Celebrating 75
Chronicling Cuisine and Culture
From a single cream puff to CIA-level secret critics, here’s a look back at San Diego’s food scene through the lens of SDM ’s storytellers
BY TROY JOHNSON
F
ood was first deemed worthy of cover-model status in San Diego Magazine in 1975. A single sultry cream puff,
its protruding fluffy middle, come- hithering on newsstands across the city. An object of desire. Food as abs. Food as décolletage. If it were a few decades earlier, buttoned-up parents might cover childrens’ eyes from that illicit pastry smut. But this was the late ’70s, an era disco-dancing its way through one forbidden pleasure after the next. SDM ’s editors seemed to recognize the lust they were peddling, as the headline read: “The X-Rated Bakeries.” Of course, food writing wasn’t new. It’s cave-painting stuff. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin penned The Physiology of Taste 150 years earlier. Twain wrote exhaustively about food. The world’s greatest cookie writer was Proust. Brillat-Savarin was the one who coined, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” That statement seems a tad pretentious in a modern food climate that’s more
RIGHT Photographer John Oldenkamp not only shot this seductive cream puff for our November 1975 cover—he baked it, too.
46 AUGUST 2023
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