So begins a journey to figure out her food priorities. She talks her way into the kitchen at applewood, a Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant that spells its name with a twee lowercase and is devoted to sustainability and supporting local farmers. She works her way through its stations, learning to make vinaigrettes and plate salads, cook fish, work the grill, and make pastry (the included recipes, which can seem incidental, get increasingly more interesting as her skills improve). She also meets the producers who provide the restaurant with vegetables, cheese, meat, and fish. She helps harvest and deliver crops; she learns to milk and butcher. She goes deep-sea fishing.
As an account of where our food comes from and what goes into creating it, the book is amiable and engaging enough. Rehak is an accessible writer. She shares her experiences, both positive and negative, with good humor. (More concrete sound bites are often delivered in oracular fashion by her subjects. “[E]veryone in general should be eating way less meat than we do,’’ says a farmhand. “Meat should not be cheap, and if it is, you’ll pay for it in other ways.’’) But the title is apt. “Eating for Beginners’’ is reading for beginners, people just starting to think about the impact of large-scale agriculture on health, environment, and economy. It accomplishes the same thing as the movie “Food, Inc.’’ did — it brings these issues to a different audience, this time through the lens of motherhood. For anyone who has read Pollan and Eric Schlosser, there’s not much here that’s new.
