Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch

syrup, and Maxwell House Coffee (and soon Birds Eye frozen foods). The disastrous effects of the Depression on small retailers and farmers had only encouraged these national companies and the large supermarkets.
    Charlotte Snyder was the only classmate of Julia’s who remembered the food, beyond a general comment about its fat and sauce content. Charlotte’s father owned Batchelder and Snyder, a large meat distributor/wholesale food business in Boston (much later bought by Birds Eye), and when he visited the college he was mightily impressed when he was served sweetbreads. Though Charlotte would eventually go on to the Cordon Bleu (before Julia did) and make a career in the food world as an editor of the Larousse Gastronomique (1961), she claimed that “none of us was into food then.”
    While Julia and Charlotte were eating tasty junk food, Americans were being sold foodstuff for its purity, uniformity and “scientific” goodness. Crisco advertised its product as “used wherever a housewife takes pride in a clean, sweet kitchen.” Baker’s cocoa was “scientifically blended” and “corrects the action of the digestive organs.” Nothing in the official advertising about freshness, taste, aroma, or pleasure. Little wonder these students did not care about food preparation or careful dining. They had a kitchenette on the second floor of Hubbard Hall, but no one remembers any cooking: they stored ice cream in the refrigerator; Julia had a reputation for never doing the dishes.
    Nevertheless, during Julia’s freshman year, an event occurred in St. Louis that would eventually make a major impression on her life. Irma Rombauer, a German-American widow, and her friends put together a collection of recipes that they self-published: The Joy of Cooking . Five years later, after many rejections, it was printed by Bobbs-Merrill, and its sales, thanks to its accessibility and practical approach, increased steadily to more than a million a decade later. It would become Julia’s first cookbook after she herself discovered the joy of cooking.
    Rombauer’s book, emphasizing the pleasure of cooking and eating, went against a trend dominating American cooking for two generations: domestic science, which tried to marry science and cooking. It was a trend stoked by the food-processing companies and factory farms, which emphasized sanitation, uniformity, and “health.” Perhaps the Depression Dust Bowl helped undermine an agrarian society and fresh produce, but it was greed and the hair-netted “scientists” in the lab (no cooks need apply) that destroyed American eating habits. Their crowning achievement, suggests Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad , was the invention of Crisco, advertised as an “Absolutely New Product” of scientific cookery. Crisco ads pointed out its “pure cream white” appearance and the fact that it never spoils (but not that it never leaves the arteries). This “model food of the twentieth century” is probably what Julia’s jelly donuts were cooked in.
    Ironically, it was the work of the grandfather of her classmate Catherine Atwater that laid the foundation of the domestic science movement. Catherine Galbraith would discover decades later that Wilbur Olin Atwater, who had studied in Germany and was professor of chemistry at Wesleyan before he became the head of the Office of Experiment Stations in Washington, DC, was the pioneer of nutrition, the popularizer of the word “calorie,” and the developer of food composition tables. His numerous books, published between 1887 and 1898, made him the first to investigate food and digestion; he became the “mentor of scientific cooks.” (Atwater’s father was a Methodist preacher who founded a temperance newspaper near Burlington, Vermont.)
    T RADITIONS
    When the chapel bell rang, as it did unannounced every October, Julia jumped for joy. It was Mountain Day, and by tradition everyone left the campus to go out into the New England foliage. Julia’s