II. Food Without Fear

“It would seem that for thousands of years man has been eating all the wrong things! He has enjoyed the sense of taste that Nature has endowed him with, and all the time Nature was an ignoramus!”

—PIERRE ANDRIEU, FINE BOUCHE

When I say that Americans are afraid of food, I mean that we’re afraid to buy it, because we’re not sure how to pick it out or what it ought to cost; we’re afraid to cook it, because we don’t begin to understand the cooking process; we’re afraid to eat it, of course, because we’ve heard about all the awful things it can do to us; we’re afraid to utter its very name, for heaven’s sake, because we’ll probably pronounce it incorrectly.