Faced with an inordinate amount of books on what not to eat, students ought to think critically about food without trusting every diet or weight-watching tip thrown at them, a speaker said Monday.
About 50 people attended Netta Davis' lecture titled "The Ideal Way to Eat: How Utopian Foodways, Democratic Diners, and Competing Perfections Came to the Party and Ruined My Appetite" in the Fuller Building.
Davis teaches a graduate course at the Metropolitan College in the new gastronomy program. She said she hopes that attendees would get "an understanding of how important it is to think critically of what people are saying and writing about food."
Though the lecture was technically part of a course requirement for BU graduate students studying gastronomy, the coordinators encouraged the public to attend as well. The audience was given complementary wine, beer, cheese, homemade graham crackers and other snacks.
Rachel Black, the coordinator of the master's program, encouraged BU undergraduates interested in gastronomy to attend the lectures so that they could learn from food experts.
Davis said she became interested in food studies as a child when she used to spend time at the Radcliffe library, while Julia Child was working on her cookbook collection.
Though Davis said it never seriously considered being a chef, Child and the famous French chef Jacques Pépin sparked Davis's interest in food studies.
"Tonight, I will be sitting on Julia Child's stool," she said.
Davis approaches food with the perspective of an American studies specialist, she said.
"American studies insist on interdisciplinary studies," she said. "We don't just look at the meal, or the consumption of calories, or corn proliferation, we look at the whole [thing]," she said.
Of the hundreds of books, there are a lot of contradictory and silly ideas about what people should be eating, she said.
"It is particularly true that in the United States, we have a strong strain that goes back to colonial times of not wanting people to tell us what to eat and how to eat. That's at war with the "I know what's best for you attitude,' seen in the books of the last decades and centuries."
Davis said she takes issue with prescriptive, which refers to how people should eat, and proscriptive, which refers to how people should not eat, books such as the critically acclaimed "Food Rules" by Michael Pollan.
Pollan's book offers a prescriptive list of rules about how to eat and stay healthy.
"He writes very eloquently about contemporary issues with food, but he's not looking critically; it's not looking at [food] in terms of gender, races or culture; it's not nuanced the way it should be," she said.
Daniel Remar, a graduate student in MET, said he wished the lecture had been more straight-forward.
"The lecture was definitely thought-provoking," he said. "However, I wish it was a bit more focused and simplified. The lecture didn't change what I want to eat specifically but makes me think about eating and how I, and contemporary Americans, eat."
However, he said he appreciated Davis' address of culinary books.
"I like how Mrs. Davis addressed the recent flood and onset of non-scholarly books, and how that sudden influx of books has somewhat diluted the field of food study on the scholarly level. It is a challenge that we as students in the field have to address."
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