Paper Palate

David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation makes for a good light read for anyone interested in the subject of food, its follies and fights in the United States. It glides the decades and personalities of the food world with personal stories, quirky accounts and riffs of all our favorite foodie things: from the feisty Frenchman brought in to “enlighten” Americans about French cuisine at the World’s Fair to America’s first taste of new items to some of today’s better known and loved (or loathed) Celebrity Chefs.

The first half of the book is a fly by of earlier personalities who dip in and out of the remaining pages. The second half provides a more nuanced look at some of the growers, chefs and personalities that forged a new way in the food world. The book is a great insight into the personal lives of some of the big shots in the food establishment while also detailing the accounts of bringing quality ingredients into peoples’ conscience. Unfortunately, to truly be all encompassing, the book would have to be encyclopedic in magnitude and in the end, it leaves much to be desired.

I find it hard to believe that it is not until the mid-eighties (page 300) that other cities hop on the gourmet band wagon. It is here that Kamp finally makes note of cities other than New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles as pushing the food envelope, calling for fresh ingredients and seeking out farm relationships. An overwhelming amount of research was taken from New York Times, which I believe to be lacking in reach of what is considered newsworthy outside of the coasts. I find it hard to believe there was nothing food-worthy outside these cities before 1983 (which the book gently claims with little mention of other locales before this year).

While rumor has it that many of our known personalities in the food world are slight odd balls– as anyone with an extreme passion for something might appear– Kamp’s account of the better known female personalities (namely Julia Child and Alice Waters) leaves images of a crass-mouthed Childs to a feeble yet impassioned Waters; both of whom are slightly sex-crazed. On the other hand, the early non-chef-pen-inclined men in the field, Craig Claiborne and James Beard, are sited throughout as beacons of light in an otherwise female dominated arena when they’re not too drunk to work/eat. Though I don’t necessarily doubt the validity of it, I wonder whether the scope of it is needed in the book.

The real question boils down to not how the revolutionaries came to love good food and advance their cause of good eats, but how our food industry came to such grim lows - from the mass packaged tv dinners, the dire straights our farms have entered, our wax-coated SmartFresh gas crazes, quick-fix diet fads and childhood obesity to name a few.

In United States of Arugula, Kamp skims the surface when he mentions Industrialization giving rise to the horrid conditions of the meat industry that became familiar in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and continues today in many industries. What he fails to mention is the natural progression that as world travel became more affordable for the common person and the medias’ ability to reach tenfold the numbers with more accurate and timely news, people would be more in tune with world happenings, be it the next president of a nation or the newest food craze to reach London streets. This, along with the rise in popularity of food-specific magazines, like Saveur and Gourmet helped to disseminate news to food enthusiasts around.

Every generation will have their counterculture ready to dismiss their parents’ teachings. Whether it’s seemingly radical political visions or the food they grew up on (The United States of Arugula rightly points out this is also quite political). Therefore, it was only natural that the hyper-revolutionary 1960’s and -70’s brought out a movement of food awareness that continues to this day.

But now, as words like gourmet, organic and free-range have entered common lexicon and consumers become more label savvy and pesticide/herbicide/hormone weary, the question falls have we pushed our gourmet world too far? What does gourmet, organic and free-range mean today? While Americans may be pushing Popeye’s spinach aside for the peppery arugula, have we turned the notion of gourmet into a McNotion, with even WalMart taking on the organic world? Will organic laws hold up and labeling prevail so we know what is in our food (including what is sprayed on it), where it comes from and possibly even what our food was fed? Are organizations like Slow Food (slowfood.com) and concepts like Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) too late or just in time?