AMERICAN WHOLEFOODS CUISINE

From the authors of The Supermarket Handbook: a bulky compendium of advice and over 1300 meatless recipes, distinguished chiefly by the quantity of its offerings. Among all these soups, nuts, pastas, muffins, and what have you, there are bound to be a number of tasty dishes. But the Goldbeck's approach is notable--if that's the word--for making foreign foods ""familiar"" to Americans (tofu stroganoff, tempeh parmesan); for selecting Americanized foreign foods (chow mein, chop suey, egg fu yung) just when Americans are getting a taste of that cuisine's genuine variety; for preparing nonmeat foods in forms which suggest they would rather be eating the real thing (tofu ""chicken"" salad, tofu à la king, tofu instead of fish in a ""Portuguese"" stew, sloppy beans for sloppy joes--even soyfood paella); and for concocting what they assure us are remarkable imitations: a ""meaty"" cheese-nut cutlet, an ""astoundingly liverish"" seed-nut ""steak"" (""one of our favorites""), fried provolone dubbed ""cheeson"" because it tastes so much like bacon, etc. Some may call this stuff natural food; others will find it as contrived as the maraschino-topped creations of yore.