Page 12 RAIN February/March 1982 GOOD COOKS IN THEIR OWN WRITE by Nancy Cosper Nancy Cosper, a current Rain staffer, is a former back-to-the-lan- der who moved from the country to Eugene to continue organizing work with the Cascadian Regional Library (CARELj. Author of You Can Can With Honey, Nancy is currently working on its sequel, You Can Bake With Honey, to be published later this year. There is a certain magic that happens at RAIN. Having written a cookbook myself, I have been routed several cookbooks for review over the last few months. As the pile on my desk grew, and I knew it was time to write, I announced my intentions at copy meeting. From bookshelves at the back of the Rainhouse, from hidden drawers, from the bottom of other people's piles came yet more cookbooks just waiting for review. Answering a casual question at a meeting about what I was doing brought a response that I must get in touch with the friend of a friend involved here in Portland in a study of the psychology of changing nutritional habits. And finally, the afternoon's mail brought a gift from a dear friend in the form of the new edition of her cookbook. With this, the article became more than just a series of cookbook reviews. The reviews and the cookbooks themselves reflect a variety of issues concerning food, because we all now know that what we eat is more than nutrition. Food has become a political, economical, and even spiritual consideration. The publishing of Frances Moore-Lappe's Diet/or a Small Planet in the early '70s revolutionized food consciousness. It brought up the issue of eating lower on the food chain by combining certain vegetable proteins as a substitution for meat proteins, popularizing the notion of vegetarianism. Quickly the improvement of eating habits became a question of improvement of the quality of life, not only for ourselves, but for people in Third World countries, whose land is being used by multi-national corporations to grow major cash crops: coffee, sugar, bananas, pineapples. Buying food that is regionally grown by small scale producers supports the local economy. Food that is indigenous to local climate and eaten in season is of better nutritional value too. Home or community gardening, greenhousing, and food production, both rural and urban, have become widely popularized. Mainstream publications like Good Housekeeping and Sunset routinely publish recipes and articles about natural food and food production. And in the last ten years, there has been an explosion in publications specific to the issue of nutrition. When people begin to change their eating habits, the basic questions they often find themselves confronting have to do with the elimination of convenience foods, processed white flour and sugar, and meats. The myriad of cookbooks that have recently been published reflect these questions about nutrition. Almost all the authors do agree on the benefits of eliminating processed and convenience food whenever possible, and of substituting whole grains and legumes, fresh vegetables and fruits. But beyond that, there is little agreement as to what is proper diet. The words "organically grown" and "natural" have very little standarized meaning except in certain specific applications. (Both California and Oregon have enacted consumer fraud protection legislation which simply defines the words "organically grown." In Oregon's case it means no more than 10% of "allowable toxic residues" in the produce.) The cookbooks reviewed here fall into two categories: those concerned with specific types of food (honey, soyfoods, grains, beans) and those that reflect a style of eating or of food preparation (vegetarianism, fireless cooking, spirituality in food, change of dietary habits). There is an overlap of issues and a distinct value system emerges beyond the lack of agreement as to whether or not sugar or meat should be part of a healthy diet.
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