267
CHAPTER
24
THE GLOBALIZATION
OF PLENTY
The world of food requires unobtrusive erudition. It is well known
that curiosity is the basic thrust toward knowledge, which in turn is
the necessary precondition for pleasure.
Giovanni Rebora
1
AS WE JUST SAW, American anguish about weight and well-being has
prompted scientifi c probes into obscure food-related alleyways. It also
did much to advance food globalization in America. During the 1950s,
Americans with a hankering for the foreign had pizza parlors for eating
out and canned chow mein and chop suey for eating in, but most were still
meat and potatoes people. It was a time when nobody used garlic and only
winos drank wine. But this stolid unimaginative image was chipped away
at beginning with the refi ned tastes of highly visible Jacqueline Kennedy
and her fondness for French, Italian, and even British foods. Moreover,
Americans took a good look at their waistlines, had their hearts checked,
worried about their fat consumption, and began in earnest to adopt foreign
foods increasingly thought to be healthy.
A stick prodding the public in this direction was the controversial
1977 document entitled Dietary Goals for the United States, published
by the Senate Select Committee headed by George McGovern. Its 1978
bombshell edition alleged that the nation was under siege from an epi-
demic of “killer diseases” – heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes, and
obesity brought on by changes in the American diet during the preceding
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A Movable Feast
half-century. The document called for a more “natural” diet, as well as

featured on the TV series 60 Minutes. Those details credited red wine
drinking among the French with their relatively low rate of heart attacks.
7
Especially impressive was the much lower than expected rate of coronary
artery disease among the foie gras–gobbling ( but wine drinking) people of
Gascony who were also heavy smokers and whose diet incorporated many
more cholesterol-laden foods than just goose liver. All of this led to a panel
of nutrition authorities from Harvard University and the World Health
Organization, which unveiled in 1994 a “Mediterranean Diet Pyramid.”
This gave olive oil a prominent place, along with cheese, yogurt, and, of
course, red wine.
8
Wine achieving health-food status arrested falling sales of California
wines, especially the reds. American tastes had leaned toward white wines
as fi sh and chicken became trendy, but now veered back to red wines while
an expanding population of wine drinkers discovered what Californians
already knew. California wines had come a long way since the 1960s when
The Globalization of Plenty
269
Orson Welles, as a television pitchman for Paul Masson Wines, intoned that
“we sell no wine before its time.”
9
The transformation began at the University of California at Davis,
where from the 1950s through the 1970s new technologies were applied
to turn winemaking and vineyard management into sciences. California
wines began to compete favorably with wines the world over and, during
the 1990s, the number of wineries in that state jumped from 600 to more
than 900.
10
The baby boomers were absolutely charmed by wine and

The Food Guide Pyramid, which included pasta and rice at its base,
pushed up the consumption of both, although Chinese foods were dealt a
glancing blow by the 1994 revelation from the Center for Science in the
Public Interest that popular Chinese restaurant dishes had high levels of
fats, cholesterol, and sodium.
14
The Center also showed that foods served in
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A Movable Feast
Tex-Mex restaurants were ridiculously high in saturated fats.
15
But sushi in
Japanese establishments was not and, improbably, after its introduction
in the 1960s, Americans gingerly discovered that they could stomach raw
fi sh, and sushi became something of a craze. Food critic Craig Claiborne
enthused that sushi was “a great vehicle for maintaining a stable weight
and is enormously gratifying to the appetite.”
16
Dim sum – Chinese appetizers – also became popular, as did the French
foie gras. Yogurt, used in much of the world for ages, remained a novelty in
the United States as late as the 1950s. Subsequently, however, it became
aU.S. staple, available in myriad fl avors and textures from dozens of pro-
ducers. Annual sales of kosher foods grew from 1.25 million dollars in
the 1940s to almost $2 billion by 1993, even though less than a third of
the consumers were Jewish.
17
Kosher foods were perceived by the public
to be healthier than their non-kosher counterparts. And in 1994, Lean
Cuisine varieties of frozen foods that could be microwaved in a few min-
utes included Cheese Lasagna, Fettucini with Chicken in Alfredo Sauce,

tastes had reached a point where “foreign” was perceived as better and they
scoured the globe for exotic foods while also giving a foreign cachet to
foods produced at home. “Haagen-Dazs,” for example, was a name dreamed
up to convey the impression that European infl uences were behind the ice
cream’s production.
20
It was in the late 1980s and the decade of the 1990s that so many food
globalizing forces coalesced in America that people can now embark on an
extensive journey of “culinary tourism” without leaving their hometown.
21
Posters in ethnic restaurants let diners know what is on the menu as mata-
dors face bulls, the Taj Mahal looms, the Tower of Pisa leans, Far Eastern
markets beckon, Thai temples glisten, and sleepy European villages lull. In
the supermarkets, meat and seafood counters feature ostrich, squid, and
escargot, items that few would have dreamed of putting in their mouths
in the recent past, along with other foreign delicacies such as Black Forest
ham, weisswurst, mortadella, pancheta, and prosciutto. In addition, many
of these outlets now have Asian counters featuring sushi, seaweed wraps,
wasabi, and soy products.
Produce markets (and farmer’s markets) stock cilantro, chayote, jicama,
avocados, chilli peppers, tomatillos, and nopales for Mexican dishes;
arugula, fennel, fresh basil, radicchio, porcini mushrooms, celery root, and
sun-dried tomatoes for Italian meals; leeks, for French and other European
dishes; basmati rice, ginko nuts, litchis, shitiake mushrooms, tofu, taro root,
and Thai lemon grass for Asian occasions; manioc, papayas, and plantains
to be eaten Caribbean (or Brazilian) style. Pomelos, highly valued in South-
east Asia (they are associated with the Chinese New Year), are now readily
available in U.S markets.
22
Fish became globalized so that we regularly eat tilapia – an African fi sh