Where'd the Culture Go?

You ever drive from one neighborhood to the next in a city/suburb and notice that every shopping center is exactly the SAME.

It's depressing. Mom & Pop stores and restaurants (I.E. PRIVATE BUSINESSES) are apparently long a thing of the past. Does that mean capitalism has passed us by too (I.E. competition, creative thinking and diversity in the marketplace)?

Regardless of the answer to that very complex question, the homogenous options that appear to the masses as "what they want," seem to exist in the cookbook market too - at least on the bestseller list.

Read what Nancy Leson, of the Seattle Times, blogged about, then come back to me....


The thing that genuinely disturbs me about the prevalence of celebrity chefs is that many of them work for TV stations, which are provably owned by one of five great media conglomerates (Disney, Time Warner, NewsCorp, Viacom (used to be CBS), and General Electric (own NBC). There's Bertelsmann in Germany too - but I'm talkin' U.S. here.

So a lot of the celebrity chefs seem to fit in a corporately-defined box, but they still influence our culture.

This 'possibility' disturbs me because it seems yet another identifiable example of how our society becoming homogeneous. The end result, at least for cookbooks, are products that lack individuality and a unique culinary cultural experience.

Which is to unabashedly say that FRP does a great thing by publishing regional/local community cookbooks.

One of our classics is River Road Recipes, from the Junior League of Baton Rouge.

I bought this book for all my family one Christmas when I was at LSU - this was well before I even came to work for FRP.

Why did I buy a cookbook that called for ingredients like raccoon, dove and squirrel?
Because the chapter for "Game" alone is a cultural trove.
Who doesn't want an original recipe for "Squirrel Country Style," or "Coon a la Delta."

I sure did, and I wanted my family to have them too.

While my Oregon people may never skin a squirrel for supper, the point is that people used to. They probably often needed to and were not above it. And it's fascinating to see where we've been and actually apply thought to where we're going.

So basically, FRP has been preserving food culture since 1961. I need to monitor the lifespan of some of these celebrity chefs.

They have nothing on a book that's been a bestseller like River Road Recipes: 1959, thank you very much.