A Visit With ‘The Greatest Living Food Writer’
Colin Spencer, whom Germaine Greer once called “the greatest living food writer,” turns 80 next year, and shows no signs of slowing down. His latest book, “From Microliths to Microwaves,” a history of food in Britain from pre-historic times to the present, is the work of a scholar. (In it he argues, in a way that’s reminiscent of Jared Diamond, that agriculture — or at least agriculture as it’s practiced now — is one of the great tragedies of the human race.)
Yet Spencer’s scholarship is only one of his many achievements. Indeed, he’s as close to a Renaissance man as you can get, an accomplished artist, novelist, analyst, activist, playwright and journalist.
And cookbook writer. (Also, needless to say, cook.) Which was my excuse for looking him up in England a couple of weeks ago. We’d never met, but I’ve admired his work for 30 years, since he began writing a column in The Guardian. This had followed his publication of a vegetarian cookbook, and was ostensibly a vegetarian column. “But what I tried to do right from the beginning,” he told me, “was to make the column political. I was supposed to be talking about food, but you can’t talk about food without being political.”
People have, of course — even Spencer has managed to, producing more apolitical cookbooks than you can easily count — but the point is a good one.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/a-visit-with-the-greatest-living-food-writer/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120418
