Think about the last time you ate out. Think about how much it took to get that meal to your table. It took farmers and ranchers and drivers and chefs and wait staff; it took creativity and time management. It’s a story, one with a diverse cast of characters and interwoven dreams, ambitions and disappointments.
Andrew Friedman wanted to tell one such story. In his meticulous, engrossing new book “The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food” the author of “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll” and “Knives at Dawn” traces the provenance of a single meal in a single night in a Chicago restaurant. “I just woke up one day with this idea,” Friedman told me during a recent “Salon Talks” conversation, adding “The very last line in the book was exactly the last line that I knew it was going to be when I woke up that morning five years ago."
