Julia Child is less of a figure of history than a Great American Brand; to the degree this transformation was due to the efforts of the woman herself or an accident of fate is (at least for me) a little tricky to determine. Child had no children, and her husband, Paul Child, preceded her in death. Her estate is managed by a foundation bearing her name and a constellation of assorted private organizations, including her publishers and parts of Harvard University. Since her death in 2009, they have done spectacular work in capitalizing her. Her biography, written and compiled with her husband’s grand-nephew, My Life in France was finally published in 2006, leading to the more popular portions of Julie & Julia (2009), a Nora Ephron film which neatly splices My Life in France with Julie Powell’s blog-cum-memoir, Julie & Julia.
Julia McWilliams met Paul Child while in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in the service of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). While working with the OSS, Child acted in a number of roles, ranging from clerical work to developing a shark repellent. Ephron’s Julie & Julia opens in-relationship-res on Paul and Julia, but well into the runtime, Stanley Tucci as Paul Child casually reveals at a dinner party that the two of them were working as spies in China during the second world war. This is not an overstatement, and Julia Child’s accomplishments are touted by no less than the CIA themselves. Child’s accomplishments in cooking and on television are her second act.
Julia Child’s story is well known at this point, and even becoming better known as her biography is mined for ever more content and her life massaged into ever more saleable shapes. Anyway, did you know Ina Garten wrote nuclear policy for the Ford and Carter administrations?
Ina Rosenberg met Jeffrey Garten while visiting her brother at Dartmouth. Jeffrey Garten himself is quite accomplished, with a lifelong career in government and academia. But the thing is, Ina Garten’s accomplishments in cooking and television are her second act.
This fact flies around the internet intermittently— I first encountered it on Twitter, I think. Anyway, Sandra Lee— Kwanzaa Cake, two shots of vodka— she was the first lady of New York. Sandra Lee’s ex-husband is Andrew Cuomo.
Taste is not a natural force. Although there are outliers, such as the “cilantro soap” gene and the “raw tomato” gene, taste is not innate but created. A truly astounding amount of industry is devoted to directing and creating taste. Some efforts to shape taste are more obvious than others (one of my most treasured cookbooks was published by Hershey’s Chocolate in the early nineties) and some feel outright conspiratorial to accurately describe. Did you know the “bacon” craze of the early Obama admin was the endpoint of a pork lobbying effort that began in the 90’s? Did you know tilapia’s widespread availability starting in the mid-aughts was due to the Colorado Department of Corrections figuring out how to successfully farm fish with prison labor?
The strategies to dictate taste are various—- there are subsidies directly to farmers and ‘strategic reserves’ for purchasing and storing surplus. There’s specific institutional supply chains (school lunches, military base grocery stores and restaurants, prisons) and marketing campaigns (Got Milk?). Fundamentally, what you eat and what you want to eat is shaped by the coalition between private industry and the government, at a scale that is only rivaled by defense. In many ways, the post-war food industry is the twin sibling of the defense industry, both the offspring of a union between the government and business.
It’s not surprising that the women at the forefront of developing and evangelizing ‘good American taste’ are connected and powerful. More simply, that sentence could be reframed as “connected and powerful women are connected and powerful.” Perhaps more accurately, this shouldn’t be surprising, but is. It feels like a betrayal that the nice woman with the weird voice on the television making coq au vin was a operative; am I crazy for feeling that way? The midcentury’s favorite bastard is conspiracy, of course. Conspiracy’s twin? Soft power.
The United States is not the only country to use food as a tool of soft power— the history of Thai food and “gastrodiplomacy” is fascinating (pad Thai is as ‘authentic’ as the Dorito but goddamn is it delicious); there are two Star Wars movies older than ciabatta, which was invented as an Italian alternative to the baguette. Is the problem that everything the US government does feels sinister? Is the problem that in this instance, this power is being directed inward instead of outward?
The purpose of a cooking show is intrinsically didactic. The viewer is not just taught how to make a specific dish, but is taught how to perform the habitude of the dish. Fourth of July Barbecue; Busy Weeknight Dinners; Date Night Classics— the storytelling of the cooking show instructs the viewer how to make the dishes as well as when and for whom they should be deployed. The idea that domestic labor must be educated predates the television by centuries; this is also the central purpose of a cookbook. Domestic education has also had more formalized outlets, including Home Economics and Childbirth & Parenting Classes.
Domestic education has also had more straightforwardly sinister outlets, such as the Reichsbräuteschule, or the institutions in which young women learned to be good brides for SS Officers; the cookbooks made by the Japanese Imperial government for colonial brides in Korea. All kinds of governments have been curious about what the domestic labor is doing within the domicile and have made enormous investments to make sure they’re doing it the right way. Julia Child and her sorority of successors are de facto government mouthpieces, if not de jure given where PBS funding comes from. All of these powerful, well-connected women with powerful, well-connected husbands brought directly into the home to provide a friendly, unflappable education to busy/baffled/harried girlfriends/wives/mothers.
Following the collapse of the National Endowment for the Arts, the only meaningful cultural investment the government has made within my lifetime has been in food. Now we are experiencing a collapse in government spending for everything except explicit wickedness. In the twilight of the government-industrial complex, the flickering last embers of the monoculture, I do wonder— who will be the next operative we invite into our homes? And what on earth will she cook?
