August 15 marks Julia Child’s 102nd birthday. That’s hardly a banner anniversary, but Julia’s birthday should be recognized as a national holiday every year.
For we have her to thank for all the Americans who eat something besides TV dinners every night. Of course, we also have her to thank for the glut of food porn, er, media that comprises an industry unto itself.
Really, the entire Food Network should credit Julia as its founder. Without her, there’d be no Emeril Lagasse, Jamie Oliver, Tom Colicchio, Barefoot Contessa, nor Pioneer Woman in our public eye. There’d probably not even be an Anthony Bourdain or a “Hell’s Kitchen.” (There’d likely still be a Rachael Ray, though. With her aggressive cheer and predilection for shortcuts and catchphrases, Ray is such a 50s throwback that she’s one gelatin mold away from being the new Betty Crocker.)
It’s also possible that, without Julia, we wouldn’t recognize food literature as a legitimate genre. True, A. J. Liebling and M. F. K. Fisher were already writing brilliantly about travel and dining long before Julia published her seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. But most publishers didn’t believe an American cookbook market existed for anything but chirpy homages to cake mixes and cans of mushroom soup.
We forget now, but in the 1960s, in the the wake of the second-wave feminist imperative to liberate women from domestic slavery (an admirable imperative!), and with the rise of fast food and new food-preparation technology, meals with integrity and complex flavors were not being prepared in the average U.S. household. Full stop.
In fact, were it not for the forward thinking of editor Judith Jones–a legacy in her own right!–this groundbreaking instructional tome may never have been published by Julia and her partners Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. But publish they did, and the book launched a literary revolution of cookbooks and food essays, biographies, autobiographies, and, eventually, blogs and social media verticals. It also launched the career of Judith herself, who went on to introduce many other seminal cuisines and culinary philosophies to the American public. (Jones also proved a wonderful food writer in her own right; her The Tenth Muse may be one of the most underrated eating memoirs around.)
A child-free Child, Julia reframed cooking for the American public. She approached the everyday ritual of cooking with pleasure rather than resignation, and thrilled to devise the finest meals she could unfussily make for herself and her best friend, business partner, and husband Paul. If Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was demonizing all housework as drudgery – and for sure that polemic was necessary to counteract the post-war brainwashing of the American woman – Julia Child lumbered on the scene to declare, in her oft-imitated squawk, that cooking was not only physically and spiritually nourishing but fun. So fun, in fact, that everyone – men and women – should want in on the game.
What’s more, Julia declared, good food belonged to everyone, not just the wealthy. Fresh off her years abroad, she was keen to remind us that many of her recipes would be considered mere peasant fare in France–nothing fancy, darlings.
Julia made good food democratic, and what’s more democratic than television? With her outsized personality and physicality, the lady was a natural at looming large on a small screen so PBS was smart enough to offer her a show. An empire was launched.
As a tween, I acted on a show filmed at WGBH, the Boston public television studio that produced her cooking shows, and I remember the echo of her big laugh, her six-foot-two frame towering over the men who flanked her as she strode down halls. To a young girl, Julia was that rare female role model who ruled the media roost with charismatic intelligence rather than batting lashes. She might not have considered herself a feminist icon but I worshipped her as a domestic goddess who unleashed her powers on the world, not just her kitchen.
I knew she was why my family ate something besides chop suey for supper. I knew she was why I could envision a future in media that did not require cosmetic surgeries of the body and soul.
The irony, of course, is Julia likely would have detested the direction food media has taken in the decade since her 2004 death, two days before her 92nd birthday. Upholding cooking as joyful, not frivolous, and rejecting faddishness of all sorts, she would have been appalled by today’s “Top Chef” and “Cupcake Wars” battlefield and likely would have rolled her eyes over the preciousness of today’s “farm-to-table” kvelling and culinary personal testimony. (Witness her legendary dismissal of Julia obsessive, blogger Julie Powell).
To Mrs. Child, the first-person voice was best used to connect people to their individual instincts rather than to trumpet one’s own personality. The number of people who watch hours of food TV but never cook would have filled her with despair.
Julia always said she’d “lived at exactly the right time,” and while it’s hard to imagine a cultural moment that wouldn’t benefit from her presence, she might have been correct on this point as on so many others. The lady stirred us out of our national bad-food coma and then, just as we were devolving into a food media circus, left us with a legacy of principled culinary pleasure. Her fluty, funny voice will always be accessible on page and on video, and it is our responsibility to keep listening.
This essay was originally published in Word and Film.