Our Lady of the Kitchen

by Betty Fussell

Everyone seemed to be riding the Julia wave as the media blitz for Julie & Julia swept the country this summer. I got a free ride because of my 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars (just out in a new paperback edition), which detailed what Julia meant to my generation of housewives in the 1960s. I was happy to be quoted, along with Nora Ephron, in the August issue of Vanity Fair by Laura Jacobs, who profiled Julia in “Our Lady of the Kitchen.”

Recalling Julia in the 60s, Nora Ephron told Jacobs, “It was an almost hilarious epidemic of cooking from that cookbook. … People would just pitch themselves into these things, and it was very much part of the fabric of all our lives in the early 60s.”

I’m cited as one of those “pitchers”: “We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us. …. To cook French, eat French, drink French  was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.”

I got another happy freebie mention in a new novel that appeared in April, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission, set in Princeton in the 1990s, three decades after Julia had taken over the lives of women like me. Korelitz’s heroine has read up on women who’d written back stories of the academic scene, and I was happy to be linked to such notables as Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem) and Eileen Simpson (Poets in Their Youth).

But I was even happier to be linked to Julia, even though her revolutionary shakeup of American food was perhaps all too transient in Princeton.

Korelitz writes of her heroine: “The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars — like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child — seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them.” (p.83)

Julia was a blessed person and she continues to shed her generosity of heart and mind on all of us she left behind.

Tsunami Julia

by Betty Fussell

Hurricane Bill was nothing to Tsunami Julia. Julia washed over America this summer like a perfect media storm, the kind usually caused by a Sci-Fi Blockbuster. How soon will we have little action dolls in aprons and cleavers, or interactive TV games for kiddies played out with skillets and ice picks?

Actually, we already do and it’s called Iron Chef. But who could have predicted that real life Julia Child, that big-jawed giant of 6’2”, would morph into one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses and become an instant Hollywood star?

We all know the power of imagery but hold on — we’ve been warned by the late Michael Jackson that we ought to ask, What do we see when we look in the mirror? We also ought to ask, Who hung the mirror?

Julie & Julia set up a funhouse mirror. Now every little blogger in the country, who like real life Julie Powell (of the Julie/Julia Project) dreams by night of fame and fortune, will drown by day in oceans of butter while images of Meryl dance in her head. As she whips up one more Sabayon Mousseline and lets out her jeans, she’ll fantasize not just her big-screen career but her big-book career as a best-selling author.

The unlikely fact that Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking hit the #1 spot on The New York Times’ Bestseller List in August, after a delay of a mere 50 years, gives the fantasy some teeth.

So what’s wrong with this picture and why shouldn’t we cheer on a Julia resurgence? Because a nation deserves the fantasies it lives by, and ours have become as dangerous as Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The bookend to the escapist fantasy of Julie & Julia is the documentary Food, Inc., which made a few ripples but not a tsunami.

How could it be otherwise? It’s not a fluffy romance about making it. It’s a monster movie about making everything Big. Who wants to see the ugliness of an industrial food chain that thrives by making people fat? Who wants to look at fat people at all? Or at billions of beheaded chickens or at characters named Diabetes and E.col. 0157? Puhleeze, give me James Bond 007.

A Stonyfields Farm truck delivering at WalMart / Food Inc.

For millions of people, the realities of the Recession are depressing enough without a bunch of talking heads undermining our faith in the American belief that cheap is good. In a culture queasy with fear, we don’t want to know where something as basic as food comes from. One of Food, Inc.’s stars, Michael Pollan, got famous by doing just that when his book In Defense of Food became a best seller last year. He made clear that what we’re eating everyday as food — fast, cheap, synthetic — is not real.

But to get really famous, Pollan would have to become a big-screen action hero played by Bruce Willis in rimless glasses. The message of today’s multiplex media is not information but escape. Neither the tsunami about Julia nor the little wave about industrial food is really about food. Both movies are about what we see in the mirror and what we want to see, and how we confuse those two images all the time.

Holding a mirror up to the nature of the American food scene is just too much for millions of us to stomach. We’d so much rather feed our hunger with images of Julia/Meryl’s joy. And while we’re watching, how about sharing that bag of Jumbo Popcorn — don’t hold the ersatz butter.

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)