Margaret Visser. Much Depends on Dinner. Grove Press, 1986.

     Margaret Visser’s title is Much Depends on Dinner. And her book proves that dinner depends on much. She deconstructs an ordinary home-cooked meal, one that would be accepted by North Americans as unremarkable—corn with salt and butter, chicken with rice, lettuce with olive oil and lemon juice, and vanilla ice cream—a meal that is surprisingly complex in its history, chemistry, and social implications. I began to associate my roast chicken with growth hormones and antibiotics, a salad with the plight of farm workers, ice cream with the fat factor. My comfort food became fraught with danger and controversy.

     In the introduction to her romp through the science, mythology, and taboos of an ordinary meal, Visser states, “Food shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or houses or utensils do.” Any bit of travel, whether to the next state or another hemisphere, confirms this statement. Few things say “home” to me more than what I eat, and when I come across fare that is not like home I am wary and critical. My indignation rises as I drive into the interior of our continent and am served a salad that consists of a wedge of iceberg lettuce and a large pink blob of bottled Thousand Island dressing. I don’t mind that the houses there are built of brick, not at all like my own neighborhood. Invited into a villager’s house in Indonesia, I am uneasy when presented with a plate of greens I cannot name and chicken chopped into unrecognizable pieces, yet I happily join the family as we sit on the floor to dine. I delight in donning the traditional clothing of Uzbeks, but their greasy rice dishes and lack of vegetables are the first things I complain about when I tell friends about my trip. Not so if I have just returned from Italy. There I feasted on the pastas, pizzas, and gelatos that I can make or buy at home.

     I have been able to find creamy, refreshing Drumsticks or credible knock-offs—those waffle cones of vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate and nuts and wrapped in paper—in the middle of Nevada, on islands of eastern Indonesia, and in Central Asia as well as at my local supermarket. Once a symbol of childhood and innocence, ice cream is now consumed more by adults than by children, according to a California survey Visser dug up. This must be an American phenomenon. When I took my Japanese exchange student to Baskin and Robbins, she was startled to see adult males walking out of the shop seriously engaged in their double-decker cones—in Japan men do not eat such a childish food.

     We could call this book cultural anthropology, but it’s also an amusing and absorbing trek around our dinner table.

This review originally appeared in the Redwood Coast Review.