Calvin Trillin – GEORGE ROTHERT

Sustenance on the Road

People whose employment requires travel can be divided into two groups: those who eat at whatever is in the hotel or at the Applebee’s across the parking lot (Is there an Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar that’s in an actual neighborhood?) and those on the endless and often frustrating search for a good meal.

Calvin Trillin, on the road reporting for the New Yorker magazine’s “U.S. Journal,” became a food writer too, resulting from his quest for something decent to eat in strange towns. He found that hotel clerks and acquaintances always directed to what they considered the best place in town, what he referred to as the generic “La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine.”

Yelp and TripAdvisor are only incidentally helpful; even establishments with a lot of stars also have negative reviews because of small portion sizes or some slight by a server.
Zagat compiles reviews from those who consider themselves sophisticated diners in major cities.
AAA Tour Books try, but their restaurant listing stick pretty much to the mainstream and avoid the out of the ordinary
Michelin Guides cover only limited areas in this country and are directed at gourmands with unlimited funds or unlimited expense accounts.
Roadfood, the work of intrepid travelers and diners Jane and Michael Stern has been my consistent guide for local, sometimes quirky, places since before the Internet age. (Their newly “upgraded” web site is harder to navigate than its graphics-light predecessor.)
Santa Rosa’s favorite celebrity, Guy Fieri and his Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, will steer you to high-fat, high calorie dining.

Which brings us to Duncan Hines. Yes, Mr. Hines was a real person. From the 1920s through the ‘40s he traveled the country selling office supplies and looking for a clean restaurant with decent food. He carried a notebook to record his experiences.

Hines self-published his first edition of Adventures in Good Eating in 1936. It listed 475 restaurants. Word-of-mouth sales were so good, for the second year’s edition, he raised the price from $1.00 to $1.50. A revised edition was issued annually until he retired in 1954.

While not accepting advertising for his guides, he did lend the Duncan Hines name to food products. Today the Duncan Hines brand is owned by Pinnacle Foods, the folks who also bring us Armour, Tim’s Cascade Chips, Nalley, Wish-Bone, the Mrs. Paul’s and Butterworth’s, Swanson, Birds Eye, Vlasic and on and on.

Just a Spoonful of Sugar…

Many years ago my food-writer mother gave me a copy of the book “Sugar Blues” by William Duffy. The author blamed sugar for everything from acne to loose stools. We knew sugar was empty calories and was bad for our teeth. We all knew the real villain in an unhealthy diet was saturated fat. The USDA told us so with its Food Pyramid.

Guess what – sugar is bad, much worse than we’ve been led to believe. Turns out the sugar industry spent a lot of money commissioning purported studies to convince us that sugar wasn’t so bad. The National Confectioners Association claimed children who ate candy carried less poundage than those who didn’t. Coca-Cola funded a non-profit group to fight obesity, but claimed it had nothing to do with it.

Besides, making us a nation of fat people, sugar is also responsible for diabetes and heart disease. The scientific journal JAMA Internal Medicine has published a report disputing the sugar industry’s claims. Something to think about when you’re ordering that venti coffee-flavored beverage with whipped cream on top.

In fairness to my mother, she also introduced me to Calvin Trillin, with “American Fried,” a collection of pieces he wrote while travelling the country as a roving correspondent and trying to find something decent to eat.

Calvin Trillin – Part 1 and Part 2

Part 1

Calvin Trillin, longtime contributor to the New Yorker magazine, has a new book out: Jackson 1964 & Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America. It’s a collection of his pieces from the sixties and seventies, covering the civil rights movement. The timing of its release couldn’t be better. He reported not only the conflicts in the South, but all over the U.S.

“I couldn’t pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides — the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought people acting on such a belief should have their houses burned down — had an equally compelling case to make.”

Part 2

Years of travel for the New Yorker’s “U.S. Journal” sent Trillin on another quest: something decent to eat in an unfamiliar town. Growing up in Kansas City, “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” His first food essays were gathered in American Fried, published in 1974.

Mr. Trillin has also poked fun at wine aficionados, questioning whether a person can really tell the difference between red and white.

“I should probably tell you a little something about my background in the field. I have never denied that when I’m trying to select a bottle of wine in a liquor store I’m strongly influenced by the picture on the label. (I like a nice mountain, preferably in the middle distance.)”