The United States of Arugula Read Online Free

thrall to celebrity chefs and myopic Manhattan tastemakers who delude themselves into believing that “the whole country [is] greedily feeding on chanterelles and mâche.” Like Villas, he imagines that Beard would be horrified by it all, surveying the scene like the weeping Indian in the old Keep America Beautiful ad: “We seem as a people less inclined to gather at our stoves and our tables and take succor in the good things that happen around them … and James Beard would have thought that a tragedy.”
    These laments bring to mind the wounded, I-was-there-first bitterness of the early R.E.M. or Nirvana fan who has never gotten over the fact that his favorite indie band got big, and who therefore sees a positive development—the mass acceptance of what was once a small movement—as some kind of unforgivable sellout. There’s no doubt that chefs and food editors do indeed get caught up in risible trends (for example, blackened fish in the eighties, lemongrass abuse in the nineties, foams in the early twenty-first century), and that the celebrity-chef machinery coughs up the occasional vainglorious twit, but these are mere glitches in what has been a remarkable culinary evolution. While the whole country most certainly is not “greedily feeding” on mâche, things are moving fast enough that, in the decade-plussince Clark launched his gratuitous, unprovoked attack on the perfectly innocent salad green, a Chez Panisse alumnus named Todd Koons has started up a company called Epic Roots that distributes bagged, fresh mâche to supermarkets in thirty states. In the same period, an alumnus of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchen, Nancy Silverton, has rapidly expanded her La Brea Bakery, whose artisanal baguettes and sourdough loaves are par-baked in Southern California, shipped frozen to supermarkets across the country, and baked to completion on the premises the day they’re sold, allowing people all over the United States to enjoy fresh-baked bread of a sort that was once available only in expensive West Coast specialty shops.
    Besides, I’m not entirely sold on the guilt trip that some in the food elite like to lay on non-cooks and infrequent cooks. Though I’m an enthusiastic home cook myself, I recognize that this is America, and part of what has made America America is its drive, its impatience, its demand of long hours in the workplace, its two-career couples, its lack of Mediterranean languor. It’s all well and good to pine for the vanished America in which moms stayed home and issued forth three hot meals a day, or to gaze across the Atlantic with envy at Europeans who still take three hours off for a midday meal with wine—and it sure is nice to appropriate the rhythms of these places over the weekend or while we’re on vacation—but that ain’t us.
    So maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world that the bustling, everbusy, aromatic home kitchen of yore has been replaced by an ad hoc arrangement of dining out, ordering in, toting home prepared foods, and
occasionally
whipping up something from scratch. And maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible if those who flat-out don’t want to cook never had to, provided they had options and inclinations beyond processed fast food. Indeed, to some culinary thinkers, like the brilliant Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, this represents an exciting new frontier. “From an opportunity standpoint, it’s gonna be an amazing time to be a cook or a chef twenty, twenty-five years from now,” he says. “It’s a weird time at the moment, because you have a massive part of the population that doesn’t cook, maybe doesn’t even know how to cook, and yet is conversant in several food languages, knows its way around a sushimenu. And then there’s this whole ’nother segment of non-cooks that eats nothing but fast food and processed food, which is part of the reason we have the obesity problem. Either way, you have people who, whether for personal reasons, time-commitment reasons, or