The United States of Arugula (31 page)

But even such butterfat-peddling, unabashedly for-profit countercuisine enterprises as Steve’s and Ben & Jerry’s offered a measure of do-gooder
solace to their consumers, proudly proclaiming their commitment to natural ingredients and local dairies. Ben & Jerry’s went still further, adopting policies that it would donate 7.5 percent of its pretax profits to charity and that its highest-paid executives would never make more than seven times the salary of its bottom wage earners (a pledge that was rescinded in 1994, when the company realized it needed a proper white-collar CEO to handle its expansion plans). While Ben & Jerry’s tactics sometimes came off as cloyingly self-congratulatory, the notion of a “halo effect,” of being nourished morally by doing business with a socially conscious company, proved to be a powerful marketing idea in the gourmet world.

Among the growing ranks of specialty coffee companies—such as Starbucks in Washington, the Coffee Connection in Massachusetts, Green Mountain Coffee in Vermont, and Thanksgiving Coffee in California—socially conscious initiatives became especially popular. Coffee and activism were a good fit: most coffee beans came from Third World countries where poverty and human-rights violations were problems, and many specialty coffee drinkers were college students who were eager to be politically engaged.

So when the specialty roasters started working on what would come to be known as fair-trade issues—ensuring that their coffee beans came from growers who treated their workers humanely and compensated them appropriately; paying their suppliers a guaranteed minimum price for their beans as a hedge against market fluctuations; and educating their growers about ecologically sustainable farming methods—these roasters acquired a certain cachet among young customers. Specialty coffee wasn’t just delicious; it was righteous and cool. No coffee company mined this vein of sentiment more astutely than Starbucks, which somehow managed to maintain an image as a hip, enlightened company even as it expanded with a zeal and rapaciousness to rival McDonald’s. By 2005, the company was taking out full-page ads in newspapers and magazines that focused less on its product line than on its socially conscious practices, which readers were invited to learn more about on a specially created Web site called
whatmakescoffeegood.com
.

LESS WITTINGLY, BILL NIMAN
learned of his own brand’s halo effect when he entered into an agreement in 2001 to sell his pork to Chipotle, a burrito chain. Chipotle, based in Denver, was founded in 1993 by Steve Ells, a trained chef and alumnus of Jeremiah Tower’s Stars. By the time Niman became one of its suppliers, though, the Chipotle chain was 90 percent owned by the great McSatan itself, McDonald’s. Nevertheless, Ells continued to run the company with a great deal of autonomy, and if it was Niman Ranch pork he wanted, it was Niman Ranch pork he got—even though, to recoup the extra expense of buying Niman’s boutique meat, Chipotle had to raise the cost of its carnitas burritos and tacos by a significant margin, from $4.65 a serving to $5.50.

Instead of low-keying the switch to a more expensive brand of pork, Chipotle hyped it. The chain launched a print advertising campaign that celebrated the Niman Ranch network of pig farmers with such headlines as
EAT A BURRITO. HELP A FAMILY FARM
and
WELCOME TO PORKUTOPIA
. The accompanying text enumerated the animal-, farmer-, environment-, and consumer-friendly virtues of Niman Ranch’s product and concluded, “We think it’s the best-tasting pork available.” Niman was as surprised as anyone when the unit sales of Chipotle’s carnitas meals quickly shot up 250 percent, even with the steep price increase. “It kind of blew the mind of everybody at Oak Brook, the McDonald’s headquarters in Illinois,” he says. It was even more mind-blowing that America’s greatest symbol of cultural imperialism, beset by image problems, was suddenly eager to bask in the reflective glow of a company founded by Bolinas radicals.
*

THE INTERTWINING OF THE GOURMET AND NATURAL-FOODS WORLDS PROCEEDED APACE
in the seventies, with the spartan, sloganeering health-food stores of yore supplanted by colorful, bountiful markets with organically grown produce, fresh baked goods, and the finest in Norwegian flatbreads and Swiss mueslis. Some of these new-breed emporiums, like Bread & Circus in Brookline, Massachusetts (established in 1975), and Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Market in West Los Angeles (established in 1977), found success so quickly that they rapidly expanded into regional chains. Down in Austin, Texas, the epicenter of Lone Star State counterculture, a young man named John Mackey had even bigger plans for the natural-gourmet crossover genre. In 1980, he merged operations of his two-year-old store, Safer Way Natural Foods, with those of a market called Clarksville Natural Grocery, and built an 11,000-square-foot superstore that he named Whole Foods Market. For crunchy Austinites, the aisles upon aisles of filbert butter and hibiscus tea proved too much to resist—Whole Foods was a sensation, and Mackey swiftly opened a second Austin store and new locations in Houston and Dallas. By the mid-nineties, Mackey had taken Whole Foods nationwide, in part by gobbling up other natural-foods retailers, Bread & Circus and Mrs. Gooch’s among them.

But well before the Whole Foods juggernaut, in the food-fertile seventies, the gourmet movement was turning into a formidable market force beyond the “natural” arena. It wasn’t just the crunchies who discovered the selling power of upscale, high-quality food; it was also the next-generation
Italian greengrocers and Jewish deli men who saw a world beyond the niche markets of their fathers—people like Andy Balducci and Eli Zabar, both scions of beloved New York ethnic markets that bore their family name, both believers in the idea that if they applied their parents’ standards of excellence to a wider variety of goods, they would attract a wider variety of customers. Even some conventional supermarkets were getting hip to so-called specialty foods, again thanks to the agitation of second-generation guys who sensed a change in the air—guys like Rob Kaufelt and Glenn Rosengarten, both supermarket-chain princelings of the New York metro area, Kaufelt from a family that owned several Foodtown stores in New Jersey, Rosengarten from the family that founded the Westchester County chain Shopwell. “Glenn and I talked about what was happening a lot in the city with Balducci’s and places like that,” says Kaufelt. “We talked about how sterile our families’ stores were compared to Balducci’s, and what could be done about it.”

The more ambitious Rosengarten created his own line of upscale supermarkets under the Food Emporium brand—in Manhattan, no less—to fill a niche between budget-price chains like ShopRite and specialty shops like Balducci’s and Zabar’s.
*
Kaufelt convinced his family to let him jazz up their existing shops with such fancy-for-the-seventies products as warm croissants—“bought frozen, but proofed and baked in-store”—and orange juice freshly squeezed on the premises. Each successful innovation begat another, to the point where, by the early eighties, Kaufelt remembers, the family’s Fort Lee supermarket had moved into the brave new world of “big Lucite self-serve bins of nuts, candies, and dried fruits, with the beginnings of grains and lentils.”

But no gourmet innovator of the seventies was more zealous than Giorgio DeLuca. He, too, was the son of a food man. His father was an importer of specialty Italian products in New York’s old Washington Market, a bustling mercantile district on the city’s lower west side that existed from the
1770s until the 1960s, when it was condemned to make way for the World Trade Center. As a child in the fifties, Giorgio frequently accompanied his father on his rounds, riding along, he says, “as my dad delivered stuff from the back of his car, which smelled of cheese all the time.” The senior DeLuca sold his wares—olive oil, dried figs, chocolates, parmigianoreggiano cheese, the Christmas cakes known as panettone, the hard sausages known as soppresatta—to wholesalers, who in turn sold these goods to specialty shops in Italian American enclaves. Still, Giorgio took no particular pride in the fact that the sandwiches that he brought to school were filled with caponata, the Sicilian tomato-eggplant relish, while other kids were eating cream cheese and jelly; Italian foods, no matter how
autentico
, were considered “low-end,” he says, “and just for a limited market.”

DeLuca was not a romantic. Born in 1944, two years after Martin Scorsese, he viewed life bleakly, through a grimy lens very much the one that trailed Harvey Keitel in Scorsese’s seminal film
Mean Streets
(1973)—a movie whose narrative the director has described as the struggle of its protagonist, a young Italian American New Yorker, to make sense of life while “essentially living in a feudal society, structured by organized crime, family, and church.”

“Growing up, personally and generally, it was tough times,” DeLuca says. “It was a dark, grim world. We had the Korean War, we had the end of the Second World War, we had the holdover clouds from the Depression.” Outwardly, DeLuca was charming and charismatic enough to be elected president of his class at Richmond Hill High School in Queens, but inwardly, he was a mess, subject to paralyzing anxiety attacks. These he traced to his uncertainty of where he fit in—was he destined to live out his existence in his feudal, outer-borough Italian American community, or would he somehow make his way into the wider world, and doing what? “I was asking myself, ‘How do you find some degree of security in this fuckin’ world?’” DeLuca says.