PERFECTION SALAD

I’m taking a break from the Project to read a great nonfiction book called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, by Laura Shapiro, a dense but slyly amusing look at the food science movement (to quote the jacket cover because I’m too lazy to think for myself) “that placed fruit salad with marshmallows at the heart of our national cuisine and made American cheese into a staple widely appreciated for its uniformity, sterility, and blandness.” It’s crazy to realize there was a time when food quality, hygiene, and the purity and consistency of ingredients were all so poor that people applauded the advent of mass-marketed food and believed that canned vegetables (so clean and modern and scientific!) were superior to fresh ones. And now foodies today are taking everything in the absolute opposite direction—locally grown, organic, heirloom ingredients; home-cooked comfort food; fusions of different styles and cultures. Thank god, because most of that turn-of-the-century “modern” food sounds revolting. Boiled chicken on a bed of popcorn smothered in white sauce, anyone?

By far my favorite part of the book is the discussion of the period’s attempts to study nutrition and digestion. I’m a sucker for crazy moments in the history of science and found this one irresistible:

...a famous series of experiments performed in the 1820s by an American army surgeon named Beaumont who was lucky enough to come across an 18-year-old Canadian wounded in a shooting accident. The young man’s stomach had been perforated, and the wound left a permanent opening. This inspired Dr. Beaumont to investigate exactly what happened during normal digestion…. By tying a piece of meat to a string and suspending it inside the stomach, Dr. Beaumont was able to mark the rate at which digestive juices did their work.

I read this passage to A on the airplane coming back from DC and I think he turned a little green.