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There’s a germ of an idea here–there are more conceptual, sometimes abstract covers of contemporary books like Mindless Eating, Fast Food Nation or Heat. And Smith’s individual design analysis, while scattered (she doesn’t cover the more abstract stuff), isn’t that horrible, despite clunkers like, “The ’60s may not have been a good era for design.” But the frame she creates for the discussion is just too glib. It can’t remotely support what she’s trying to hang from it.
“Way back in that hazy bygone age that we now refer to as the 1990s, if you went to the store to buy a nonfiction book about food, you would most likely come home with a book like this one–books that were kind of eating porn, in which people traveled all over the world looking for the most perfect, exquisite loaf of bread, or the most tender baby sheep that charmingly scampers and gambols on the sun-dappled Tuscan hills…”
