Shibumi eats (and spits out)

Trevanian was a pen name
of Rodney William Whitaker

Driving back from Chatham County on Saturday after walking with Ralph, I continued to read Shibumi.
     It was lunch time, and awaiting me was an outing to Hillsborough with my wife. A description of lunch at Nicholai Hel's chateau in the Basque region was therefore timely:

"Eating for me [Nicholai's concubine is speaking to their guest] is for me what you might call a managed vice, a vice particularly difficult to control when one is living in France, where, depending on your point of view, the food is either the world's second best or the world's very worst."
    "What do you mean?" Hannah asked.
    "From a sybaritic point of view, French food is second only to classic Chinese cuisine, but it is so handled and sauced and prodded and chopped and stuffed and seasoned as to be a nutritive disaster. That is why no people in the West have so much delight with eating as the French. Or so much trouble with their livers."
    "And what do you think about American food?" Hannah asked, a wry expression on her face because she was of that common kind of American abroad who seeks to imply sophistication by degrading everything American.
    "I couldn't say really, I have never been in America. But Nicholai lived there for a time, and he tells me that there are certain areas in which American cooking excels."
    "Oh," Hannah said, looking archly at Hel. "I'm surprised to hear that Mr. Hel has anything good to say about America, or Americans."
    "It's not Americans I find annoying, it's Americanism, a social disease of the post-industrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called American only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. Its symptoms are loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities—fun.
    "As for your food, no one denies that the Americans excel in one narrow rubric, the snack. And I suspect there's something symbolic in that." [at approximately the 11-hour point]

Another arresting bash^* a bit further along:

[Hel's concubine is speaking] "I have been wanting to ask you, Hannah, what did you read at university?"
     "What did I read?"
     "What did you major in?" Hel clarified.
     "Oh. Sociology."
     He might have guessed it. Sociology, that descriptive pseudo-science that disguises its uncertainties in statistical mists as it battens on the narrow gap of information between psychology and anthropology, the kind of non-major that so many Americans use to justify their four-year intellectual vacations designed to prolong adolescence.

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* ...In view of the curious fact that sociology is the academic discipline of the chief academic officer of the University of North Carolina.