by Katy Such
I am just back from the cloudy, self-satisfied center of a metro Saturday morning: the downtown farmers’ market. Don’t misunderstand, I love the market and the five kinds of curled leaf greens I wrapped in their own damp paper towels and stowed next to the bumpy purple potatoes and marble-sized strawberries, but I could do with less smugness (seriously, people, it’s not necessary to wear earth-toned organic cotton and linen to coordinate with your handmade trug…they let you buy the food even if you’re wearing man-made fiber sweats).

I remember the farmers’ markets (then called produce stands, mostly) in the metro area in the 1990s. There was no fashion on display, no long, earnest conversations about lettuce biodiversity, just Pacific Northwest produce in plastic bags. But since our growing self-identification as foodies, there are now layers of subtext and identity present on these Saturday mornings.

Past the subsistence level, preparing food, eating it, and certainly writing about it is much more than calories and surfeit. Molly O’Neill (author and food columnist for The New York Times Magazine), in the Library of America’s new anthology American Food Writing (ISBN 978-159853-005-6, 2007, 753 pages, $40), nails an American culinary dichotomy: there is plain-spoken indigenous food, and then there is haute cuisine, or what O’Neill calls, “Euro-envy,” a jealousy and class awareness focused almost entirely on France (surely Americans are the only people on earth more reverential toward French cooking than the French themselves).

The collection deals in about equal parts with American food and Americans writing about other cultures (and a handful of essays with Europeans writing about America, including Brillat-Savarin fussing about whether he can get the right ingredients to cook the wild turkey he has shot in Connecticut). The anthology starts in the 1770s with Pehr Kalm, a Finnish botanist writing about oysters, (which appear many times in this volume – on a rainy Saturday, it’s possible to trace oysters’ progression from readily available native food to rarified, expensive delicacy. The breakpoint comes at MFK Fisher’s “A Lusty Bit of Nourishment.”). It ends with Michael Pollan exploding the comforting myth that organic food makes any appreciable difference to the earth in “My Organic Industrial Meal.”

The early selections about American food are generally earthier and more concerned with practicalities. Annie D. Tallent in “Bill of Fare on the Plains” catalogs dining during the westward expansion (a short summary here: there wasn’t a lot of variety).

As time and the book progresses, the selections become more self-aware and wry. Betty MacDonald writes about her dissatisfaction with her marriage using a pressure cooker metaphor – not quite as heavy handed as it sounds – and Betty Fussell mixes the 1960s cultural revolution with academic dinner parties (as it turns out, making mousseline de poisson would be very sexy if only it were not so exhausting). The indigenous American foods are what you’d expect – chowders, cod, cobblers, and all things dairy – and a few things you wouldn’t. O’Neill includes a selection from Joseph Mitchell (longtime New Yorker writer) called “Mr. Barbee’s Terrapin,” and more than one essay in the first third of the book waxes rhapsodic about the joys of canvasback duck.

The anthology is both less earthy and less intellectually rigorous when it deals with the heavy hitters, most of whom fall into the category O’Neill defines as the, “bon vivant club of gourmets.” You can’t really fault O’Neill – how could you have a comprehensive anthology of American food without Julia Child, Craig Claibourne, Alice Waters, and MFK Fisher? – but these essays feel familiar, and a little tired. While at the time of their original writings many of these authors were radical and new for Americans, by now we’ve read all this before. Roy Andries de Groot was one of the original fetishists of terrior, in a time when very few people thought about locality, and he writes about his experience in France with, as O’Neill says, “an almost mystical fervor.” His earnestly breathless style and minute descriptions of uniquely local ingredients and those cooking them are now mimicked in every issue of Gourmet, Saveur, or any of a hundred blogs. It’s hardly de Groot’s fault that he and others have been co-opted, but in these selections, any serious food reader won’t find anything new (unless it’s to observe that every generation of foodies is equally surprised and pleased to discover in their very selves a discerning taste and palate, and to congratulate themselves for it).

But these are quibbles. The usual experience of an anthology of this heft, at least for me, is a glazed-over quality, and a tendency to skip around randomly, but AFW reads like a consistent narrative and not a motley collection. O’Neill has a curatorial willingness to seek out writing, like the selection from Gertrude Stein’s “From American Food and American Houses,” with its five pages of blisteringly funny run-on sentences like, “You see he said French people did not like food moist, if it is moist then how can they drink wine, if the food is not dry there is no reason for drinking wine.” This eccentric sensibility in selection coincides with O’Neill’s discipline. She gives Waters, the saint of American local eating, ten pages on the currently very fashionable topic of the farm-restaurant connection, and she gives exactly the same space to the gay Southern Euro-expatriate Eugene Walter on the untrendy topic of gumbo and oysters in the 1930s. It’s O’Neill’s choices that keep American Food Writing fresh all the way through this significant addition to the food writing canon.