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Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food
Eating is the most common way to celebrate in our culture, the most visible way to indulge ourselves. And yet few things have such power over our lives—it controls us as consumers, as social animals, as guilty creatures of appetite. Through a lively mixture of the history of eating, memoir, sociology, and family recipes, Tisdale explores our public and private attitudes about and relationships with food, drawing a rich portrait of the many forces behind our American appetite and demystifying the everyday miracle of eating.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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177 people want to read
About the author
Sallie Tisdale
29 books63 followersSallie Tisdale is the author of Talk Dirty to Me, Stepping Westward, and Women of the Way. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the year. Her work has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
May 3, 2007
This book traces the evolution of technology and how it influenced our culture's view of cooking and food and does so in a wonderful way. Anyone interested in The Omnivore's Dilemna should also check this out. Anyone who has tasted a supermarket tomato and wondered why it doesn't taste like the tomato from a roadside vegetable stand will develop an increasing appreciation for how wonderful fresh food can be. But unlike many food critics, ST also has a fond memory and loving appreciation for the comfort food of her childhood, in all its unhealthy glory. And the honesty in that is one reason I loved that book (even as the description of some of those foods horrified me, never having been from a WonderBread family myself!)
October 8, 2019
While reading The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, I felt a little disappointed in this odd memoir/history/polemic/lament about eating and cooking in millennnial America and what it all means. My disappointment was mostly due to the fact that I had been so dazzled by Sallie Tisdale's collection, Violation, earlier this year. It was a little unfair to expect to be similarly blown away. The essays in Violation, while erudite and intellectually fecund, were models of distillation and revision. This monograph, which boasts comparable creative thinking and comprehensive research, seemed, by contrast, sprawling and diffuse and tonally inconsistent and even a little uncharacteristically hectoring. But I have to confess that it has lingered with me. I've been thinking for days about Tisdale's issues and concerns and, once again, I find myself repeatedly citing her in conversation after seemingly unrelated conversation. I have lamented a great deal about how, as I get older, I feel such a temporary ownership of texts. I used to remember everything I read in exhaustive detail. Now I find that even the books that I like and am convinced by are forgotten in short order. So I've learned to pay attention to the ones, like The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, that have a troubling afterlife.
It may not have been as tight as I wished, but this exploration of one of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers was not without considerable satisfactions. Tisdale is a reader and a completist, so we are treated to an armchair history of food production and distribution in America and an eclectic and wide-ranging survey of American food writing. I learned about a number of books that I want to explore, most notably The Taste of America by John and Karen Hess. I, for one, had never questioned Julia Child's sacrosanct place as probably the most important figure in 20th-century American food culture, so I'm more than a little intrigued to read a book that asserts, "She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV." In addition to all the tasty history, I enjoyed Tisdale's attention to the emotional meanings of food, even and, perhaps, especially, the industrially processed pseudo-foods characteristic of the mid-20th-century American diet. One of Tisdale's favorite treats as a child was a grilled cheese sandwich prepared with Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip and Velveeta. Yearning for an infantile satisfaction and curious if it is even possible - in light of adult sensibilities - to scratch that itch, she prepares the Kraft-tastic delicacy for herself and her daughter. Her daughter, "raised on sandwiches made from whole-wheat bread and local whole-milk cheddar and homemade mayonnaise," is astounded at the resulting deliciousness. "This is great," she says, "How did you make this?"
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted is many things, as I've said, but most of all, I think, it's a mournful elegy for our humanity in late-stage capitalism, a lament for the ways that the pernicious values of an untrammeled marketplace have pervaded and degraded our lives, cheapening and undermining even this most basic of human activities. Food as nourishment - in the sense of both literal nutrition and social reification - has been undermined in essential ways, she argues, by food as commodity. The abundant but flavorless and homogenized food that we eat is emblematic of our simultaneously gluttonous and denuded existence. "Tomatoes were ruined," Tisdale writes in my favorite sentence in the book, "because we wanted them all the time and so with our lives: each single thing ruined because we want everything at once."
It may not have been as tight as I wished, but this exploration of one of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers was not without considerable satisfactions. Tisdale is a reader and a completist, so we are treated to an armchair history of food production and distribution in America and an eclectic and wide-ranging survey of American food writing. I learned about a number of books that I want to explore, most notably The Taste of America by John and Karen Hess. I, for one, had never questioned Julia Child's sacrosanct place as probably the most important figure in 20th-century American food culture, so I'm more than a little intrigued to read a book that asserts, "She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV." In addition to all the tasty history, I enjoyed Tisdale's attention to the emotional meanings of food, even and, perhaps, especially, the industrially processed pseudo-foods characteristic of the mid-20th-century American diet. One of Tisdale's favorite treats as a child was a grilled cheese sandwich prepared with Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip and Velveeta. Yearning for an infantile satisfaction and curious if it is even possible - in light of adult sensibilities - to scratch that itch, she prepares the Kraft-tastic delicacy for herself and her daughter. Her daughter, "raised on sandwiches made from whole-wheat bread and local whole-milk cheddar and homemade mayonnaise," is astounded at the resulting deliciousness. "This is great," she says, "How did you make this?"
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted is many things, as I've said, but most of all, I think, it's a mournful elegy for our humanity in late-stage capitalism, a lament for the ways that the pernicious values of an untrammeled marketplace have pervaded and degraded our lives, cheapening and undermining even this most basic of human activities. Food as nourishment - in the sense of both literal nutrition and social reification - has been undermined in essential ways, she argues, by food as commodity. The abundant but flavorless and homogenized food that we eat is emblematic of our simultaneously gluttonous and denuded existence. "Tomatoes were ruined," Tisdale writes in my favorite sentence in the book, "because we wanted them all the time and so with our lives: each single thing ruined because we want everything at once."
September 27, 2019
It has some very interesting information about food and cooking and the way individuals and cultures relate to it over time. But the information is dated. It doesn't include recent developments: e.g., meals kits, home delivery from restaurants.
It also tends to bog down in places.
It also tends to bog down in places.
September 15, 2009
Sallie Tisdale writes books that are pretty impossible to categorize, and that's what's so darn good about them! In this one, Tisdale offers a melange of memoir, social history of food, cooking and the fashion of food, philosophical rumination and social critique.
Throughout, she offers many fascinating facts about food, the sociology of food and food preparation, but the fact that she is a Buddhist teacher, though Buddhism is never mentioned, comes through in her reminding us of the significance of food and the eating of food. As the first of the Five Food Contemplations in the Meal Gatha puts it: "72 labors brought us this food; we should know how it comes to us." Then of course, there is the reminder that we should live in such a way as to be worthy of it: that is to say, mindfully!
Contemporary 'culture' is the culture of the Hungry Ghost personified, writ all too large. "There is something hellish and creepy in our prosperous luxury, our raw hunger, like some fiendish limbo. Too much is never enough. Perhaps we lost, if Americans ever had it, the ability to eat with understanding. More important, we lost the ability to tell the difference between excess and sufficiency, between what is enough and what is more than enough. Tomatoes were ruined because we wanted them all the time, and so with our lives; each single thing ruined because we want everything at once."
If you feel like you 'never have enough time' and it seems you have to plan weeks in advance to meet a friend for a cup of coffee, THIS is what she's talking about. The only way out, it seems, is to wake up!
Throughout, she offers many fascinating facts about food, the sociology of food and food preparation, but the fact that she is a Buddhist teacher, though Buddhism is never mentioned, comes through in her reminding us of the significance of food and the eating of food. As the first of the Five Food Contemplations in the Meal Gatha puts it: "72 labors brought us this food; we should know how it comes to us." Then of course, there is the reminder that we should live in such a way as to be worthy of it: that is to say, mindfully!
Contemporary 'culture' is the culture of the Hungry Ghost personified, writ all too large. "There is something hellish and creepy in our prosperous luxury, our raw hunger, like some fiendish limbo. Too much is never enough. Perhaps we lost, if Americans ever had it, the ability to eat with understanding. More important, we lost the ability to tell the difference between excess and sufficiency, between what is enough and what is more than enough. Tomatoes were ruined because we wanted them all the time, and so with our lives; each single thing ruined because we want everything at once."
If you feel like you 'never have enough time' and it seems you have to plan weeks in advance to meet a friend for a cup of coffee, THIS is what she's talking about. The only way out, it seems, is to wake up!
May 6, 2010
At times pointless and rambling, the author skewers practically anyone who ever cooked a meal - from the hunter gatherers to Alice Waters. She uses Julia Child to send up Martha Stewart as in:
"Julia Child, for all the years of complaints about her technique (!) has never failed to express her firm belief that good food is part of a well-lived life with rough edges and a few untidy corners. She is a woman of appetitie and undenied pleasure. Martha Stewart's vision of a well-lived life has no untidy corners; tiny corners may be her version of heaven. Control, not comfort is her joy. Julia Child once told a friend she didn't think Martha Stewart would ever be happy."
The book was written before Julia died and Martha went to prison so not a lot of what is written is particularly new. But I was interested in some of her thoughts on the isolation of the homemaker, her chronicles of food that was actually eaten in the fifties and some of her references to what is called trailer trash cuisine - especially one casserole that involves velveeta, ritz crackers and canned pineapple - which I confess to have eaten and can say is quite good. But other things that the author can remember from her childhood - peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches for example - might account for some of her anger at the state of affairs of American food.
"Julia Child, for all the years of complaints about her technique (!) has never failed to express her firm belief that good food is part of a well-lived life with rough edges and a few untidy corners. She is a woman of appetitie and undenied pleasure. Martha Stewart's vision of a well-lived life has no untidy corners; tiny corners may be her version of heaven. Control, not comfort is her joy. Julia Child once told a friend she didn't think Martha Stewart would ever be happy."
The book was written before Julia died and Martha went to prison so not a lot of what is written is particularly new. But I was interested in some of her thoughts on the isolation of the homemaker, her chronicles of food that was actually eaten in the fifties and some of her references to what is called trailer trash cuisine - especially one casserole that involves velveeta, ritz crackers and canned pineapple - which I confess to have eaten and can say is quite good. But other things that the author can remember from her childhood - peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches for example - might account for some of her anger at the state of affairs of American food.
January 26, 2009
I enjoyed this a lot, although it's a bit of a mishmash of different foodie genres. Tisdale looks critically at the American food supply and diet (like Michael Pollan) and how it got that way (like Laura Shapiro) while also acknowledging some of the legitimate reasons convenience foods have taken hold and how they symbolize freedom to women (like Barbara Enhrenreich) and giving credit to the mysterious pleasures and attractions of food that is, objectively, crap. And yet somehow it's more than the sum of its parts -- maybe because she is able to look at food and culture and love and tradition and femininity from so many viewpoints, without dogmatically clinging to one. Plus, she dishes a lot about food-world personalities, which is always fun.
I read it a few months ago and little of the specifics of what she discusses has stayed with me, probably because the book is a bit unfocused and elliptical. But the tone and the generosity of the book remain and I will probably reread at some point. I'd read her book about sex years ago, and I think this one is far more successful in rounding up (if not resolving) all the contradictory ways that modern urban Americans feel about a highly charged topic.
I read it a few months ago and little of the specifics of what she discusses has stayed with me, probably because the book is a bit unfocused and elliptical. But the tone and the generosity of the book remain and I will probably reread at some point. I'd read her book about sex years ago, and I think this one is far more successful in rounding up (if not resolving) all the contradictory ways that modern urban Americans feel about a highly charged topic.
December 9, 2013
I could cut this book into thirds. One third was an interesting and informative historical look at the development of certain food trends, like Betty Crocker. One was a poignant look at the author's food history and how it related to her family, both past and present.
Unfortunately, a too-large chunk of this book is devoted to the author's musings on large questions of food, globalization and other issues that I don't think anyone could successfully unpack in a book twice this size. The author's attempts to use some small situations to think about larger issues of isolation and the modern world come off as confusing, self-indulgent and occasionally even directly contradict what's previously been written.
More than once in this book I was left scratching my head - the prose was pretty, but I had no idea what point the author was trying to make. A shame, I think there's some interesting information in here and if the focus had been kept small and personal it would have done more to serve its goals than trying to go big.
Unfortunately, a too-large chunk of this book is devoted to the author's musings on large questions of food, globalization and other issues that I don't think anyone could successfully unpack in a book twice this size. The author's attempts to use some small situations to think about larger issues of isolation and the modern world come off as confusing, self-indulgent and occasionally even directly contradict what's previously been written.
More than once in this book I was left scratching my head - the prose was pretty, but I had no idea what point the author was trying to make. A shame, I think there's some interesting information in here and if the focus had been kept small and personal it would have done more to serve its goals than trying to go big.
July 6, 2011
I enjoyed pieces of this book such as the first person narratives and memoir sections, but I couldn't get an overall sense of who this author was, as I have never read anything by her before. I also enjoyed reading about how Betty Crocker was not a real person, and how recipes have changed throughout the years of Joy of Cooking depending on food trends and health views. I feel this could have been an interesting book on its own. I read this after finishing Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, so I was hoping for something similar. I didn't find that the history and academic-type commentary was unified well with the memoir pieces. The only thing that really united them in my mind was the theme of food. I think the book could have benefited from a unifying theme and structure.
July 15, 2016
Wonderful non-fiction - such sensuous writing, and a great combination of personal and historical info. If you've ever pondered what food means - socially, culturally, historically, and what changes in what we eat in the 20th-21st century mean - then this would be a great book for you.
It touches on marketing, leisure saving devices, convenience foods, restaurants and Nouvelle cuisine, gender roles & food, Betty Crocker, dieting - just fascinating and all over the place, which is also one of its drawbacks, since there isn't an index. I would have liked footnotes or endnotes, too, but I think most of the book was previously published as short magazine pieces.
It touches on marketing, leisure saving devices, convenience foods, restaurants and Nouvelle cuisine, gender roles & food, Betty Crocker, dieting - just fascinating and all over the place, which is also one of its drawbacks, since there isn't an index. I would have liked footnotes or endnotes, too, but I think most of the book was previously published as short magazine pieces.
March 13, 2013
We've all been told "never judge a book by its cover", and sadly that is true here. Based on the title, I was expecting (and hoping for) a book like Laurie Colwin's "Home Cooking", but I was sadly disappointed. Like many other reviewers, I only finished about half of the book because I was very tired of the author's whining. I kept waiting for the good part where she told us about the best thing(s) she ever tasted, but she wasn't writing a food memoir. I'm not really sure what she was writing about; all I got out of it was a disjointed collection of complaints and unintelligible thoughts about fusion, fisheries, and Zen Buddhism.
April 14, 2011
I checked this book out hoping it would be stories about wonderful food experiences. I'm having to go by title/cover art alone these days in the library since I usually have a baby in my arms. Anyways, what I didn't want was a well-researched diatribe on how evil I am for being an American and how this means I have no food culture. Also, how white flour is a plot to appeal to my racist sensibilities and make everyone fat. I read 80 pages and then got too mad to read anymore and took it back.
March 22, 2007
This book is in a newly emerging genre of food literature. It is deeply thoughtful about the food we eat, where it comes from, its history, and the relationships we develop with it. She expands her discussion of food to the larger market trends, discussing the big box problems of Walmart and others. This book is not statistical or analytical, however, but rather deeply thoughtful prose.
November 9, 2007
This book gave me a lot to think about, and I'm still digesting it. I never realized how long ago 'convenience' foods began coming into our lives. Long before I was born or my mom for that matter. What is a regional cuisine? Or are there any out there anymore? Lots of food for thought in this book (sorry I couldn't resist ;-}
March 7, 2009
It took me a while to get through this, as it wasn't really all that exciting. Food, you'd think I'd just jam right through it. In the book Tisdale mixes scholarly research examples with personal stories and observations to discuss the changing landscape of food over the past hundred years or so.
May 29, 2007
history, economics, geography, culture, personal anecdotes, pleasure. . .this book has it all.
August 25, 2007
This was a broader overview of food than I expected - more general history and sociology, rather than the memoir I was expecting.
April 5, 2008
Lots of interesting info about food, and some memoir type info thrown in, but it meanders a bit much. Enjoyable, but not as good as some of the other food lit I've been reading lately.
November 20, 2008
Fairly boring.
Read
January 18, 2010 Really enjoyable --- a psychology of food, a history of the 60's in bad cuisine, a compassionate appreciation of other peoples tastes
August 26, 2010
Once again, the personal essay extended, explored, in no way diminished-
July 23, 2011
a bit academic... a bit conversational... all together interesting.
the last page being the best.
the last page being the best.
June 18, 2012
I wanted to like it. I really did. It has its moments of excellence, and of whininess.
January 9, 2013
this was a great cultural perspective book.
excellent
excellent
June 28, 2014
Though the description of the book sounded quite interesting, I just couldn't get into it. Maybe another time...
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews