Of late he had succeeded in placing two articles with the Saturday Evening Post and Life's ill-fated rival, Collier's. Now James was in pursuit of the nation's biggest-circulation magazine, Reader's Digest, and its uncommonly rich fees of fifteen hundred dollars per feature. A March meeting with a Digest editor yielded an assignment for an article titled "How Good Is American Food?" which would gently suggest that the nation's appetite for big, out-of-season produce and embrace of frozen and convenience foods and supermarkets were all that stood between the United States and its rendevous with gastronomic greatness.

But much as Beard had opinions about these matters, he was no polemicist, and for the Reader's Digest assignment he produced prose of unequaled lassitude: "It is wise to appreciate what is in season for what it is. If one has spent winters in France or Italy it is easy to accustom oneself to the winter vegetables, which are truly very good in their own form and which for the most part have wonderful variations which many of us miss." Despite such writing, the piece was full of prescient thoughts . . . on the pleasures of truly seasonal cooking and on the debilitating effects on the nation's larder of pink tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and cosmetically perfect gargantuan produce. But any genuine ideological fire the piece might possess was dampened both by the Digest's innate conservatism and James's sense of where his own future interests might lie. James could hardly condemn processed food and simultaneously plug canned petits pois from Green Giant -- as he did in the article -- with whom he hoped to reach a consulting agreement.

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