‘The School of Essential Ingredients,’ ‘Food Matters,’

The School of

Essential Ingredients

A Novel

Erica Bauermeister

Putnam: 242 pp., $24.95

“Lillian believed in food the way some people do religion.” Growing up with a single mother who hides behind obsessive reading, Lillian discovers food as a way to draw her mother out and force her to engage with the world. As an adult, Lillian opens her own restaurant and cooking school. Her students bring their complicated lives to her Monday night classes and are, in the style of Isak Dinesen’s great story “Babette’s Feast” healed by the act of sharing food. There’s no shortage of novels featuring food and love, but what makes this one different is Bauermeister’s interest in slow food. Her writing is downright langorous when it comes to orange zesters (“the edge scalloped around the openings like frills on a petticoat”), avocados (“wrinkled and grumpy on the outside, green spring within”), potatoes boiling in a pot (“like passengers in a crowded bus”). The novel has that Berkeley/Pacific Northwest life-is-meals feeling. These days, that qualifies as escapist.

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Food Matters

A Guide to Conscious Eating

With More Than 75 Recipes

Mark Bittman

Simon & Schuster: 322pp., $24

“Eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours, while leaving all the lights on at home,” Mark Bittman writes. In his calm, convincing way, Bittman, a.k.a. “the Minimalist,” gives us yet another reason to eat better. Like Frances Moore Lappe in her 1971 classic, “Diet for a Small Planet,” Bittman appeals to his readers’ outrage that in eating the typical American diet and buying industrially produced food, we contribute to the rapid destruction of the planet. (This might be a better reason to stop eating junk food than simply losing weight.) “Factory farming, the overproduction of corn and soy, junk food -- these are just the most obvious examples of an agricultural production and marketing system gone awry.” The system Bittman calls “Big Food,” has, not surprisingly, spawned “Big Organic Food,” which, with its mass production and distribution, he writes, “defeats the purpose . . . to produce food in a way that sustains us and the planet.” Bittman is a fan of locally grown food, but he’s gentle with his agenda: less meat (a daily 3 ounces rather than the typical 8), more plants, fewer refined carbohydrates. It’s nothing new, but he’s less strident than many true believers.

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The Moon Opera

Bi Feiyu

Translated from the Chinese

by Howard Goldblatt

and Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 120 pp., $18

The literature of nostalgia is especially poignant when it bubbles up from a striving economic culture like China. It’s as if the horse race comes to an abrupt halt before the finish line and someone forces the viewers to notice the beauty of the horses. This novel plunges the reader into the world of Chinese opera. The chief executive of a cigarette company agrees to finance a production of “The Moon Opera” using the actress who made the opera famous some 20 years earlier when she was 19. “Everything about her -- her eyes, her interpretation, her enunciation, and the way she tossed the water sleeves of her costume -- was imbued with an inbred aura of tragedy.” The singer starves herself to lose the 25 pounds she has gained; she must also enter the frame of mind that made her performance so memorable: “a cloud formed by water.” The novel is full of proverbs, many to do with the corrupting influence of money and capitalism. “These days,” the narrator shrugs, “that thing called money was getting stranger all the time.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com