The Taste of Things

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

The Taste of Things is a selection of previously published articles by restaurant critic and food writer Joanne Kates. The first half of the book includes many autobiographical essays; stories about Kates’s travels; trends she observes —including what people ate in the fifties, with emphasis on “hash brownies” (whatever they were), peanut butter, and Kraft dinner — and, for those who collect trivia, the distinction between what Yuppies and Baby Boomers eat.

The second half of the book is somewhat more objective. We are told how good olive oil, goat cheese, bread, and ice cream are produced. More serious are essays about food allergies, the importance of fibre in the diet, anorexia and bulimia, the hungry in Canada, and food banks and soup kitchens. The best, most thoughtful and informative essays deal with modern food production (with, for example, the use of red dye to colour fake crab; with antibiotics in chicken, pig, and cow feed; with nitrogen and carbon dioxide to preserve frozen food; and with sundry other chemicals the unwary public ingests).

Interesting as these articles may be, the author’s constant grating tone and pontificating are annoying. The big problem with this collection is that a little bit of Joanne Kates goes a long way. In small servings, her self-aggrandizement, her subjective observations, sweeping generalizations, and abominable choice of diction might be titillating. But two hundred densely packed pages of repeated pet phrases, such as the adjective “sweet” referring to things as varied as fish, pig flesh, earth, Jerusalem artichokes, became very tiresome. Worse still is Kates’s tendency to use similes and metaphors for food that evoke the human body and its functions. What is it but cannibalism when she describes foie gras as “soft and pink as a baby’s bum”? Rather than stimulating our appetite, the result is more often repugnance.

This book might appeal to those hungry for news about food trends and about who eats what and where. As Kates says, the current ultimate status symbol is the tutored taste bud. We aren’t all knowledgeable about opera, music, art, or literature, but we all eat and, for those who can stomach it, Kates caters to curiosity about all things gastronomical.