Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen
by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle
Delacorte Press, 2005

List Price: $22.00
Amazon Price: $14.30

Review by Jennifer Sader

The runaway success of Mirelle Guiliano's French Women Don't Get Fat was bound to inspire other women from other countries with lower obesity rates than the United States (I think that's all of them) to tell us why they don't get fat either. Naomi Moriyama (with her husband William Doyle) has written Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen to remind Americans that the diet of the Japanese is widely regarded as one of the healthiest in the world.

Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat closely mirrors French Women Don't Get Fat, with the author's nostalgic tales of her naturally slim girlhood, her first encounter with unwanted pounds after sampling too much rich American food while living in the United States, and the effortless return to thinness that came from returning to the food habits of her homeland.

Look no further than your local "Japanese" restaurant if you want to learn how to make California rolls and BLT "sushi or flip on the food channel if you're hoping to master the wacky spectacle fare created by the Iron Chefs and ceremoniously displayed in their highly ritualized presentations.

If you want to learn how to make the "ordinary every day" cooking of Moriyama's Tokyo youth, pick up the book, read it through and tab all the recipes that sound good as you peruse the pages. Though many of the ingredients, like bonito flakes, might be unfamiliar to U.S. kitchens, the recipes are simple and within reach of the adventurous home cook with access to an Asian market. For those who are interested, the author supplies a list of essentials for creating your own Tokyo kitchen, wherever you live. For those who don't live in a major metropolitan area, she gives suggestions on where to buy Japanese ingredients, dishes, and cookware online.

The best parts of the book are the rich, evocative descriptions of food and family celebrations. "In the United States, you have the ice cream truck and its signature melody, which gathers all the children within earshot. Our version was a wagon, and the treat we flocked to was a vegetable that was sold by the pound. The sweet potato man walked from street to street, singing his sweet potato song, the wheels of his wagon sending the fallen leaves flying into the air."

In another passage, she writes of visiting her grandparents' fruit farm, "I remember peeking into the warehouse and staring, awestruck, at the mountains of tangerines ripening on the shelves. I felt like Alice in a Wonderland of Orange."

Moriyama emphasizes the importance of the "Seven Pillars of Japanese Home Cooking:" Fish, vegetables, rice, soy, noodles, tea, and fruit. The advantages of this kind of diet are easy to understand, and like Guiliano, she reminds readers about the importance of shopping and eating with the seasons.

Both books are about getting back in touch with the pleasures that come with consuming foods so fresh the dirt that housed, fed and protected them from seed to maturity still clings to their parts when offered for sale at specialty stores, farmer's markets and roadside stands. The books give a look inside lives and pantries that don't include highly processed American indulgences and diet foods and the sugar, sodium, fat, artificial ingredients and flavors that go with them. .

It will be interesting to see whether we will have to see Czechoslovakian Women Don't Get Fat, Swedish Women Don't Get Fat, and Egyptian Women Don't Get Fat before Americans start to realize that fearing food is not bringing us thinness or health. I don't know about the rest of you, but if being "healthy" means I have to live on nothing but poached skinless chicken breasts and steamed cauliflower, I'm not interested.

As Chef Kathleen has been telling us all along, getting thin and loving food are not two mutually exclusive goals. In fact, learning to love food and indulge sensibly while living a more active life may just lead us to a future where "Americans Don't Get Fat."