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Taste By Greg Atkinson

American Born

There will be no sufferin' with this scrumptious succotash

EARLY THIS SPRING, I paid a visit with my family to the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History. My wife accompanied one son, who was determined to see "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War," while I dragged our other son to see Julia Child's kitchen. Julia may have been "The French Chef," but for millions of Americans she was also an icon. And over the decades, as she worked with and influenced American cooks from lots of culinary traditions, her life and work came to stand for what it means to eat like an American.

Ask any two Americans what that means, and you'll likely get three answers. A young nation easily influenced and not deeply rooted in its own culinary traditions, ours is a country as confused about what to eat as any people ever have been.

Every year, cookbook authors and food professionals of the International Association of Culinary Professionals gather to examine trends and traditions in food. The conference culminates in an award ceremony. This spring, the gathering was in Seattle, and the IACP Cookbook Award in the American category went to Joan Nathan for "The New American Cooking," which promises readers "new flavors from around the world."

I couldn't help wonder, is our food a salmagundi of flavors from other places? No. Nathan's book also provides "fresh ways with old favorites." So in addition to "Couscous from Timbuktu" and "Chicken Yasa from Gambia," we get "Pancakes with Blue Corn" and "Nouvelle American Crabcakes." But what is a home cook or an American diner to make of all this variety? And how do we choose what to eat?

In another book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," author Michael Pollan waxes eloquently about what he calls "our national eating disorder." Citing the Atkins craze as an example of "The American Paradox," Pollan paints us as "a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily." His book traces the natural history of four distinctly different meals:

First, he examines a McDonald's meal eaten in the car while zooming along the freeway. The quintessential example of a meal "at the end of the industrial food chain," the fast food is derived almost entirely from corn, that quintessential American food. The beef in the hamburger is corn-fed; so is the chicken in the nuggets. The soda, the burger bun and even the salad dressing are amped up with high-fructose corn sweetener, and myriad additives — some 13, according to Pollan — are derived from corn.

Next comes a meal from "Big Organic." The industrialized organic-farm movement serves up a tastier meal just slightly tainted by moral quandary: "Only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is used on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around."

There's a meal harvested on a "beyond organic" grass farm in Virginia. And the book wraps up with a meal hunted and gathered from the forest. Wild yeast leavens the homemade bread, morels are served with handmade pasta, and the main course of "Braised Leg and Grilled Loin of Wild Sonoma Pig" was shot by the cook.

The two meals that bookend Pollan's history are the extremes. "The pleasures of one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance." They are, in the author's words, "equally unreal and equally unsustainable." Without these two extremes, "food would be — well, what it always was, neither slow nor fast, just food: this particular plant, or that particular animal, grown here or there, prepared this way or that."

When I read those lines, I was reminded again of Julia Child, and all the different things she must have cooked in the kitchen now enshrined at the Smithsonian. I remembered also seeing a little refrigerator magnet from Seattle's Pike Place Market, a place Julia truly loved, the place where I first met her. I thought that if she were still with us, I'd like to walk the stalls of the Market with her and talk about American food. While we talked, we could gather ingredients for a little lunch. I think I would make something simple and familiar like Succotash, a very American dish that Julia liked a lot.

Greg Atkinson is author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.