Per ardua ad astra.

ONE OF THE greatest changes I've seen during my lifetime concerns American attitudes toward food, drink, and health. (And, like everything else American, these changes will, before too long, affect the attitudes of the rest of the world.) Here in New York, at least, food and health have become sheer obsessions. People, even those who have other interests, will invariably talk about food, and food again, and what it does to them. "In" restaurants multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm; the average lifetime of such restaurants, as the owner of one told me, it two years or less, or the time it takes to get at least one's investment back. Meanwhile, customers come not to eat, but to see and to be part of the scene, the same person told me, so why should owners bother unduly about the food--meaning, why bother at all? Food and health are to our time what sex and politics were to the Sixties. Small wonder that there is little time, if any, left for canoodling or for the wish to improve the world; however ill guided that wish may have been, at least it did consider somebody besides oneself.

I'm working on a menu cookbook, and have seen some 1,500 or so menus from restaurants all across the country. I was surprised to see that the true food manias--distinguished by exotic and frequently unsuitable food combinations, and by the desperate striving to be different, to the point of the outlandish--are basically New York and California phenomena. The big cities between the coasts all have their one, two, or several trendy eating places, but what most folks eat remains what it was before raspberry vinegar and nouvelle regional hit, although I agree that more fish and chicken are being consumed as compared to red meats. But what is different across the land is the physical getup of the menus. My, how splendid they have become, with lots of special categories, such as Lite Eating, Vitamin-Packed, and so on, to make you think you're getting something more unusual than you really are.

As with clothes, there are different styles of menus, but the one thing they all have in common is the size. Menus nowadays resemble fashion models in being tall and on the stark, minimalist side, rather than displaying old-fashioned cuteness. White backgrounds are in, possibly because white paper is less expensive, and some menus are printed on laminated paper. Almost all menus explain what the dishes they mention consist of--a necessary feature considering the fancy names under which these dishes appear. For instance, Manhattan's very fancy Maurice gives you, for $27, "Le saumon frais marine au soja cuit a la vapeur et sa julienne de legumes," or, as printed in English below, "Steamed salmon marinated in soya sauce." It surprised me how carelessly many menus are proofread, especially those of some rather trendy and expensive New York Italian restaurants such as La Colonna, where I found four out of ten Italian dishes misspelt: this in a trendy and expensive Italian restaurant that prides itself on being Italian! What's more, I am constantly inundated with publicity releases about resaturants: Public-relations firms send them out, loudly and shamelessly praising their clients, and offering food writers free meals. Pfui!

In the wine world, meanwhile, the latest discovery is that wine and food are supposed to go together. California especially has latched on to the fact that the big bruisers, those overpowering brews the producers have been praising to the skies as "big," "complex," et cetera, are impossible to drink in a normal manner, that is, while eating. But now the cry for wine with food is up, as witness Julia Child's commercials for the California grape growers (though in all honesty I must say that Julia Child has always taken it for granted that people drink wine when they eat, as part of the meal). Wine publicists and wine writers are stressing the fact, and courses are given and books are written on how to match food and wine, which creates problems for the people who can afford the expensive California wines but who don't want to drink--or, for that matter, eat--because they want to stay thin and healthy. All this from a well-known food and wine advocate, who also pointed out to me the eating habits of America's power brokers. Power, he said, eats grilled fish and drinks mineral water--else there would be no Lite Eating, and Time magazine would not find it necessary to have mineral waters rated by food expert Mimi Sheraton.