The United States of Arugula

MOST OF US HAVE AT LEAST ONE RAPTUROUS FOOD MEMORY FROM CHILDHOOD—OF
fresh-baked Saturday-morning popovers, of sweet little strawberries picked in the wild, of a Cantonese lobster dish unveiled from beneath a dome at some dimly lit place with a name like Jade Pagoda. But I must confess, in defiance of societal pressure to view one’s bygone youth as a magical idyll of unsurpassable delights, that these memories pale completely in comparison to those I have of, oh, last week. Virtually every day of my adult life, I’ve been fortunate to eat something I simply never tasted as a young child. I’m talking not only about fancy foods, like white truffles and aged balsamic vinegar, but about commonplace, nonevent stuff: a tortilla chip dipped in salsa, a handful of picholine olives, a pat of goat cheese on a cracker, a crumble of aged pecorino, a fresh croissant.

Amazingly, these things were either unavailable in my youth or sufficiently scarce that my family didn’t know about them. I remember attending a wedding in 1984, when I was in my teens, at which a cousin from San Diego, where they were more food-forward than us East Coasters, grimly surveyed the restaurants and markets of the dire Pennsylvania town where we’d gathered, and said, “Dude, you people need to learn about salsa.” My response: “What’s salsa?” I remember my mother, in 1978, returning from a business trip to Palo Alto, California, and telling us that her associates had taken her to a Japanese restaurant where they served something called sushi, and that when some of this sushi was placed before her, the restaurant’s watchful Japanese proprietor, somehow sensing that my mother was a sushi novitiate, sped across the room, and, like a Secret Service agent taking a bullet for the president, inserted himself bodily between my mother and the table, crying
“Raw fish! Raw fish!”

Suffice it to say, salsa, if I may toss out an oft-cited food factoid, has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment, and sushi has become so unthreatening that Schnucks, the St. Louis–based supermarket chain whose eminently Midwestern, howdy-do slogan is “The Friendliest Stores in Town,” now features a sushi bar in many of its locations. In other words, I’m not the only one who has come a long way culinarily. Judy Rodgers, whose San Francisco restaurant, Zuni Café, was named the Outstanding Restaurant in America at the 2003 James Beard Foundation Awards, and who herself won the foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award the following year—the food-world equivalent of winning Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars—was originally a St. Louis girl, and she recalls that in her youth in the 1960s,
white corn
was considered outré. (“I didn’t like it,” she says. “I liked yellow corn.”) Today, as you might expect of a chef whose restaurant is named for a Southwestern Indian tribe but whose primary influences are country French and rustic Italian, Rodgers has gotten a lot more adventurous. Her menus feature items as varied as house-cured anchovies, homemade spaetzle, short ribs braised in ale, pasta alla carbonara, grilled meats marinated in the Argentinian chili-vinegar mixture known as
chimichurri
, roast chicken with bread salad (her signature dish), and
esqueixada
, a pungent Catalan salt-cod concoction.

The very fact of such cornucopian variety buoys me. I love the speed with which the food world moves, ushering forth new taste sensations and better ideas with the let’s-top-ourselves alacrity of Apple Computer and the anything’s-possible ambition of 1960s NASA. I love the way each new month brings with it some strange, unexpected, or simply delicious new edible to try, whether an artisanal Kentucky bacon whose down-home producers have just figured out e-commerce, an unfamiliar peach variety that some small-time farmer has grown from heirloom seeds, or the utterly bizarre “bubble tea” drinks that leapt from Taiwanese street stalls to American cities a few years ago, replete with giant tapioca balls that are slurped through an extra-wide straw.

I love the way that even the seemingly mundane staples of our daily life
are being tapped for all the depth and complexity they can offer—to the point of ridiculousness, but benign ridiculousness. Butter is now something you can get in a variety of regional pedigrees and butterfat contents: 86 percent for the artisanal “cultured” version made by the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company, 85 percent for the butter from California’s Straus Family Creamery, 82 percent for the commercially manufactured but high-end Plugrá, and 80 percent for your basic supermarket Land O’Lakes. Sugar, too, is making a play for our attention, its enthusiasts arguing that there’s a whole world out there beyond the yellow Domino box, a world populated by varieties with such Dr. Seussian names as jaggery, piloncillo, muscovado, and demerara. What about salt, then? Well, at the restaurant widely regarded as the best in the United States, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, in Yountville, California, I was soberly presented with a salt tasting—
a salt tasting!
—as an accompaniment to my foie gras course. The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next—one as fine and white as baking powder, another as dark and chunkily crystalline as the inside of a geode.

It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? Nowadays, it’s all too common—and, alas, valid—to complain that things just aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political discourse, ladies’ millinery, what have you. But food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve. If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re dining out, we have more options open to us, and a greater likelihood than ever that we’ll get a good meal, no matter what the price point. Our culinary elites—the chefs, cookbook authors, cooking-school instructors, purveyors, and food writers who lead the way—are suffused with feelings of boundless possibility, having liberated themselves from the old strictures and prejudices that hemmed in their predecessors. It’s okay for the traditions of peasant cookery to inform those of haute cuisine, and for haute flourishes to inform regular-guy food.

I daresay we’re in the throes of an American food revolution! Well, I
would
daresay, were it not for the fact that the national media have been declaring the advent of the American food revolution for decades, since way back in those primordial dark ages before people knew what salsa and sushi were. In November of 1966,
Time
put Julia Child on its cover, an acknowledgment of the huge following she’d acquired via her program on public television,
The French Chef
, and the best-selling cookbook she’d co-written in 1961,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The story inside declared, “If 1966 is the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia, this is partially because Julia is just right for the times … Supermarkets have found that their gourmet counters are their handsomest profit earners, and are rapidly expanding them … [The] Bon Vivant supermarket in San Diego stocks more than 3,000 kinds of fancy foods, from kippered sturgeon and kangaroo tails to pickled rooster combs and 4–1b. tins of Caspian Sea caviar.”