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

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

A memoir? A ramble? A wallow? A recipe collection? An essay? Mallet’s
excursion into food is all these, but above all it is a rant. A
thorough, prolonged, get-it-off-your-chest rant. Eggs, of course, are
watery or worse. Beef has been aged in plastic; the scallops have been
soaked in STP (the active ingredient in carpet cleaner); there’s Alar
on the apples; one can no longer get a good raw-milk Brie. And the art
of cooking brains is as good as lost. Basic, earthy, unadulterated,
uninspected, natural food is no more. Are we reduced to eating farmed
fish and squirting whipped cream from a pressurized can?

Mallet is concerned with taste. Food, she maintains, tasted like food
before industrialization took away taste in order to serve the gods of
mass production and profit. Then food science used health threats to
scare us away from the sources of taste (fats, raw milk, bacteria,
etc.). Taste is dead, and the art of cooking is dying. Soon even
kitchens will be historical curiosities.

The book blends memories of tastes from the author’s childhood in
England and travels to France with an extensive sprinkling of food
facts, a little history, and a fine contempt for “healthism.” Mallet
presents food as a “potent bond to the past” and laments the use of
food as a political tool. The current “famine of quality” leads her
to a “sense of doom” and the sarcastic projection of a future where
seeking taste is a clandestine underground activity.

Mallet revels in language and drives a stretch vocabulary. She is a
master of intense imagery. All this, 20 recipes you won’t be needing
any time soon, and strongly expressed opinions make for an interesting
read.