Digging into heaping helping of ‘Food City’
THE book “Food City,” so well-reviewed in The New York Times several months ago, has been decorating my coffffffffffffee table for a while. I had pleasurably been saving this tome, subtitled “Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York,” for my spare time.
As we know “spare time” seldom comes, so the other night I dug right into this intriguing histor y of not only food itself, but the stor y of production of food and its transport in Gotham over four centuries.
This stor y is one heck of a delicious entertainment, brilliantly written by Joy Santlofer. (Her daughter, Doria, completed the massive work, in honor of her mom.) It has been vouched for by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author Mike Wallace of “Gotham,” Paul Freedman’s “Ten Restaurants that Changed America,” The James Beard winner, Laura Schenone, of “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove” and Amy Bentley, author of “Inventing Baby Food.”
This work is rapidly becoming a runaway hit with its re velations of the fall of the gastronomical empire. There are also vital but unappetizing tales of slaver y, immigration, unions, child labor and racial and ethnic wars, etc.
But the chief thing raising my interest was my partner Denis Ferrara. He is a guy whose tastes run the gamut from the fraught and furious hotbeds of politics, current TV and movies, books of ever y genre — not to mention his passion for klieg lights, classic show biz lore, Marilyn, Elizabeth, Dietrich, etc. His eye fell on “Food City” and he exclaimed, “Oh, I’ve been dying to read this!”
A greater recommendation was never heard!
SHORTLY before the holidays, and after the election, the fabled movie, theater and cabaret scribe, Rex Reed, sent out an email to his many friends and fans, regarding The Observer, the paper he’d long worked for, as it went under as a print entity.
But never let it be said that the always sunny and optimistic Rex, couldn’t squeeze lemonade out of lemons. Here in fact, is his message:
“FRIENDS — I have been severely saddened by the termination of the print edition of the New York Observer, a publication I have appeared in for the past 25 years. But I am happy to tell you I am still writing more reviews than ever — on the Observer website.
The only difffffffffffference is I am now online. Anyway, it has literally thousands more readers than the print edition of the paper ever had. I am grateful to still be in print at all, only in a difffffffffffferent way. So if you are inter- ested or curious enough to want to see what I am doing, I am sending you a link that cuts straight to the chase.
Put this link in your column of “Favorites,” click on it whenever you want to read a review of mine and you will bypass the rest of the paper completely and land on my reviews exclusively — including the archives, which access all of the old fifilms and plays and cabaret acts I have reviewed in the past. Here is the link: http://observer.com/author/ rex-reed/.”
Speaking for ourselves, we couldn’t live without Rex’s expert critiques, whether appearing in a newspaper, written with a feather quill, on papyrus or online. Rex makes his pointed point, no matter the process. Long may he write!
THIS N’ THAT: Random Globe thoughts:
■ The Debbie Reynolds/Carrie Fisher tribute. Really? I could have done better on my home computer, drunk. Could they have spared that 47 seconds? And, as 2016 seemed unusually heavy-handed in celebrity losses (perhaps not, but it sure seemed that way) shouldn’t there have been a general In Memoriam?
■ Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn. Whatever they were going for, it didn’t go. Cringy!
■ “Moonlight” actress Janelle Monae looked like a dramatic head-to-toe dessert.