The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food - Hardcover

What is it to be a housewife in a Betty Crocker world? And what is a housewife, anyway? What is her work? Tisdale noodles around on these avenues, meandering through the past couple hundred years of American and European history, taking special note of the rise of "time-saving" refinements in life--the way vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens are often sold in terms of the time they will save the housewife, too often overlooking the fact that she is at work. Convenience is another theme--what are we giving away simply to have convenient food? And consistency is another--the consistency of experience in a chain of restaurants that keeps satisfied customers coming back for what amounts to no real experience to begin with.

There's a lot of history in here, like how white sugar and white flour were sold to the public as good, its immediate predecessor as bad. Tisdale lays bare the ways in which advertisers get the public to use products they don't really need and might not even want if they took the time to think about alternatives. She has read a lot of the primary texts on the subject (don't overlook the terrific bibliography) and has reassembled a lot of that basic information, adding her own unique insights and organizing principles. Much of The Best Thing I Ever Tasted reads like loosely assembled magazine essays masquerading as a cohesive book.

But the voice is there, the attitude, the Tisdale:

I try to buy fish from one of the few sustained fisheries left, and I look at the seafood counter and realize with a sinking feeling that most people don't care. Most people don't care where their food comes from, who grows, picks, catches, and prepares it. Life is hard; we can't track every unseen cost. We will eat the very last fish in the ocean. I know this. I believe this, and still I compromise. I buy time. I buy gratification. I rationalize. I deny. I turn away. I turn away.

You will find it difficult to turn away from Tisdale's ideas and explorations. As self-involved in bleak vision as she may become, she never leaves the reader's side. --Schuyler Ingle