Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [65]
As for organic food, as far as Julia was concerned it was even worse than health food. In 1971, she received a newsletter from the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, which featured an essay titled “The ‘Organic Food’ Kick,” by R. A. Seelig. Julia read it, photocopied it, often quoted it, and used it as the basis of much of her thinking about food reformers. “In the real world of farming today there is no room for the cult that regards ‘natural methods’ as good, and all improvements on nature as bad,” Seelig wrote. “Many of the organic food cultists, who go arm in arm with the ‘health food’ faddists, appear to have a semi-religious conviction that what is natural is a manifestation of God’s purpose, while what is scientific is a denial of God’s plan.” This was the sort of language guaranteed to set Julia squarely against advocates of organic farming. She and Paul avoided all manifestations of organized religion; and the lesson Julia had drawn from her own conversion experience, back at the Cordon Bleu, was that science and logic easily trumped instinct and faith at every stage of cooking. “I just do not want to be allied to any cultist type of operation, which this could well turn out to be,” she told a group called CHEFS (Chefs Helping to Enhance Food Safety), which was enlisting chefs to promote organic farming. “I am for hard scientific facts.”
The scientific facts that most appealed to her were those offered up by such organizations as the American Council on Science and Health, a group funded in part by the food industry and notorious among reformers for taking the industry’s point of view on everything from sugar-laden breakfast cereals to genetically modified tomatoes. Julia became a financial supporter of the council and appeared at one of its press events. She called the genetic engineering of food “one of the greatest discoveries” of the twentieth century, spoke out in favor of irradiation as a food safety measure while terming opponents “Nervous Nellies,” and agreed to provide a testimonial in favor of monosodium glutamate when it came under attack in 1991. Since she had always disliked MSG, she rejected the wording offered by the industry (“Like all chefs, I have used MSG as an ingredient in recipes for years”) and instead called MSG “a harmless food additive that can make good food taste even better.” What was truly “evil,” she added, was to frighten the public with misinformation.
The one area of food safety in which she readily sided with the reform organizations was the problem of contamination in shellfish. When a subcommittee of the House of Representatives held hearings on the subject, Julia agreed to supply written testimony, and she discussed the issue in public on other occasions as well. “Only a small percentage of the fish and shellfish sold in this country is inspected for wholesomeness by government agents,” she told a meeting of the Newspaper Food Editors and Writers Association in 1988. The solution was supposed to be thorough cooking, “but who wants to cook an oyster till it’s a piece of cement?” Fish cookery was dear to her heart, and anything that interfered with a lovely poached oyster garnish for sole à la Normande in her estimation plainly deserved a major public outcry.
For the most part, however, Julia was unable to make the connection between enjoying food and working to radically overhaul the food system. To forge precisely such a connection was the aim of the second wave of culinary enthusiasts, the ones inspired by Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse restaurant opened in Berkeley in 1971 and spawned the revolution known as California cuisine. Though Waters and her colleagues shared some of the philosophy behind nouvelle cuisine, the much-hyped effort on the part of French chefs to invigorate classic cooking by making it lighter, less formulaic, and more sharply focused on fresh ingredients, the spirit of the California movement