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By Root 245 0

By temperament and belief she was a liberal, but never a knee-jerk one. Gun control, censorship, abortion rights—on issues like these she was staunchly aligned with the left. But when food became a political issue, as it did during the 1970s, she carved out a position of her own that puzzled a good many of her colleagues and admirers. These were the years when journalists, food writers, and environmental activists began zeroing in on modern American agriculture and the food industry. In books, articles, and lawsuits they publicized the threat to human health and the damage to soil, water, and biodiversity posed by chemical-heavy factory farming; and they vociferously mourned the loss of taste and texture in fruits, vegetables, and meats. Other aspects of the American way of culinary life—convenience products, overpackaging, artificial ingredients, the supermarket system itself—tumbled into disrepute as well. Gastronomes had never admired the technological sheen of the American food supply, and now it was a full-fledged object of scorn.

Julia had little sympathy with this movement, in part because she refused to think of the food industry as an enemy. Since the earliest years of her career, whenever she wanted reliable information on anything from flour to seafood, she habitually wrote to the major food companies or to such trade organizations as the Dairy Council, the Meat and Livestock Board, and the Egg Board. “I don’t know as much as I would like to know about rice, and would very much appreciate any documentation you might be so kind as to give,” she once wrote to the Rice Council, adding that she wanted “deeply technical documentation (not typical housewife stuff which doesn’t go deeply enough into things).” Such queries brought a steady supply of industry-generated literature to her mailbox (including, in this case, “Reduction of Cohesion in Canned Pearl Rice by Use of Edible Oil Emulsions and Surfactants”), which she pored over eagerly. When it came to a standoff between these long-trusted sources and the activists who were assailing them, she sided with her sources. Pesticides? Hormones in beef cattle? Antibiotics in chickens? She researched these problems by going to the same sorts of experts she had always trusted in the past, and took their word as objective.

Her distrust of health-minded reformers in the food world also went back many years. She had been battling nutritionists ever since she described in Mastering, and then demonstrated on television, the proper French way to cook green vegetables—namely, in a large quantity of rapidly boiling water. Nutritionists and home economists wrote to complain that all the vitamins went down the drain, and that the approved method was to cook vegetables in as little water as possible. Julia always countered that the vegetables were so much tastier when prepared by her method that people ate more, and thus took in many more vitamins. But the criticism irritated her: she called the early health-food advocate Adele Davis “that dreadful woman” and said that Davis’s vegetables were so limp and gray, no wonder she had to take vitamin pills. The very idea that people could look upon food as medicine, that they might sit down to eat thinking only about their arteries or their risk of cancer, appalled Julia; and she fought it long and hard. “The dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure,” she often said, and she once pointed out that she’d never met a “healthy, normal nutritionist who loves to eat.” When articles about cholesterol began appearing in the sixties, she made a firm decision not to believe them. Even after she finally conceded the importance of cutting down on fat, and began devising lighter recipes, she retained a sacred place for butter and cream in her cooking. “In this book, I am very conscious of calories and fat,” she assured readers in The Way to Cook, her magnum opus published in 1989. Sure enough she included “low-fat cookery” in the index and listed some two dozen recipes under that heading. Every time she offered a dish such as Broiled Fish