BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Contrarian Chowhound Weighs In

An Economist Gets Lunch, by Tyler Cowen
By DWIGHT GARNER Published: April 10, 2012

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Tyler Cowens book An Economist Gets Lunch arrives on the table like a big, unidentifiable, whey-colored casserole. After 75 pages youre still poking at it, thinking, What is this thing? and Can I order something else?
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Jake Guevara/The New York Times

AN ECONOMIST GETS LUNCH

New Rules for Everyday Foodies By Tyler Cowen 293 pages. Dutton. $26.95.

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Economic Theory Plots a Course for Good Food (April 11, 2012)

For a while I thought I had a bead on its contents. Mr. Cowen is a right-leaning economist and a contrarian foodie. He takes aim at a fat target: food-world pretentiousness. He attempts to skewer the slow-food, eat-local and eat-fresh movements; to him, theyre expensive and snobbish. He praises modern agribusiness. He admires the genetically modified animals and produce that opponents call Frankenfood. Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, shouldAlice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit. These observations include: Theres nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer; buying green products seems to encourage individuals to be less moral; and a contender for Orwellian sentence of the year technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun. Whats cognitively dissonant about An Economist Gets Lunch is that Mr. Cowen combines this needling with his own brand of chowhound hipsterism. His book is also a long, Calvin Trillin-like ode to tamale stands and strip-mall joints and ethnic food, the more exotic the better.

These cuisines appeal to the economist in him because theyre cheap and innovative. His book is packed with sentences like Bolivian, Laotian and North Korean are staples of my dining out and I know how Husband and Wife Lung Slices taste (not bad). This combination of elements takes some getting used to. Reading Mr. Cowen he is a professor of economics at George Mason University near Washington, the author of a best-selling e-book titled The Great Stagnation, and a food blogger is like watching a middle-aged man in a blue blazer play Hacky Sack at a My Morning Jacket concert. An Economist Gets Lunch might have worked if, aesthetically, it wasnt rather dismal. Its flat, padded with filler, flecked with factual errors and swollen with a kind of reverse snobbery thats nearly as wince-inducing as anything youll hear at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn. The quality of Mr. Cowens prose varies wildly. Many of his sentences read as if he composed them before entirely waking from a nap. Heres an example: The more fundamental problem is that labels do not encompass the same economywide information that is communicated by the price system in its assessment of competing uses for resources. Word-goo of this sort creeps in everywhere. One of his favorite books is assessed this way: I found his writing compelling and the photos full of striking colors. Items on ones plate are foodstuffs. You sense in almost every chapter that hes stretching thin material. Thus the ponderous detours into much-trampled areas like the history of barbecue, the varieties of Chinese food and how to choose kitchen equipment. Truisms are sprinkled like whatever the opposite of salt is. Barbecue restaurants often have idiosyncratic names, he announces, to aliens I suppose. Like Bubbas. Mr. Cowen presents the wisdom of the ages as if it were a series of dispatches from the gastronomic front lines. To find good food and not get fleeced, he recommends, leave the city centers and seek marginal areas. Mr. Trillin has been saying this for at least 40 years. I suspect Thucydides preferred the little joint on a side street to the place with the fountains where the waiters peeled customers grapes. Speaking of Mr. Trillin, this book makes reference to the kind of ostentatious restaurants he used to jokingly refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. Mr. Cowen quotes his patron saint incorrectly, replacing House with Haus. Not a big deal. Except that this mistake arrives on Page 2, rattling your confidence. Mr. Cowen later writes, Google brings up over a million mentions for tofu fajitas. That sounds crazy, so you check it. It turns out that Google offers only about 30,000 mentions of tofu fajitas; giving it a wider search range (without quotation marks) brings it up to about 115,000. Confidence further rattled.

Deep down theres nothing foodies loathe more than other foodies. Mr. Cowens prose is animated by his dislike of sanctimonious, more-organic-than-thou types the foodie liberal elite but his book is its own elaborate exercise in conspicuous consumption and reverse snobbery. He flies around the globe, eats at the most expensive restaurants and sneers at nearly all of them. For a few years running Noma, in Copenhagen, has been judged the worlds best restaurant, but my meal there bored me, he declares in a typical formulation. Soon enough hes back home slumming around in decrepit neighborhoods for food carts and talking about the four spice grinders he owns. Lost inside An Economist Gets Lunch are some worthy if unoriginal arguments. Mr. Cowen praises agribusiness because the worlds billions must be fed. He disagrees with the ethos that ones meals are only as good as ones ingredients. Many ethnic cuisines deploy cunning spices and sauces to enliven mediocre ingredients. This is good food that everyone can afford and enjoy. In relating all this, however, Mr. Cowen comes perilously close to suggesting that we shouldnt care about where and how our food is grown. As long as we can cloak the test-tube mush were given with some fish sauce and peppercorns and I have nothing against fish sauce and peppercorns our souls and stomachs will align in delight. To give Mr. Cowen his due, he made me smile a few times. When choosing a restaurant, he suggests that if the people inside look happy, run the other way. He prefers spots where the diners appear to be fighting and pursuing blood feuds. Bitterness and gloom bespeak seriousness of purpose. Yet I felt gloomy reading An Economist Gets Lunch. Its an argument for exoticism that tastes like paste.