The United States of Arugula (55 page)

“Chez Panisse really represents itself as holding value,” says Mark Miller. “People even talk about it that way: making a ‘pilgrimage’ to Chez Panisse. Alice needs to be the goddess figure of the church, in that sense, and hold those values, because they’re values that are noncommercial. But she’s caught. I think that Berkeley is still sort of stuck in time. Chez Panisse was, at first, a small meeting hall, then it became a sort of church, and now it’s this grand cathedral that towers above everything in the Bay Area. At some point, if you don’t belong to the sect, or don’t want to believe in the beliefs, it’s time to move away.”

Bayless’s heretical actions earned him a rebuke from Waters. “She wrote me this really, really curt, smug e-mail that said, ‘There is absolutely
no justification for what you’ve done,’” he says. Actually, the language of her message wasn’t that strident. The text of the e-mail that Waters says she sent Bayless reads, “Dear Rick, this is a message from all of us at Chez Panisse. We love you dearly but do not approve of your endorsement of Burger King. No matter how you justify this to yourself and others, it feels like an endorsement of Fast Food Nation, especially coming from one of our champions of sustainability and Slow Food values!”

Couched though it was in smiley language, Waters’s critique of Bayless infuriated him. “I’ve known Alice forever and I really respect what she has done,” he says. “But I wrote her back a letter that said, ‘I think you’re smug, I think you’ve got your head in the sand, and I think that you can’t continue to do this.’ When you look at what our restaurant has done through the years, and how we’ve been exemplary in all things, why couldn’t she have just said, ‘Well, that seems peculiar, that Rick’s doing that. I think I’ll ask him why he did it’? Instead of slapping me on the wrist and saying,
‘Bad boy!’”

AT ITS CURRENT JUNCTURE
,
the story of American food is dominated by two phenomena: the “national eating disorder,” to use a phrase coined by the food writer and UC-Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan, that finds many Americans obsessing about being thin while getting still fatter, lurching from one faddist diet to the next (such as the Atkins madness that demonized “carbs”), and eating too many processed foods; and the quantum leap forward in ingredient availability and culinary sophistication that is described in this book. The problem is that these two phenomena have been running on parallel tracks, with some segments of the population depending evermore on fast food, and other segments getting deeper and deeper into foodie connoisseurship and/or organic, biodynamic, and “slow” foods.

The trick, the task America faces, is to get these two parallel tracks to converge. For the solution to the national eating disorder lies in the advances and lessons of the American food revolution. The junk-food and diet-food people need to learn that natural and gourmet foods need not be flavorless,
expensive, or “elitist”; the foodie sophisticates need to lose their smugness and patronizing tone and embrace capitalist enterprise and engagement with big companies as a good thing, the most effective means of proselytizing on behalf of real, healthful foods.

There are hopeful signs that market forces and moral forces are already effecting precisely these kinds of changes. Slowly but surely, for example, the supermarket is transforming itself from a lowest-common-denominator vendor of pale iceberg lettuce and Spam into a hybrid store that sells both the prepackaged, processed stuff that America will always have an appetite for
and
the fresher, healthier, better-tasting stuff that the premium markets sell.

In the summer of 2004, the venerable A&P company opened its first A&P Fresh Market in New Jersey, an obvious acknowledgment of, and response to, the aggressive expansion of Whole Foods. A&P’s promotional materials stated, “The focus is on the fresh department offerings; the wide selection of organic and natural items and the outstanding customer service … The signage throughout the store clearly highlights the natural items as those that are minimally processed and contain no artificial ingredients and the organic items, which are produced or grown without the use of harmful pesticides or herbicides, therefore not harming the environment.” There was also a prepared-foods department, a cheese department with “over 200 varieties from around the world,” a gelato bar that “gives customers a taste of Italy,” a bakery that boasts “the scent of freshly baked Artisan breads,” and a meat counter offering “store-made sausage and a selection of organic and natural meat products.” As this book was being written, A&P was converting several more of its old markets to Fresh Markets. More auspiciously, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest grocery retailer, was embarking on a big push into the organic market, imploring major food companies like Kellogg and General Mills to produce organic versions of their products for the chain’s shelves. Wal-Mart’s executives made no bones about their motives: to appeal to more affluent customers and upgrade the company’s image. Predictably, this unabashedly capitalist stance upset some purists, who fretted that the intrusion of a corporate giant into “OrganicLand” would only loosen standards,
dilute the message, and squeeze out small farmers and suppliers. But Michael Pollan, to his credit, resisted the urge to view this new development apocalyptically. Organic, even Corporate Big Organic, is, “for all its limitations, a better agriculture, and, if you care about ingesting neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, an unambiguously better kind of food to eat,” he wrote on
The New York Times
’s Web site. “That more Americans will now be able to make that choice is something to cheer.”

Approaching the issue from the corporate side, Ron Burkle, the California supermarket mogul, sensed a paradigm shift afoot in 2005, after his company, Yucaipa, bought shares in both the traditional-supermarket chain Pathmark and the natural-foods chain Wild Oats. “I think traditional supermarkets have to pay attention to the fact that America is more and more conscious of lifestyle,” Burkle said, using that old seventies buzz term for upgraded living. “Things have changed, and you have to pay attention to those changes.” But not only do the supermarkets need to move in the Whole Foods direction, Burkle argued. “The flip side of the question,” he said, “is what do Wild Oats and Whole Foods do to get traditional grocery customers? … Whole Foods has to figure out how they can sell Coca-Cola.”
*

Barry Benepe, the father of the Greenmarket movement in New York, couldn’t ignore the fact that Whole Foods opened a superstore on Union Square in 2005, just steps from New York City’s most popular farmers’ market. “I’ve always said that if the supermarkets rendered Greenmarket obsolete and put us out of business, that would be a happy day for me,” he says. “But I don’t see it happening just yet. I went to that Whole Foods, and they still have some ways to go. I don’t like their labeling, or lack of labeling. Their produce may be organic, but I didn’t know where any of it was from.”

Meanwhile, it may be just an incremental step, but McDonald’s, spurred to action by public outcry and the good old-fashioned muckraking
of Eric Schlosser’s book
Fast Food Nation
and Morgan Spurlock’s documentary
Super Size Me
, is buying and selling more fruits and vegetables than it used to. The company now offers apple slices as an alternative to french fries in its Happy Meals, and its introduction of a line of so-called Premium Salads has suddenly made the Great McSatan of Oak Brook one of the nation’s top five food-service buyers of “spring mix” lettuce, a combo of greens that includes arugula, radicchio, and frisée; the United States of Arugula, indeed.

The dreamed-of next step—whisper it—would be for McDonald’s to spurn the big commercial farms, and, instead, build up a network of small, all-natural produce growers, much as Bill Niman has done (albeit on a much smaller scale) with beef and pork producers. “McDonald’s could have a huge impact,” the activist Ronnie Cummins, the director of an advocacy group called the Organic Consumers Association, told
The New York Times
in 2005. “They could be the company that changes agriculture toward a more organic and sustainable model.” And even if McDonald’s did this for less than pure reasons—like, say, because they discovered that they could make a fortune selling a McNiman Bolinas Burger with organic lettuce and tomatoes and Marion Cunningham’s All-Natural Special Sauce at a three-dollar markup over a Big Mac—well, what’s the harm?

REVIEWING A NEW
,
painfully correct “local foods” restaurant called Cookshop in
The New York Times
in 2005, Frank Bruni dryly noted that eating had “evolved from a matter of survival to a statement of values.” The blackboards in the restaurant listed not the specials of the day, Bruni wrote, but Cookshop’s favorite farmers, “an honor roll of principled stewards and good shepherds who aren’t exhausting their land, immobilizing their livestock, tweaking genes or toying with hormones.”

It does get goofy sometimes, the deployment of the buzz terms du jour (oh, everything must be “sustainable” nowadays), the self-congratulatory grandstanding, the trends that bubble up from nowhere, achieve critical mass, and then get discarded by jaded foodies who’ve moved on to the next
thing. As this book was being finished, chefs across America were embracing
sous vide
, a French culinary term for Cryovacking, a process in which a foodstuff is vacuum packed in plastic—in some cases, to compact its cells and create an entirely new texture for a familiar food; in other cases, to allow a chef to slow cook the foodstuff to perfection in a water bath, sealing in its flavors rather than letting them leech into the cooking water. Thomas Keller has likened the impact of
sous vide
to that of the Cuisinart. Less rapturously, the food writer Maile Carpenter reported in
San Francisco
magazine that when Keller’s waitstaff at Per Se proudly presented her with a whole pink foie gras encased in plastic, the better to impress her with their
sous vide
slowpoaching technology, the experience was akin to having an “organ donor package” shoved in her face.

But for all the unintentional humor the food world gives us, we trivialize this world at our peril. Food is more than just a “lifestyle” choice or fodder for the leisure pages, more than a hobby for
Zagat Survey–
wielding gourmands or a duty for
Ladies’ Home Journal
minivan moms. The movements that we’ve seen embraced headlong and then embarrassedly dismissed as regrettable fads or specious labels—such as nouvelle cuisine, California cuisine, New American cuisine, and fusion cuisine—have actually turned out to have lasting, positive impact. They’re nothing to be ashamed of. Our cookery is lighter, our ingredients fresher and better, our tastes more wideranging, our palates more adventurous.

James Beard was far ahead of the curve in recognizing that it wasn’t silly for us Americans to give serious consideration to what we eat, as the French and Italians do. “While I do not overlook the grotesqueries of American cooking,” he wrote
in James Beard’s American Cookery
, “I believe we have a rich and fascinating food heritage that occasionally reaches greatness in its own melting pot way … We are barely beginning to sift down into a cuisine of our own.” Beard was, most probably, off the mark in forecasting the development of a coherent American cuisine, but he was prescient in his optimism and sense of possibility. He knew that we could have it so much better in the United States if we just
cared.
For a long time, though, we resisted
caring too much; it was as if there was something wussy, too soft, even un-American about investing one’s passion and emotion in what’s for dinner. But the tide is turning.

I don’t presume, as certain chroniclers of other sectors of American history have, that we’ve reached some kind of glorious endpoint—that the battle has been won and the Spam banished. We still live in a world where Taco Bell has the audacity to base an advertising campaign on the catchphrase “I’m full!”—the implication being that a) fullness, the turgid state of being stuffed to the gills, is desirable; and b) this state is all the more satisfying when it’s been achieved by eating a half-pound, 99-cent beige log of quasi-Mexican food product from the chain’s Big Bell Value Menu.

But, like Beard, I’m an optimist where food in America is concerned—buoyed by how far we’ve come and eager to see where tomorrow will take us. That a healthy debate rages over the merits of a fine-dining chef’s alliance with Burger King; that the celebrity chef may soon be joined in the foodie pantheon by the celebrity
farmer;
that even the merciless food-world backbencher Karen Hess cheers the advance of Starbucks as a boon to coffee drinkers; that chefs and parents are finally standing up to the tyranny of the greasy, nasty institutional American school lunch; that the traditional supermarket as we know it is dying and getting reborn as a “fresh market”; that Wolfgang Puck is trying to Puckify airport food with his Wolfgang Puck Express restaurants, positing the Chinois chicken salad as the pleasurable, survivable alternative to the dreaded roller-grill wiener—well, doesn’t all this suggest that we’re not only getting somewhere but have already gotten somewhere?

HAVING WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT FOOD, I SUPPOSE I OWE THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO’S
shaped my eating experiences—everyone who’s ever fed me, cooked for me, eaten my cooking, or talked to me about food, right down to the prosperous, terrifying old man I met once in Florida who sat bare-chested in a patio chair, gnawing on a cold knuckle of meat, and barked at me, “Kid, ham hocks are the best goddamned meat you can put in your mouth!” (Soon after this encounter, this man’s sons opened one of New York’s most renowned restaurants, Gotham Bar and Grill—not that such a fancy place registered in my suburban, adolescent consciousness.) But I’ll stick to thanking those who have directly influenced the creation of this book.