Eating for Beginners
An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A memoir of a year spent working at a Brooklyn restaurant—and on a series of farms—to get the lowdown on organic, local, ethical cooking. Includes recipes!
Food was always important to Melanie Rehak. She studied the experts on healthy nutrition, from Michael Pollan to Eric Schlosser to Wendell Berry, cooking, preparing, and sourcing what she thought were the best ingredients. So when her son turned out to be an impossible eater, dedicated to a diet of yogurt and peanut butter, she realized she needed to know more than just the basics of thoughtful eating—she needed to become a pro.
Thus began a year-long quest to understand food: what we eat, how it’s produced, how it’s prepared, and what really matters when it comes to socially aware, environmentally friendly, and healthy eating. By working at Applewood, a locally sourced Brooklyn restaurant, and volunteering her time to farming, milking, cheese making, and fishing, she learned the ins-and-outs of how to shop, cook, and eat right—all while discovering some delicious recipes along the way.
Wry, wise, and warm, Eating for Beginners is a delicious and informative journey into two of life’s greatest and most complicated pleasures: food and motherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rehak (Girl Sleuth), a Brooklyn resident and new mom, spent a year toiling delightfully inside the kitchen of a neighboring restaurant to get a handle on where the food we consume really comes from. Volunteering to help long hours at Applewood, a small restaurant in Brooklyn owed by trained chefs Laura and David Shea and devoted to the idea of supporting local farmers and sustainable agriculture, Rehak was able to observe and participate in the "choices and the compromises" of gathering, preparing, and cooking the food we consumers pay good money to eat. At the same time as she manned the garde-manger station, preparing aesthetically pleasing salads and cold appetizers, Rehak had to deal with her finicky toddler, Jules, at home as he refused to eat even toast. Eventually, Rehak was happily promoted to the fish station, and Jules took a bite of a chicken leg. By turns, Rehak proved game at making cheese at a diary farm in Connecticut, sorting beans at an organic vegetable farm in Hamden, N.Y., and, hilariously, getting violently seasick while catching monkfish aboard a lobster boat off Long Beach Island. Lovely recipes at the end of each chapter display her culinary achievements. As part of a welcome, continuing spate of recent works concerned with rehabilitating American eaters, Rehak's chronicle is pleasantly lowkey, generous, and nondidactic.
