Product Description

No eggs, no beef, and only an occasional fish. Those were the hungry years after the Second World War in the English countryside, when the sighting of a rogue hen or even a thin pig was a cause for celebration. But that didn’t matter, because the warm stove was still the hub of the house, and a family meal, however scant, was a shared experience. Food still promised pleasure, unstained by guilt or fear. To eat was enough. But how quickly that would change as Gina Mallet journeyed through the darkening foodscape of our times.

It was in the 1990s, when the author was reviewing restaurants, that she came to confront the paradox of contemporary food. There was more and more food, more publicity about food, more cookbooks and cooking shows than ever, but there was less variety and less taste, and some common foods were actually threatened with extinction. Why?

In this provocative and evocative book, Gina Mallet weaves together her own experiences in England and America and her memories of great taste with a grim look at the enemies of good food: the U.N.’s template for universal taste; trade wars; healthism; extreme environmentalists; food scientists; food scares; organic dogma; zero tolerance for flavour-bearing bacteria.

Mallet quotes Elizabeth David when she advises “Shop well” – but do it fast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161586 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-07
• Released on: 2004-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.ca
Gina Mallet doesn't beat us over the head with her urbanity, but she's travelled a lot in Europe and North America. She also seems to remember everything she ever ate. A former drama and restaurant critic, she delights in stating her opinions. Last Chance to Eat is an unsentimental celebration of lost tastes, including a clear-eyed appraisal of industrialized and genetically modified foods and a critical assessment of organics (she finds that, in some instances, they don't taste any better than those raised with chemicals). "What has changed most is our taste," she writes, adding that we "prefer food that tastes reliably the same each time we eat it." Mallet also plays consumer advocate. After visiting with a canny kibitzer at a fish market counter, she concludes that shrimp from Louisiana are "the best," while Tiger shrimps "taste of nothing." This willingness to engage, to do the digging, to find the right people to talk to, to ransack the memory so as to record and compare her distant and current tastes of foods is the hallmark of her text. It sizzles with little polemics about wild versus tame strawberries, wild versus farmed salmon, farmhouse versus factory cheeses, dry-aged versus wet-aged steak (the latter is stored and shipped in cryovac; try to find the former, she says, since the latter tastes tinny). Mallet muses about the disappearance of excellent sole and salmon: "There must be a philosophical reason for the saying that all good things come to an end. I just haven't found it."

Too frequently, food books present recipes with little or no comment on the ingredients used. Mallet's directions for her occasional recipes, however, are intensely personal, clear, and immediately practical. The dishes themselves are a mix of the conventional and the weird: Sauce Verte (herbs stirred with mayo) on the one hand, and Parmesan Crème Brûlée with Black Pumpernickel on the other. She closes with a plug for buying provisions on the Internet; not one to worry about the cost of air freight and other punishing economies of scale when it comes to the food we eat, she calls the Web "the best place to order the greatest food." The contradiction of using thoroughly modern means to shop for artisanal goodies doesn't go unnoticed: "It isn't nature restoring balance in food, it is technology." --Ted Whittaker

Books in Canada
Gina Mallet has written a wonderfully crabby-and timely-memoir Last Chance To Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. Mallet was the Toronto Star’s much feared drama critic during the 1970s and the early 1980s, and has since had stints writing perceptive restaurant reviews for the Globe and Mail. Her approach to restaurant reviewing acknowledges that people actually drink wine and talk during meals. From that I understood that she clearly loves and understands good food. This book takes my regard for her into a higher dimension.
She has some firm ideas about what does and doesn’t constitute good foods. But somehow, the book’s title, which seems more like a marketer’s than her own, is slightly misleading. This is much more a memoir of what constitutes good eating than a polemic against factory-produced food stuffs or the corporate/government conspiracy to permanently disable our tastebuds. Oh, the polemic is there in the book, and it is both articulate and sensible-and it is backed by convincing evidence that we have been assaulted by culinary cretins and over-zealous health Nazis for more than half a century. But when it comes to food, Mallet is a better lover than a fighter.
This book is a marvelous thing, and so is Mallet at the dinner table: a feisty, articulate woman in the midst of a lifelong feast. I learned more about why today’s eggs, cheese, and meat are devoid of flavour from Mallet than from the dozen or so other books I’ve read on the subject. Probably because she can not only explain why, say, most Bries now taste like chalk, she can also make you taste Brie as it should be tasted. Only very fine writers can do this, and it puts her in a very exclusive and small group of food writers. Virtually everything else that lands on her gourmet plate in this book is enlivened by those rare skills. She’s not always 100 percent correct, but she’s always 100 percent interesting, even on the tricky-for-Eastern-seaborders subject of Japanese cuisine.
Throughout the book she makes a useful distinction between nutritional commodities-fuel-and food, which for her lies somewhere between culture and art. It’s a useful distinction, and not just because Mallet’s combination of passion and astuteness enables her to build a convincing rhetorical framework for it. Because of the topical constraint the editors force on her, the book isn’t perfect. There are some oddities in the book, like her strange admiration for Martha Stewart, who is-or was-as much about décor as about food, and wasn’t an adequate replacement for the late Julia Child even before she went to jail. Still, each of the dozen or so recipes dotted throughout literally beg you to taste them, and the several I’ve tried were remarkable. Great read, great food, a truly feisty feast, and one of my favourite recent books in any category.
Brian Fawcett (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Being a gourmet isn't simply about ferreting out the best victuals; it's also about luxuriating in good food the way others might stroke a new mink coat. Toronto writer Mallet is one such epicure. In this combination of memoir and essay, she balances remembrances of growing up in wartime England with zesty opinions on various foodstuffs ("I don't consider cod a fish at all," she writes. "It's like eating twenty-dollar bills"). Mallet opines that in an era of Big Macs and a dizzying array of snack foods, people don't know what they're missing. Rather than delight in a few gulps of richly flavored raw milk, she laments, consumers today simply go for quantity over quality. Readers of this work will know better, however, since Mallet goes beyond describing comestible ecstasy and digs deep into topics like cheese, beef and fish. Like an excellent dinner guest, Mallet lets her thoughts roam freely, yet always with focus and a dose of intriguing fact. In writing about kitchen gardens, for example, she begins with the loss of her mother's vegetables and herbs from an errant German bomb that destroyed land and greenhouses alike. From there, she chats about Versailles, organic farming and supermarkets. This breadth of insight, mixed with Mallet's childhood memories, makes for a tasty treat.
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Customer Reviews

somewhat informative, mostly irritating
[Cross-posted to LibraryThing and LivingSocial]

The Julie/Julia Project recently rekindled my passion for cooking and since food was on my mind, I picked up this book. Part memoir, part history of food, and part manifesto against the industrialization of food, Mallet argues that in the interest of having mass produced food with no fat or bacteria in it, weve sacrificed flavour. We mostly being North Americans, whom Mallet seems content to write off as ignorant germophobes.

Mallet takes on five food items that she argues have gone by the wayside over the last few decades: eggs, cheese/dairy, beef, good quality fruits and vegetables, and fish. She shares anecdotes from her familys past and her own childhood and discusses the current state of these foods. Since Mallet is a food writer, I was expecting better. The book often felt disjointed and inconsistent - Mallet would allude to a particular experience or some bit of food trivia that was tangentially related to the topic at hand and rather than develop these threads, she left them hanging. At times, she seemed to contradict herself.

I think what bothered me the most was Mallets tone. Throughout the entire book, she is somewhat pretentious and haughty and cannot mask her disdain for North American food culture. She makes valid points but I would be more inclined to hear her out if the points came from a well-researched, balanced perspective rather than anecdotes and an air of superiority.

There were some positive aspects to this book; it was informative and motivated me to learn more about certain foods that I consume, particularly eggs. I think we do need to be more mindful of what we eat, how our food is being produced, and where it comes from. This, however, is not the book with which to begin that process. Id recommend Barbara Kingsolvers Animal, Vegetable, Miracle instead informative without constantly talking down to her readers.

don't go anywhere without it
don't eat out or anywhere without this book .Last chance to eat is a guide to modern eating, controversial, funny and stuffed with the kind of information i wasn't quite sure i really wanted to know - until i read it.