Food as Social History : JAMES BEARD, <i> By Robert Clark (HarperCollins: $27.50, 357 pp.)</i>

Do not mistake this for one of those denatured celebrity swipes that all too often masquerade as biographies. It seems these days that anyone who’s been famous for 10 minutes or dead for 12 gets a book, many of which read like dozens of press clippings strung together.

But this life of James Beard, who dominated the American food scene for almost 50 years, is as much a work of social history as it is the biography of a single individual.

Author Robert Clark recognized that Beard lived at that most fascinating of intersections, where national and individual interests meet.

By choosing to write about Beard--about whom Julia Child said, “In the beginning there was Beard,” as though he had created our national cuisine single-handedly--he has written about much more. Many of today’s food gurus made their way because of (or in spite of) their relationship with a difficult master.

James Beard was born in Portland, Ore., in 1903, and if the circumstances of one’s birth presage the life he will lead, Beard was destined from the first to stand out. He weighed, according to various reports, 13 or 14 pounds, and his parents were an unusual match: Mary, who arrived in Toronto from her native England at 17 and finally settled in Portland, where she carved a niche for herself as the owner of a small boarding house and a proponent of high-quality, if simple, food; and John, who chose a bride primarily because he, a widower, needed help with a recalcitrant daughter.

Beard the elder had little interest in his family, and spent most of his time in Chinatown, where he eventually sired another child.

But Mary Beard projected her formidable ambitions on the one man in her household who paid attention to her--her son, James. He inherited her interest in food, and was stamped with her desire for recognition: the perfect recipe for a food celebrity.

As Clark explains, the country was ready for Beard just at the time that he was prepared to abandon his theatrical aspirations and turn a sideline--catering for friends--into the centerpiece of his life.

There are fashions in food, as in any other aspect of our culture, and the economics of food production and consumption had changed during Beard’s childhood. The small local producers his mother revered, and sought out for both her hotel and her home, were being edged out by large corporate concerns that could save people money and offer them reassuring, if too often tasteless, uniformity. The home economists came along and told people that eating too well--eating for taste and sensation--was some kind of a sin, and that the real value of food was in its purely nutritional value, as though it were so many lumps of coal for the fire.

Beard’s physical presence, particularly his impressive girth, advertised his unabashed love of food; like his mother, he loved dishes based on whatever bounty a particular region had to offer. But he also had a remunerative pact with the devil--endorsement deals with everyone from Green Giant vegetables to Pillsbury, just the sort of corporate suppliers who suffocated the small local producers he had been brought up to respect. Self-hatred was at the center of Beard’s professional life. However much the foodie public might love him, he failed to satisfy himself (or perhaps his mother), and was besieged by bitter doubt.

Clark has amassed a mountain of material, and has the self-confidence of a fine cook who sees connections between ingredients that others, tied to the literal reality of a recipe, might miss. Sometimes the prose can get a bit heavy; he has a tendency to try to fold the most glancing bit of information into his overall themes. But even the slower passages are fascinating, and the book an ambitious success.

The general citizenry may think that people who dwell on what they eat are peripheral; their concerns insignificant and self-indulgent. Clark’s work is a triumphant retort. He understands that the best food writing is not so much about how the grub is, but about who’s eating it and why.