprisoned in solitude, never able to find a stable and lasting love. Through Thomas McNamee’s painstaking research and eloquent storytelling, The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat unfolds a history that is largely unknown and also tells the full, deep story of a great man who until now has never been truly known at all.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Craig Claiborne was the greatest influence of my professional life in America. Knowledgeable, dedicated, and driven, he was determined to better American eating habits. As Thomas McNamee nicely portrays in The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat, Claiborne's impact on the culinary revolution of the last forty years cannot be ignored or overstated.”

—Jacques Pépin

About the Author

Thomas McNamee is the author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, Life, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He lives in San Francisco.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1ST edition (May 8, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1439191506
• ISBN-13: 978-1439191507
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #491,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in 1947 in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up there and in New York City. I studied writing at Yale under the tutelage of Robert Penn Warren.

I am the author of The Grizzly Bear (Knopf, 1984), Nature First: Keeping Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild (Roberts Rinehart, 1987), A Story of Deep Delight (Viking, 1990), The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (Henry Holt, 1997)and Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (The Penguin Press, 2007). My latest book, THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: CRAIG CLAIBORNE AND THE AMERICAN FOOD RENAISSANCE, was published in May 2012.

My essays, poems, and natural history writing have been published in Audubon, The New Yorker, Life, Natural History, High Country News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saveur, and a number of literary journals. I wrote the documentary film Alexander Calder, which was broadcast on the PBS 'American Masters' series in June 1998 and received both a George W. Peabody Award and an Emmy. Many of my book reviews have appeared The New York Times Book Review.

After twenty-three years in New York City and five in rural Montana, I have lived in San Francisco since 1998--albeit with frequent returns to New York and as much of every summer as possible in Montana.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Food For Thought May 20, 2012

By Robert Taylor Brewer

Format:Hardcover

One of my favorite possessions is a small embossed invitation to participate in a project of mine entitled The American Writing Book, which was returned to me bearing the signature of Craig Claiborne. With a graciousness I did not expect, he wrote on the back of the card that, in princiiple, he was amenable to an interview and photo session, and if I would call him, we could set up a precise time. This cooperative venture never materialized, however. Soon after receiving the card, I read in The New York Times that Craig Claiborne had died.

For me, he was the first writer whose work on food I read as seriously as a current events piece, or a piece on action sports. In fact, as author Thomas McNamee makes clear in his new biography of Claiborne, The Man Who Changed The Way We Eat, the culinary choices of JFK were current events, and Claiborne's reports on them carried the same underlying fascination and drama normally accorded page one reportage. McNamee also gives full voice to Claiborne's upbringing which of course, rounds out the man and helps bring into focus his life and times. Reading Claiborne's columns, I reveled in the specialized vocabulary of food, and the ways in which Craig Claiborne could deploy it, and this too is evocatively captured by Mr. McNamee.

The only "rough patch" for me is Claiborne's relationship with Mimi Sheraton, who suceeded Claiborne as food critic at The Times. I understand that the views expressed about this are Claiborne's but the author seems to espouse them as his own.... It is a fact that many times, Mimi Sheraton dug out microscopic holes in the New York City restaurant landscape whose kitchens were doing terriffic things with food, sometimes on only one or two dishes, and it became a ritual at our household to see what gastronomical gems she had unearthed from the life and times of the City this week. Claiborne, in point of contrast, seemed to reserve his talents for upper eschelon cuisine haunts such as Le Pavilion, Le Caravelle, and my favorite monument to elevated edibility, Andre Soltner's Lutece.

But these are tiny morsels of discontent in what is, overall, a lusciously concocted remolade of history, personality and entertainment. Read more ›

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The inner critic May 15, 2012

By Jon Hunt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Just before Julia Child and somewhat after James Beard, there emerged Craig Claiborne, whose risk taking in writing restaurant reviews for the New York Times made people sit up and take notice on the dreary state of American cuisine. Thomas McNamee's excellent new biography on Claiborne is particularly welcome for those of us boomers who grew up in the late fifties and early sixties. The food was indeed blander than tasteless pudding.

McNamee spends a lot of time tying Claiborne's Mississippi delta roots to his later life. Claiborne's mother was overbearing in many ways and managed to turn him off at every step. His homosexuality, a well guarded secret in those tormented days, was part and parcel to Claiborne's life and, apart from a few close friendships, it wasn't until he was sixty that he found a man with whom he would share much, albeit a married man.

The author peels away his subject's layers and does so with great success. Claiborne's drinking is central to his existence and was a harbinger of his downfall. Yet much of the book, naturally, discusses Claiborne's training and his many likes and dislikes when it came to food and dining. Artists are complicated people and I think the book is best at dealing with all of these factors.

"The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat" is warm and often very funny. It's also a terrific look at someone whom many people may have forgotten but a man who needs to remembered for his overarching contributions to how we look at American cuisine. I highly recommend it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I'd Rather Be At The Beach: Reviews May 10, 2012

By Vicki

Format:Hardcover

To be honest, this was the best non fiction I've read in a very long time. The authors words seemed to pull me along from one page to the next page, and the next, and when I finally looked up to see what time it was, it was way past the time I had intended to read.

The book is not only full of statistics, it is full of heart. It's very well written and is perfect for anyone who loves food or how we came to consume so much processed food instead of the healthy, made from scratch meals our grandmothers and great grandmothers made.

This book reads more like a fiction, and not the non fiction it is. I highly recommend this book!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Read Claiborne's autobiography instead August 20, 2012

By Gwin Grogan Grimes

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Let me begin by saying that I have a master's degree in liberal arts, I was a journalist for more than 20 years and I've published three books. So, I have a decent vocabulary and three years of college French. But I have never read a book that the author seemed so intent on obfuscation. Not only does he use multiple descriptors when one would suffice, McNamee seems intent on substituting an obscure word for simpler language. Sentence structure is unwieldy throughout. Several long, untranslated passages in French (not just menus) left me bewildered -- what am I missing? So glad my Kindle has a look-up function, though I may have worn it out on this book. And every time I looked up a word, I grew increasingly exasperated: Why can't this guy just say what he means? And where was the editor? The narrative is choppy, with many anecdotes seeming to build up to ... nothing. Transitions were sorely lacking from one chapter to the next. While I admire the author's attention to detail and researching abilities, this arrogant approach to writing and apparent lack of editing really ruined the story for me.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Craig Claiborne as we never knew him June 18, 2012

By Barbara

Format:Hardcover

Growing up in the 50's and learning to cook meant opening cans of green beans, frying chicken or chops, or using the oven for roasts on Sundays. It was all done to get the family fed with no thought to food as pleasure. Reading author Thomas McNamee's biography of Craig Claiborne takes us on a culinary trip, not with recipes, but with a history of the American food revolution beginning in 1957. So many things we now take for granted were introduced by Claiborne, such as creme fraiche, balsamic vinegar, Chef's knives and even the salad spinner.

Unknown to most of us was the part that Claiborne played in the careers of such chefs as Julia Child, Paul Bocuse, ,Paul Prudhomme,Diana Kennedy and Jacques Pepin. Claiborne was a loner, living his entire life in solitude, having gay lovers but living an inner life of conflict and self-doubt. The author has given us an outstanding story, painstakingly researched and presented in a very readable biography.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in culinary history, food or just to enjoy an engrossing story. Craig Claiborne finally will be known, as he was not ever known during his extra ordinary life. A great gift book, for yourself and also for friends and relatives who will enjoy a different ad entertaining approach to food.