The United States of Arugula (2 page)

Almost a decade later, in the summer of 1975,
Newsweek
featured the French chef Paul Bocuse on its cover, using his prominence as the Sinatra of the nouvelle cuisine Rat Pack as a pretext for examining the new culinary savvy afoot in America: “From Seattle to Savannah, sales are up on gourmet kitchenware. New York’s The Bridge Kitchenwares Co. has a six-month waiting list for the $20 porcelain mortars and pestles necessary for grinding fresh herbs. Chicago’s Crate and Barrel chain, whose revenues have tripled since 1970, can’t keep up with demand for woks, crepe pans or the $190 Cuisinart food processor that does everything to food but cook it.” And in 1976, James Villas wrote a landmark essay in
Town & Country
entitled “From the Abundant Land: At Last, A Table of Our Own,” in which he noted “our country’s present obsession with fine food and drink” and felt it was only a matter of time before “we could boast a cookery with all the subtlety and refinement of
la cuisine française,”
complete with a “formal codification of dishes and cooking techniques, so that people everywhere can truly understand this nation’s complex culinary heritage.”

In truth, the American food revolution has really been more of a food
evolution
, a series of overlapping movements and subtle shifts, punctuated by
the occasional seismic jolt. If there’s a major difference between now and the sixties and seventies, it’s that the scale is so much larger; culinary sophistication is no longer the province of a tiny gourmet elite. The historically unrivaled run of prosperity in the United States in the eighties and nineties, compounded by the culinary advances that had so excited
Time
and
Newsweek
in the previous decades, has led to the creation of an expanded leisure class that treats food as a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies.

The food world has its own ESPN (the Food Network, founded in 1993), its own constellation of marketable stars (Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, etc.), its own power elite (Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, etc.), its own literary lights (Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain), and its own high-end glossies
(Saveur
and
Food & Wine
, as well as the old dowager
Gourmet
, revivified under Reichl). You can be a non-cook and still be a food obsessive, attending new restaurant openings like a theatergoer, religiously consulting the Zagat guides (launched in 1979), and ordering the finest prepared foods from Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca, or Williams-Sonoma. Or you can be a serious cook and fill your kitchen with professional-grade equipment—the six-burner Viking Range, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the supersharp Global knives from Japan—and buy your produce and artisanal edibles from the local farmers’ market that didn’t exist ten years ago, and exhibit your disdain for mere “feeders” by subscribing to and following the recipes of
Cook’s Illustrated
, the meticulousy researched, trend-averse anti-glossy that has thrived since its founding in 1980 without the benefit of any advertising revenue. While I don’t think we have realized Villas’s vision of a unified, codified national cuisine like France’s, nor do I think we ever will—America is just too big, unwieldy, multiregional, and multicultural for that—we have come that much closer to being a nation where, as in France (and Italy and Japan), food is a fundamental facet of our cultural life, a part of the conversation, something contemplated as well as eaten.

This is a big deal, for America has long struggled with the very idea of
culinary sophistication, viewing it warily as a sign of elitism (an unforgivable sin in a populist land), weirdness, or worse. Booth Tarkington captured this attitude in an amusing passage in his 1918 novel,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, in which an Indianapolis commoner reacts skeptically to the latest highfalutin delicacy to hit the city, olives: “Green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she’s going to buy some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like ’em, she says. Well, I wouldn’t eat nine bad hickory-nuts to get to like
them
.”

Much more recently, in 1989, in the black comedy
Heathers
, the movie’s teen protagonists were able to pass off their murder of two mean jocks as a gay suicide pact by leaving
bottled mineral water
at the scene. (“This is Ohio … If you don’t have a brewski in your hand, you might as well be wearing a dress.”) To this day, there are those who make alarmist hay of suspect food preferences. In her best seller
Treason
, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter derides liberals who opposed the invasion of Iraq as having “sulked with their cheese-tasting friends,” the French, as if being buddies with someone who appreciates a good Morbier is an act of sedition (and notwithstanding the fact that America’s foremost cheese expert, Steven Jenkins, of New York City’s Fairway Market, is a political conservative). And during the 2004 presidential election, an Iowa conservative group paid $100,000 to air a television commercial that excoriated supporters of the former Vermont governor Howard Dean as “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving” freaks.

But these food phobics are the laggards, the ones who haven’t gotten the message that Americans are increasingly sophisticated about what they eat and expansive in their tastes. Indeed, it’s getting harder, in a good way, to define what constitutes a “gourmet” product nowadays. Is brie really gourmet anymore, or extra-virgin olive oil, or prosciutto, or fresh pasta? Is it gourmet to use fresh herbs instead of dried ones from a McCormick tin? Technically, the millions of people who get their coffee from Starbucks every morning are purchasing, to use the trade term, “specialty” coffee, but at this
point, with 5,000-plus U.S. locations and 10,000-plus worldwide, is drinking Starbucks coffee really that much of a specialty-food experience, or simply a better one than gulping down the watery deli swill we all used to put up with?

THIS IS A BOOK
about how we got to this point—how food in America got better, and how it hopped the fence from the ghettos of home economics and snobby gourmandism to the expansive realm of popular culture. The paterfamilias of this saga is James Beard, who announced his corporeal presence on this earth in 1903 as an enormous, thirteen-pounds-plus newborn, and remained, until his death in 1985, a literally and figuratively outsize character in the food world, the undisputed dean of American gastronomy. There were plenty of other cookbook writers and cooking teachers before Beard, but none who had his knack for engaging so large and varied an audience, and for legitimizing American cookery as both a heritage to be drawn upon and a cause to be advanced. That’s why the action of this book begins, give or take a few digressions, in 1939, the year a despairing Beard, who had moved to New York from his native Oregon to pursue a life in the theater, recognized that he was no Lionel Barrymore and decided to supplement his meager income by co-founding a catering company—the first step in his massively influential food career, taken at a time when the words “food” and “career” did not sit comfortably together.

And onward the story continues to Julia Child, the beloved, warbling giantess from Pasadena who demystified sophisticated French cookery for average Americans; Craig Claiborne of
The New York Times
, who turned food writing into a bona fide arm of journalism and invented the make-or-break, starred restaurant review; Alice Waters, the untrained Berkeley counterculturist whose co-creation of the iconoclastic restaurant Chez Panisse was as much a political mission to enlighten the masses as it was a culinary pursuit; Wolfgang Puck, the Austrian-born, Los Angeles–based chef who unabashedly embraced American capitalism, expanding a business that started
with one restaurant, Spago, into a multifarious empire that encompasses upscale dining establishments, inexpensive cafés, and supermarket products; and dozens of other influential figures, some of whose names are recognizable as national brands (Chuck Williams of Williams-Sonoma; Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca), and some of whom have been forgotten or are unsung heroes whose names were never well-known in the first place.

It’s a rich cast of characters, because the American food world, though often perceived as a precious refuge for aesthetes, adorable eccentrics, and saintly earth-mother figures devoted to sustainable agriculture and arranging baby lettuces just so, is, in reality, like any other creative milieu—full of passionate, driven, talented, egocentric, sharp-elbowed people, some congenial, some difficult, most of whom know one another and regard one another with varying degrees of fraternity, rivalry, warmth, and malice. (One reason Bourdain’s scabrous memoir,
Kitchen Confidential
, resonated with so many food professionals is that it gave lie to the old PBS image of the kitchen as a becalmed place where Concerto No. 1 from Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons
is always playing.)

The raggedy tale of Chez Panisse alone is rife with moments of idealist struggle, druggy abandon, screwball comedy, workplace romance, seat-of-the-pants innovation, and serious dissension—some of its participants extolling Waters as a magnetic, kindhearted soul of extraordinary vision and ingenuity, and others deriding her as an imperious, disengaged credit hog who can’t even cook that well. There have been personal friendships in the food world that, more by accident than design, have had nationwide repercussions—like the one Claiborne struck up in the fifties with the chef of Le Pavillon, Pierre Franey, which resulted in nearly three decades of collaboration at
The New York Times
, and the one Boulud struck up with Vongerichten in the mid-eighties, when both were young chefs on the rise in New York, egging each other on with fantasies of what it would be like to be not only chefs but chef-owners. And there are tiffs: the two chef-authors who have done more than anyone to educate Americans about authentic Mexican food, Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy, don’t care for each other.
The two most brilliant marketers of specialty foods in New York City, Eli Zabar and Giorgio DeLuca, nearly had a smackdown in Zabar’s shop in the late seventies when the former suspected the latter of stealing ideas. (Fortunately, tempers cooled before any vials of aged balsamic vinegar were toppled and shattered.) There is still simmering controversy, more than three decades after the fact, over who invented pasta primavera, and precisely what ingredients should be in it.

There are so many plots and subplots to the American-food saga, such a wealth of characters, that this book could potentially be several books, a multivolume epic of Proustian length. But in the interests of serving forth a digestible narrative—if you’ll indulge the gastronomical metaphors; then I’ll stop, I promise—I’ve sacrificed certain plotlines. Not every region gets its due (sorry, Lydia Shire, Jasper White, and all you great Boston-area chefs; sorry, Norman Van Aken and company down in Florida), nor do the whizzes and wunderkinds of the dessert and chocolate worlds (sorry Jacques Torres, Sherry Yard, John Scharffenberger, etc.). And I’ve given admittedly short shrift to the extraordinary American wine boom that’s accompanied the food revolution—a subject that really deserves a book all to itself.

I’m compelled to acknowledge, however, that every so often I encountered an interviewee who cocked an eyebrow and questioned this book’s very premise, arguing that food in America has, in fact, been going down the tubes for years. “Oh, it’s definitely gotten much worse, with all the processed foods and meals eaten outside the home—hardly anyone cooks at home anymore,” Marion Cunningham told me as we sat at her dining-room table in Walnut Creek, California, adjacent to the very kitchen where she tested the recipes for her landmark 1979 revision and modernization of
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
Cunningham, a Beard protégé for whom fame and success in the food world did not come until she was well into middle age, has been around long enough—since 1921, to be precise—to remember when mothers did most of their own baking, put up their own preserves, routinely used ingredients from their own gardens, and yoo-hooed their husbands and children to the table for a shared meal and a lively discussion of the day’s events.
I don’t mean to turn a blind eye to the issues Cunningham raises, or even to those she hasn’t—such as the epidemic that has seen the number of Americans classified as “overweight” or “obese” rise to 64 percent, and the threat that rapacious agribusiness poses to small farmers, and the health dangers posed by farmed salmon and hormone- and antibiotic-treated beef, and the commercial food industry’s infliction upon us of ever-more-shuddersome products like green Heinz ketchup and stuffed-crust pizza. There are food-and nutrition-related problems out there that warrant serious consideration and action, and while these issues are acknowledged in this book, they are not its main subject. (I would suggest two excellent books by Marion Nestle,
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
and
Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism
, for further reading on these topics.)

But I must respectfully disagree with Cunningham’s conclusion that we as a nation have slid backward culinarily. We enjoy a vastly greater choice of goods and eating options than our forebears did, and, if we choose well, we can eat better, and more healthfully, and with a greater knowledge of culinary cultures outside our own, than our grandparents ever could have imagined. Furthermore, the very fact that the aforementioned issues have come to the fore, and are now the subject of symposia and debate, is yet another indication of how far food has come in the American consciousness. You wouldn’t have McDonald’s scrambling to shore up its death-burger image by offering salads with Newman’s Own dressing, abolishing its Super Size portions, and switching to vegetable oil for its french fries, or Burger King angling for health and foodie cred by hiring Bayless to promote its Santa Fe Fire-Grilled Chicken Baguette Sandwich, or Alice Waters taking on the sorry state of school lunches as a pet cause, if the food world hadn’t acquired some muscle and cachet that it lacked even a decade ago.