“This book,” Josh Schonwald writes, “is fundamentally a search for people who think they have the Next Big Thing in food. . . . I’ve devoted months to investigating salad, seafood, and meat, but nary a moment to cheese or dairy products. This unequal treatment is due to a couple of things: a gagging reflex that is provoked by cultured dairy products, and my obsession with finding the salad of the future. So full disclosure: this is a look at the food frontier, a search for the next big things in food, through the eyes of a human with some food preferences and prejudices.”
Just about anyone who writes about food comes to the task with built-in positive and negative prejudices, so there’s nothing unusual about that. As one who can’t imagine getting through the day without a healthy (or unhealthy) helping of cheese, I obviously do not share all of Schonwald’s biases, but on broader matters, his views are much to my taste. Though he came to his research much under the influence of Michael Pollan and other prominent foodies who are opposed to biotechnology and genetically engineered foods, what he saw and learned persuaded him to a somewhat more complicated and nuanced view. While he shares their preference for natural, organic ingredients and agrees with many of their strictures about real as opposed to scientifically manufactured food, he also came to appreciate the work being done by scientists on ways to increase the food supply at a time in world history when population is expanding and our ability to feed it with natural foodstuffs is not keeping up.
Schonwald, a Chicago journalist, focuses on three broad areas of interest: the salad revolution, which has brought new ingredients to the table — think radicchio, and weeds, and greens in sealed bags — and altered mass tastes as well as those of elite foodies; efforts to grow meat in vitro, i.e., in the laboratory rather than in the cow; and the rise of land-based fish farming. Every once in a while his prose turns a little flippant, and he does use the first-person singular to excess, but he has come up with a great deal of interesting information, much of which will surprise people who eat food without giving much thought to where it comes from.
A decade and a half ago, when Schonwald was 26, his mother served him “the most transformative meal of his life” while he was visiting her in Wisconsin. It was a salad called “spring mix” that she had bought in a plastic bag at a nearby grocery store. He thought it was delicious and in time came to understand that it was part of a genuinely significant phenomenon: “Bagged salad was a game-changer: it changed the American salad eating experience, ended a half century of iceberg’s totalitarian-like grip on the salad bowl, and brought arugula, frisee, red oak, green leaf, and mizuna to places like Kenosha, Buffalo, and Lubbock.”
So off he went to Salinas, the California city made famous by the early novels of John Steinbeck, most notable now for being “the primary city of a valley nicknamed the ‘World’s Salad Bowl.’ ” Here’s something I never knew, and you probably didn’t either:
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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