Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
As a longtime devotee of the culinary arts (I made my first from-scratch
loaf of bread when I was about 9 years old), I've been especially 
looking forward to this conversation, which is all about the love of
good food and how it's transformed the palate of a nation over the past
century.

Our guest is writer David Kamp; leading the conversation is Lisa Hirsch.
  

    

David Kamp has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and GQ for
over a decade, covering the cultural landscape and avoiding hard news.
He got his professional start in the late 1980s at Spy magazine, the
satirical New York monthly. Now a maudlin, middle-aged sentimentalist,
Mr. Kamp is the author of "The United States of Arugula," a chronicle
of America's food culture as it developed in the twentieth century. The
book was named one of the New York Times's Notable Books of 2006, and
has just been published in paperback. Mr. Kamp is also the co-author of
the humor books "The Rock Snob's Dictionary," "The Film Snob's
Dictionary," and the forthcoming "Food Snob's Dictionary," which comes
out this October. He grew up in New Jersey and now lives in New York
City.

Lisa Hirsch is a technical writer by profession and a classical music
reviewer and blogger by avocation. She sings alto in a chorus and has
trained in Dan Zan Ryu jujitsu since 1982. She and her partner have a
dog, two cats, too many books, too many bottles of herbal tinctures, too
many opera recordings, and about 80 cookbooks.



Welcome, David, welcome Lisa, so glad to have you join us!
  

    
Thanks so much for having me, Cynthia and Lisa. Though I’ve long known
of the Well, I’ve never before had the pleasure of being invited in.
It’s kind of like Skull & Bones, right? Will there be a virtual
paddling?
  

    
I think we could arrange for that.
  

    
David, could you say a little bit about "United States of Arugula"
(hereafter "Arugula") and how you came to write it?
  

    
Sure. The book is about how food in America got better over the last
sixty years or so, and about how certain tastemakers and social forces
effected this change. It’s meant to be a fun, rollicking read–an
entertainment–but it’s also rigorously reported, and, I hope, well
thought out.

As for how I came to write the book, I welcome you all to shake your
computer monitors so they go all wavy: We’re going into flashback
mode...

Life had gotten very busy five years ago–two full-time jobs in our
household, two young kids, a zillion obligations, etc. In other words,
I found myself in the thick of an exhausting if fulfilling professional
and family life. In periods like this, you really cherish those
fleeting moments when you're totally relaxed, experiencing pure
pleasure. For me, I realized, these moments always seemed to have
something to do with food.

When was I totally relaxed? On a summer Saturday, when, having spent
the day swimming, canoeing, or otherwise recreating with my family, I
found myself alone in the kitchen around 5 p.m., doing food prep,
trimming beans or shelling peas while the iPod played in the
background, anticipating the meal we'd share that evening. Or when, on
an autumn or winter's night when, having put the kids to bed, having
hollowed out my brain after a day on deadline, I found myself
inevitably turning to food writing as my comfort reading at bedtime. It
could be an issue of Saveur or Cook's Illustrated, or the A.J.
Liebling collection “Between Meals,” or any of M.F.K. Fisher's
books–these were all like literary methadone to me, slowing down my
pulse, putting me in that happy state where everything was okay.

It occurred to me that if I derived so much pleasure from eating food,
cooking it, buying it, reading about it, and thinking about it,
perhaps I'd enjoy writing about it. I was not a food writer and still
don't consider myself one–I'm hopelessly a generalist, with no deep
furrow of knowledge in any one field–but I realized that I'd been
obsessed with food my whole life.

So many of my childhood and young-adulthood memories are, at their
core, about gastronomic experiences, whether simple ones (eating little
tiny wild strawberries from the little tiny patch that somehow
materialized every June in our yard in our dioxin-infested part of New
Jersey) or more elaborate ones (such as the mind-blowing experience of
walking through the original Dean & DeLuca store on Prince Street in
New York when it first opened in 1977, when I was eleven years old).
I'm no fan of current food television, with the exception of the
decidedly old-school Jacques Pépin, but I watched tons of it as a kid,
mostly Julia Child and Graham Kerr. Bottom line: food has shaped my
life more than any other part of American culture, with, perhaps, the
exception of music.

The other thing I realized is that the culinary evolution I'd
witnessed over the course of my lifetime was incredible, one of the few
realms of our cultural experience where I could unequivocally say
things had gotten better rather than worse. (You can't really make that
case with music, film, literature, of theater. Or at least I can't.)

I looked to see if anyone had written the book I wanted to read, about
how Americans discovered the possibilities of better food over the
course of the twentieth century, roughly from my parents' births in the
1930s to the almost-present. And I couldn't find this book anywhere,
at least not in comprehensive, readable, thoroughly researched, fun
form. Aha! So I thought, “Maybe this is one I could do myself...”

So I embarked on writing the book that became “Arugula.” And in so
doing, I turned my off-duty passion and refuge (food) into a job,
thereby sucking all the fun and pleasure out of it.

(I've since returned to loving food and food writing, though.)
  

    
I can see exactly how turning your passion into a full-time job could make
it a lot less fun.

"Arugula" is definitely a ton of fun to read. I marked a number of passage 
and will put them up here for commentary by you and our readers over the 
next two weeks.

>  The book is about how food in America got better over the last
>  sixty years or so

I'm one of the beneficiaries of how food has gotten better - I cook and
eat a lot better than I did in my childhood. (Well, it's true that my
mother never liked cooking much.) But I have to take into account, when I 
say that, that I've spent my whole life on the coasts, and I wonder 
whether, or to what extent, the food revolution has made it outside the 
major urban/suburban areas and into the heartland. 

For example, I just came back from a visit to a spectacularly beautiful 
part of the country, the Olympic Peninsula. It's within a couple of hours' 
drive of Seattle, a culinary center, and - the food sucked. It was hard to 
find entrees that weren't based on frozen food, despite the fishing 
industry, let alone fresh vegetables in restaurants.

And I still hear scary reports from people who've visited the midwest 
recently.
  

    
Well, let’s get this whole buzzkill thing out in the open:

“Aren't there a lot of people who still eat mostly frozen and heavily
processed foods?”

“Isn’t your book focused mostly on the coasts?”

“Aren’t there too many fat people in America?”

“Isn’t it true that we are not, in fact, a ‘Gourmet Nation,‘ as the
subtitle of the hardcover version of your book states?”

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. On that last point–the hardcover’s subtitle,
“How We Became a Gourmet Nation”–I am particularly agitated, since it
was my not my idea.

My publisher has been, on the whole, wonderful, as has been the
reception to this book, so for the most part, I can’t complain. But the
imperatives of selling dictated that the book have a catchy, concise,
explanatory subtitle. As a first-timer in the hardcover business, I
timorously went along with what the publisher suggested (“How We Became
a Gourmet Nation”) rather than push for my own Tom Wolfe-ian
suggestion, “The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted, Extra Virgin
Story of the American Food Revolution.”

Lesson learned: stick up for what you believe in. The “Gourmet Nation”
tag opened me up to criticism that I was delusional or a myopic New
York elitist. But if you read the book, you see that I never argue that
we have become, as a whole, a gourmet nation. I‘m pleased to say that
my publisher has kindly reinstated my suggested subtitle for the
paperback, as verbose as it is. (And even that subtitle has a bit of
the hard sell in it, since, within the book, I say I prefer the term
“food evolution” to “food revolution.”)

As for the blinkered-coastal thing, I chose, from the very outset of
writing this book, to take a personality-driven, tastemaker approach
rather than an encylopedic, state-by-state or region-by-region
approach. I simply found it the best way to digest all of the book’s
different threads into a coherent, readable narrative. In so doing, I
ended up focusing mostly on people in big-media cities like NYC, L.A.,
and S.F. because they tend to be where the tastemakers have their
perches.

This means I didn’t tell the whole story. But I think I’ve told a big
part of the story, and that satisfies me. And if I focused mostly on
culinary elites rather than the reg'lar folk, well, so be it. As the
art critic Robert Hughes has often argued, most great cultural
movements begin with an elite before disseminating into the general
populace. I think that’s especially true where someone like Julia Child
was concerned.

Now, to get directly to Lisa’s point...

There’s still plenty of nasty food in this country, but it’s simply
not true that the better-food phenomenon is strictly coastal and
doesn’t apply to the midwest or anywhere inland. Every city has at
least one or two restaurants hip to seasonal and local cookery, and
more and more places have farmer’s markets and “artisanal” purveyors,
whether ambitious cheese-makers or homey small-time bakers.

Let’s look at Starbucks, too–indeed, you can’t help but look at it,
since there’s one of its shops outside your front window and another
one outside your back window, no matter where you live.

Starbucks has become something of an easy punchline because of its
ubiquity and rapid metastasization, but it represents something
profound. A generation ago, whole-bean, fresh-ground, dark-roasted
coffee was strictly the province of university towns and Beatnik cafes
in Italian neighborhoods. And now we have this megachain that trades in
this stuff, which, even if you think it’s over-roasted and tastes
burnt, is a superior flavor experience to the watery swill we grew up
with in delis and diners, and on Mom’s stovetop percolator.

(Side note: Starbucks has also created a ripple effect, spurring
smaller upmarket coffee shops to open. I get my own coffee from a
terrifc storefront joint in Greenwich Village called Jack’s Stir-Brew
Coffee.)

Now let's think of the foods they sell in Starbucks stores across the
country: croissants, scones, baguette sandwiches with brie and
watercress in them. In 1972, these things were exotic and redolent of
sedition and deviant sexuality. Now they’re familiar foods, and not
just in places where coffee drinks cost $4.75 and come in tall, grande,
and venti.

It’s very important to think back to where we were in the 1960s and
’70s. The food on offer in supermarkets was inferior to what we have
today: your cheese was processed Kraft slices and, if you were getting
fancy, a waxed round of gouda or some soft Wispride wine cheddar in a
crock. Your lettuce was iceberg, or, if you were getting really wild,
romaine. Your ethnic foods were nonexistent or in watered-down, Chun
King form.

As for restaurants, the choices were more limited, and the “fine
dining” places were usually overstuffed, stodgy places that served
gloppy continental cuisine.

We HAVE, as a country, moved forward. You can’t argue that we haven’t.
You just can’t. Markets across America are that much more fluent in
soft cheeses, extra-virgin olive oil, whole-bean coffee, baby lettuces,
tortillas, sushi- and sashimi-grade fish, and so on. To say nothing of
organics.

Restaurants, as a whole, are exponentially better than they were a
generation ago, in terms of ingredient quality, culinary ability, and
variety. (I’m excluding fast-food restaurants from this, though there
are some chains, like Chipotle and Baja Fresh, that are a cut above.)

Sure, there is still crappy food out there, and I suspect there always
will be. But there is SO much more good food out there, more potential
for culinary pleasure than there was a generation ago. And that’s what
“Arugula” is about: this discovery by Americans that they could have
it better. Hence my stress on the words “fun” and “entertainment.” In
my own lifetime, I’ve had so much fun, and have kept myself so
entertained, by learning of more and more ways to experience good food.

I can elaborate on any of these points if anyone likes.
  

    
(Before I carry on, we've caught the cause of the missing quotation marks
and apostrophes, and David's future postings will include them.)
  

    
Yes, I was not going for any kind of ee cummings vibe. It was a
peculiar Mac-vs.-PC thing.
  

    

(Note: offsite readers with questions or comments may send them to
 <inkwell@well.com> to have them added to this conversational thread)
  

    
Hi, David. I read the book some time ago, as you know from the blog
post I did on it back then. (Known to the Intertubes as
<http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/2007/01/eat-think-gossip.html>) If
it'll help stimulate the conversation later, I'll pretend we didn't
have a really good correspondence about my criticisms and we can do it
again here. 

But I wanted to comment on your assertion, with which I fully agree,
that things are getting better. Not only in the U.S., either: one of my
foodiest friends is currently living in London dealing with the
opening of Whole Foods there and my other London friends are clamoring
for his phone number like he was some kind of rock star. Given what I
ate in 1980 on my first trip there, the progress has been remarkable --
and very much parallel to what happened in the U.S. with food TV and
celebrity chefs and all. 

It's even happening in Germany, of all places, where several chain
supermarkets offer "bio" (which is not quite "organic," according to
the law) products at much the same price as the regular ones, and
interest in ethnic cuisines which aren't quite as fat-oriented as
German food is on the rise. 

But every time I visit the U.S. I realize how much it's changed since
I was a kid. 

Course, I kinda miss Wispride cheddar with wine spread. I used to go
to a place that slathered it on a burger patty. Loved 'em!
  

    
you two see the richness in language and enjoy the same in food.

on the whole though, it seems like people are reading less and eating more.
is it because we're supposed to put our book down while we eat?

until I spent some time in Paris, I didn't realize that meals were the
central focus of the day.  everything else is to fill the time and develop
some interesting thing to talk about.

we're not there yet, but we are developing more language and culture around
food.

I like your subtitle better.  Maybe they should print two covers for the
hardback and see which one sells better.  How big is this snob elite anyway?
  

    
make that you three.
  

    
I like your subtitle yards better too, and cheer its return.

And I'm seconding your motion that the food revolution has spread well
beyond the coasts and upper socioeconomic enclaves.  Take the Hannaford's
supermarket in far upstate New York where I shop when I'm up there because,
well, because it's the only supermarket within a 20-mile radius.  It will
not soon be mistaken for a Fairway, but there are so many varieties of olive
oil, so many cheeses, so many "organic" foods, far more than you would have
seen even five years ago.

But that other trend spreads too: of fast food and high-cal, low-nutrition
eating.  Everything trendy gets turned into a high-fat version purchasable
at Dunkin' Donuts, from smoothies to croissants.  It seems to me that these
two trends are dueling for our stomachs and pocketbooks and wonder if you
have that sense and a prediction as to which is winning.
  

    
Isn't Hannaford's the market that did nutritional analysis of 30,000
products it sells and then posted the results in the store? Marion Nestle
discusses the market in "What to Eat," her latest (and really great) book.

David, those points are great, thanks. Ed, I will take a look at your blog 
at some point.
  

    
I forgot to mention earlier that David has a Web site. The home page has
bloggish aspects in that he posts about topics of interest, his books,
news, and events:

http://www.davidkamp.com/
  

    
David, I loved your book, not least because it was a kind of culinary
biography of my own life, from Julia Child (my own awakening: my mother
was British and food was not in our childhood a big deal) to early
Chez Panisse, and on to present-day James Beard House.  Last Saturday
night I sat at the counter at Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe and cheered on
a young intern from the CIA who was working his tail off, but still
thrilled to be appreciated and encouraged.

You not only brought back happy memories, but reminded me just why
they were so happy.  

Now--Miller was quoted a week or two back in the Times saying that
exotic tastes (e.g., wasabi, and other fancy foods) were trickling down
to the mass food outlets much faster than in the past.  If you agree,
could you say a little more?  (And if you don't, could you still say
more?)
  

    
Hello there, first gang of people who are not Lisa Hirsch and Cynthia
Dyer-Bennet. Thanks for your kind words so far. And kudos to Paula and
Bill for ID-ing themselves by their full, real names. Ed Ward, you
should be proud to call yourself Ed Ward. I know you're "Capt. Ward" in
your dreams and a Berliner by day, but sir, you need no pseudonym.

To touch on ideas that Paula and Bill raised: I've often said while
promoting this book that America is currently rolling on two parallel
tracks. There's a part of the population that is eating more and more
processed food and cooking less and less. And then there's this part of
the population that grows ever more conscious of the quality and the
sourcing of its food. The trick is, how do we get these two tracks to
converge?

We're a long way from the ideal, but it's encouraging that more and
more supermarkets are borrowing from the Whole Foods or Dean & DeLuca
models. And that Costco has a wine director and sells fresh fish. And
that Kraft Foods, the food-processing giant, is suffering on Wall
Street and in the supermarket because its brands (among them Cheez
Whiz, Tang, and Jell-O) have fallen out of favor with a large segment
of the public. Kraft is struggling because many Americans are no longer
satisfied with its nutritionally dodgy food-like products. (Though I
do like Cheez Whiz on a Philly cheese steak.)

Regarding what Pamela (surname: McCorduck--but I call her Capt. Pam)
says: Mark Miller is right. I think a big part the faster pace of
exotic foods' going mainstream is simply a matter of generational
turnover. When I was a kid, no Caucasian thought of eating raw fish;
now, "sushi" is a word that every kid knows. When I was a *teenager*,
it was necessary for a cousin visiting from San Diego to explain to me
what salsa was; now, to use one of the most cliched (but nevertheless
true) factoids of our time, salsa outsells ketchup as America's #1
condiment.

There's so much more variety out there that fewer foods come off as
outright weird or frighteningly exotic. The "mass food outlets" Pamela
refers to are responding to a bunch of social phenomena: the growing
desire for healthier food options, many of which are lifted from other
countries and cultures; the imperatives to get new product out there,
because "new" always sells; and the growing openness of Americans to
new flavor experiences.
  

    
When I was a kid, my aunt who lived in Ohio used to smuggle back hotdogs, 
bagels, and Jewish lunchmeats on the plane, because she couldn't get them in 
rural  Ohio where she was!   And now everyone Dunkin' Donuts sells at 
least 5 kinds of bagel, not to mention lowfat blueberry muffins. 

And all kinds of hot dogs are sold everywhere.

I'm glad that you are able to make the conversation here, David!

The thing that you talk about in your book, and that concerns me a little, 
is the loss of regionalization of food in the age of Denny's.
  

    
I hate food.  I like to cook.  It is a lot of fun to make something
and cooking is much easier than needlepoint or carpentry.  My Mom was
the same way: loved to cook and died at 103 lbs.  A couple of
Thanksgivings ago, my brother and I manned the kitchen and cooked for a
couple dozen people and we had a great time.  You can get filled up on
sampling to make sure it tastes right.  My wife is on the way home
right now with stuff from the co-op. I tallied the vegetables and
proteins -- chicken and beef cooked on the grill the other night. 
She's bringing more vegetables, rice, and tofu.  We have ginger and
garlic.  We'll have a great time together in the kitchen.  But when you
are done, all you have is something one step away from garbage or
worse. And it takes forever to eat.  I really hate food.  In the
rational world of the Gernsback Continuum, each morning, I would take
one pill with a glass of water and be done with it.

Regionalism?  What a bunch of hippy-dippy brainfluff!  Why do people
in the South die?  Because of the deepfried, carbohydrated and sugared
low-value food they make. (Denny's?  Why pick on Denny's?  You know
that you have crossed the Mason-Dixon Line when Mickie Dee's has no
biscuits and sausage gravy.)   Why do people in Scandanavia have
stomach cancer?  Their food! Food kills and agriculture is slavery.

Yes, you need nutrition to keep going.  That is a fact of life. But
there is no reason to romanticize the Krebs Cycle.  

What are you going to glom onto next?  Water?  Let's have a conference
to discuss all the delictable regional flavors in ground water, ways
to boil, roast, fry, evaporate and reconstitute water.  "Ooooo! It is
distilled so evenly with a hint of atmospheric over-pressure and a
whiff of partial vacuum. I just love your water."

As a bunch of aged hippies with the munchies, you must have heard in
some Berkeley classroom that sensualism is a symptom of social decay.
Decay: that's what cooking is.  You take perfectly good raw
ingredients and chemically and physically reduce them step by step
closer to total entropy --- and you call it "culinary art."

Your cooking is killing you as it prematurely killed your ancestors
who were no longer needed as soon as you were born, obviously an
indication that they had no wisdom to bequeath.  I bare my incisors and
expose my molars at you and I am happy to still have an appendix. 

(oooops! woman home.  man cook. bye.)
  

    
Classic!
  

    
Got some bad news for ya.   Mr. Death is coming after you, too.   And all
your thinking won't save you.    So the only question worth pondering is how
do you want to spend what time you have left.    Me, I'm going out for BBQ
and beer after work.
  

    

Speaking of BBQ:

>>> its simply
 not true that the better-food phenomenon is strictly coastal and
 doesnt apply to the midwest or anywhere inland. <<<

That is so true.  I'll pit Memphis, Kansas City and Austin BBQ beef, pork
and chicken up against New York, L.A. or Seattle BBQ any time.  But the
North Carolina and Georgia coasts will give the Midwest a run for the mone,
at least where pork and chicken are at issue.

Pies?  Don't get me started.  "Fly-overs" can make pies so good they'd
cost $40 or $50 in New York or San Francisco.
  

    

I'm a fan of fresh veggies, and I am so happy about the farmer's market
movement.  Is that happening in the midwest?  Are the kinds of prodcue
proliferating like on the coasts?
  

    
Thank you, Rik. Let's eat!