Book Review: United States of Arugula
If you're like me, biographies and memoirs pepper your food and wine library, a mishmash of the lives of culinary luminaries. And if you're like me, you're waiting for some imagined block of spare time to read the ones you haven't yet pulled off the shelf.
David Kamp is not like me. In tracing America's culinary evolution—with a focus on the last five or six decades—for his book The United States of Arugula, he's read all the biographies. And the articles. And he's interviewed every foodie figure of note. Whether he's quoting Paul Child's letters about his new girlfriend with the odd voice or describing the Newsweek cover with Paul Bocuse, it's clear that Kamp pored through the literature and kept careful notes.
The result is a well-drawn map charting America's gourmet movement. Kamp starts with James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Julia Child—the Big Three—even while acknowledging their predecessors. He tracks them and the bastion of French chefs, including Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin, who arrived in 1939 to work at Le Pavillon, the World's Fair monument to French cuisine. He shifts his gaze to the West Coast in the late 1960s, detailing how Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower built Chez Panisse on a bed of casual sex and heavy drug use, while Michael McCarty and Wolfgang Puck captured the eyes of the Hollywood set. Kamp drifts into the foodier-than-thou attitude of the 1980s and the rise of prepared-food vendors as women entered the upper realms of white-collar careers. Finally, he ends with today's mix of internet forums, the Food Network, and champions for sustainable agriculture. Throughout, he details the relationships amongst the chefs and writers who have shaped our cooking consciousness.
Kamp navigates this history with a breezy, colorful prose that keeps the reader moving. At times, the slightly flamboyant text feels too exuberant, too caught up in the romance of his topic. But he doesn't dodge the less pleasant aspects of the gourmet movement: Claiborne's depression, Beard's manipulations, and the inevitable back-biting that comes with any person's rise to fame.
Even for those who were in the food industry through the last few decades, Kamp's book will no doubt offer insights. For those of us who arrived recently to the food-loving game, The United States of Arugula offers a thorough look at the influences that shape us today.
This book was sent to me as a review copy.
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Congratulations to Sandy, Jesse, Emily, Cindy, Susan, Phaedrus, Lee, Jackie, Anonymous (with an email) and Kyle, the winners of The United States of Arugula! As of this morning a total of 10 people had correctly answered all the very tough trivia questions....
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