The Man Who Ate Everything

Jeffrey Steingarten

Jeffrey Steingarten's lab is his flab. I don't believe the man is capable of encountering a foody proposition without throwing himself into the business of testing it out. Learning that peanut butter, bread and dried milk is the absolute cheapest survival diet he rushes out to stock up these items and determines to try and live solely on the stuff for a week. He also attempts:

1. To live for a month as a vegetarian

2. To identify the 10 cheapest restaurants in New York, and eat his way through them

3. Various revolting sounding diets

4. To make his own mineral water using a cocktail of chemicals

5. Frying chips in horse-fat, supposedly the definitive frying medium

6. To live on a $4.50 per day food budget, which is what the average American spent on food in 1993. Steingarten clearly thinks this number is ridiculously low (the French and Japanese spend twice as much, only the British spend less, he notes).

This book is partly the story of these and other experiments and very readable it is too. It seems to me we are just as fascinated by revolting food as we are by delicious food, and both extremes appear in Steingarten's essays.

Other parts of the book are polemical. A chapter entitled "Pain Without Gain" begins "I have been living with low-fat cookbooks for the past month, not because they make any medical sense ... but because the low-fat cookbook business has become a bloated and distended juggernaut that threatens to crush everything else on the market". Similar chapters tackle Veganism, the Low-Salt industry, dieting in general, and the whole concept of healthy eating in particular. I found much to agree with. The American Surgeon General, who must be some sort of equivalent to our Secretary of State for Health, and who sounds a most interfering busybody, is a particular target.

He clearly believes that the British are utterly incompetent in the kitchen and he's probably right. But some of us are at least having a stab at decent cooking and this book is no small inspiration.