…don’t read this book.

Well, go ahead, but be ready, in the last third, for lots of sinews, blood and guts, as former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford heads to Tuscany to apprentice with the Dante-quoting, raw-meat loving butcher of the subtitle, Dario Cecchini.

And before that, whether you’re carnivore, herbivore or omnivore, be prepared for the slightly disturbing image of Mario Batali rifling through the garbage in the kitchen of Babbo, digging out bits that the kitchen staff had deign unworthy for cooking, but Batali deemed….worthy.

But then, that is the point of Heat..where does food come from? What is the relationship between where the food comes from, who prepares it and what it is…what it signifies?

Not a new question, but certainly addictively explored by Buford in this account of his odyssey from Manhattan kitchen drudge to apprentice butcher in Tuscany, with over a year in Batali’s kitchen in between. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, even as I had to wonder at a couple of points, primarily…did Buford really carry  a 200+ pig carcass on his scooter through Manhattan, cart it up to his apartment and work for 6 days (and on the 7th…he rested) practicing what he’d learned at Dario’s from the Maestro? I’ll trust that he did, but I’d still pay money to see a picture. For more reasons than one, I’ll admit.

Sara Dickerman at Slate gives a good review, which presents the high points so I don’t have to – she doesn’t address a question that kept popping up in my mind as I read this, though…despite the first-person nature of the tale and not-infrequent revelations of his inner life, I never quite grasped where this sudden passion to immerse himself in the kitchen came from, at this point, for this reason, at this level. It’s a small point, but it nagged. Perhaps it’s a simple as "I like to cook" + "This will make a good book." Which is a perfectly good thing.

What Buford finally comes to is this: that the essential revolution in food that’s occurred is not about slow and fast food. It’s about Small and Big food – or a shift in power from the producer to the consumer. Essentially, food has been ripped from its local roots and as such, its cultural significance – as an expression of a locality, as a bearer of both family and social history – is disappearing.

So what we have here is a good read – some philosophical/cultural musings, plus some celebrity dishing plus the tracing of what and how a vocation is discovered and nurtured plus the heady, frantic world of the restaurant kitchen.

I’m hungry. But for some reason…not for steak.

(Not that I ever am anyway. But those summer tomatoes are even more appealing than they usually are at this moment…)