The United States of Arugula (43 page)

Working first at the Polo and later on the bigger stage of Le Cirque—where, from 1986 to 1992, he endured a tempestuous but mutually beneficial relationship with Sirio Maccioni—Boulud let the American marketplace dictate how he would apply his nouvelle training. “Frédy Girardet had done a
rouge
, a red mullet, covered in scales of sliced zucchini, and Paul Bocuse did it with little scalloped potatoes,” he says. “At Le Cirque, I thought, ‘Well, I like that, but I don’t like the fact that you have to have a cook spending five hours putting those little scales on it.’ For me, it was too much. And I had these huge, beautiful Idaho potatoes that you can’t even find in France, about
a pound each. So I sliced them lengthwise, because I wanted to do a sort of bandage around the fish. Wrapped it around some sea bass, and bingo!—the dish was made, an instant classic. It will be on my tombstone: the paupiette of sea bass, potato-wrapped.”

OUT ON THE
West Coast, the restaurateurs of the Bay Area in California were intensifying their long-running campaign to support small farmers. For all of Alice Waters’s ambition, there were still very few “farm to table” relationships, to use the lyrical phrase, that put farmers in direct contact with chefs. Waters and Jerry Budrick had hoped to at least partially address this problem in the late seventies by
being
the farmers, growing their own produce on Budrick’s property in Amador County—mesclun greens, baby carrots, and the like—“but it turned out to be too far away, and too hot,” says Budrick.

To a large degree, Chez Panisse and other restaurants of its ilk were still relying on an inefficient, ad hoc approach of getting some ingredients from local gardeners, some from wholesalers, and, occasionally, some from the producers themselves via jerry-rigged transportation arrangements. Laura Chenel’s goat cheese, for example, traveled from Sonoma in the cargo hold of a Greyhound bus bound for Oakland; at the bus depot, someone from Chez Panisse would personally pick up the cheese order, like it was an unaccompanied minor.

Help arrived in the early eighties in the form of Sibella Kraus, an Australian free spirit who had studied dance, lived in communes, moved to Berkeley, and, inevitably, found work as a cook in the Chez Panisse kitchen—in her case, upstairs at the café, where she started in 1981. While working at Chez Panisse, Kraus went back to school at Berkeley to study agricultural economics, and in 1983, shortly after attending an ecological farming conference, came up with the idea of something she called the Farm-Restaurant Project: an effort to band together restaurateurs as a bloc to buy specialty produce from small farms, thereby streamlining distribution and making it worth the farmers’ while to grow better, noncommercial stuff.

“At the farm conference, I met farmers who were growing eight kinds of heirloom Japanese eggplant, but for themselves, just as an experiment,” Kraus says. As someone who’d spent time at Chez Panisse “taking a romaine that weighed two pounds and paring it down to five ounces to get the little leaves inside, and then throwing the rest away,” Kraus figured that if the farmers became aware of exactly what the chefs were after (lettuces picked tiny!) and if the chefs became aware of the fun stuff the farmers weren’t showing to wholesalers (heirloom eggplants and tomatoes!), maybe her plan would work.

She enlisted six Bay Area restaurants, among them Judy Rodgers’s Union Hotel in Benicia, Michael Wild’s Bay Wolf in Oakland, and Patty Unterman’s Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco, to chip in money. “People got these lists,” Kraus says, “and on this list, it’d say, ‘Here’s what these dozen farmers have, and if you order this on Tuesday, you can get it on Friday.’ And in the course of the Farm-Restaurant Project, most things were delivered directly from the farmer”—usually by Kraus herself, who schlepped fruits and vegetables from Sonoma and Marin over the Golden Gate Bridge in her car. The Farm-Restaurant Project begat an annual event called the Tasting of Summer Produce, in which farmers, chefs, and other agricultural professionals meet face-to-face every summer to break bread and exchange ideas. More important, it led to a position for Kraus at GreenLeaf Produce, a progressive San Francisco wholesaler that had the trucks, warehouse space, and distribution know-how to make her ideas work on a larger scale.

In the nineties, Kraus became the director of the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, the organization that established San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, one of America’s most glorious. But oddly, given its pioneer role in so many food trends, the Bay Area was not the trailblazer in the modern farmers’ market movement. Seattle probably claims that title on the basis of the Pike Place Market, which dates back to 1907 and became a cause célèbre for foodie progressivists and city activists when it was threatened with extinction in the sixties.

Launched on a trial basis by the city in the Teddy Roosevelt years,
when Seattle citizens were in an uproar about the high cost of onions—which were marked up in price by unscrupulous wholesalers who bought them from poor immigrant farmers from Italy, Germany, China, Japan, and the Philippines—the Pike Place Market was an immediate financial success: an opportunity for face-to-face interaction between farmers and customers, a money-saver for consumers, and a sprawling, chaotic slice of life for anyone who relished salty, multicultural urban adventure.

But the market fell into steep decline in the fifties and sixties as customers moved to the suburbs, took to shopping in supermarkets, and started buying long-haul goods delivered on refrigerated trucks from warm-weather states rather than their own local goods. The market became seedy and blighted, a trawling ground for prostitutes in search of randy mariners; in due course, the sixties urban planners descended like vultures, with their usual talk of condemning the market to make way for parking lots and office towers. But local activists, led by the preservationist and architect Victor Steinbrueck, who designed the city’s famous Space Needle, formed an organization called the Friends of the Market that doggedly fought to save Pike Place Market; Steinbrueck’s son Peter, who grew up to be a Seattle city councilman, recalled that his father’s effort “wasn’t so much about saving the buildings but about preserving a way of life, especially the presence of local farmers.” (Another Seattle architect, Fred Bassetti, one of Steinbrueck’s colleagues in the Friends of the Market, memorably championed Pike Place as “an honest place in a phony time.”) After years of skirmishing between the city and the Friends of the Market, Seattle voters approved a ballot initiative in 1971 to preserve and improve the market, initiating its revival. The shoppers, chastened by the flavorless, ethylene-gassed produce they’d been buying in the supermarkets, returned to Pike Place in force, and today, the market, with its salmon-tossing fishmongers and Art Deco
PUBLIC MARKET CENTER
sign, is the most recognizable symbol of Seattle after the Space Needle and the Starbucks logo.

New York’s equivalent of Victor Steinbrueck was Barry Benepe—like Steinbrueck, an architect with an interest in city planning. But Benepe wasn’t so much a preservationist as an agitator, someone fed up with the fact
that, as he says, “In August, when Long Island peaches were great, you’d go to a New York City supermarket and find hard, green nuggets for peaches, with no juice and no flavor. It was an insult.” His planning work took him in the mid-seventies to upstate New York, where he saw foundering family farms all around him. A lot of these farmers, their operations too small to compete with the agribusiness big boys, were giving up and selling their land to developers. At first, Benepe hatched a scheme to win over the developers by urging them to preserve the area’s orchards as they built their planned communities, turning the proximity of farms and apple trees into a quality-of-life selling point to home buyers.

But when this idea failed to achieve traction, Benepe and another planner, Bob Lewis, set their sites on establishing farmers’ markets in New York City. They founded an organization called Greenmarket, and in July 1976, after a year’s worth of nudging city agencies and hustling up funding and permits, opened their first market in a city-owned lot on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. By later on that summer, Greenmarket was operating at two more locations, one in Union Square, the other in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

It was an exhausting process, full of red tape and resistance from wholesalers and grocers, who initially feared unfair competition from vendors who were paying no rent. “They relaxed once they saw we were serious about selling strictly locally grown farm food, which they didn’t see as competitive,” says Benepe. “They were selling California and Florida stuff, which they considered superior.” Benepe credits the fiery food iconoclast John L. Hess as his inspiration in fighting the good fight, “the instigator, the godfather of Greenmarket,” he says. “He wrote so passionately about farmers’ markets and the loss of local cheeses, things like that.”

Hess, the shortest-lived of the short-term
New York Times
critics who filled the restaurant-reviewer role between Craig Claiborne and Mimi Sheraton, was an unlikely white knight, given his acrimonious relationship with the American food establishment. With his wife, the food historian Karen Hess, he had published a book-length polemic in 1977 called
The Taste of
America
that showered the establishment’s leading lights with spittle-laced invective, the worst of it reserved for Claiborne and Julia Child.

The Hesses, who had lived in Paris while John was the
Times
correspondent there, blasted Claiborne and Child as phonies who not only didn’t understand French cuisine but were responsible for misinforming Americans about French techniques and corrupting American foodways by perpetrating a “Gourmet Plague” of overwrought aspirational cooking. Repeating and amplifying these charges in a 1997 essay in
The Nation
entitled “Icon Flambé,” the Hesses wrote, “To the extent that [Child] had any practical influence, she may have helped to bury American cookery by urging viewers who (like herself not long before) could not scramble eggs, to do quiches and soufflés instead.”

While Karen Hess’s scholarly work on early Americans’ cooking and marketing habits is invaluable, and while many of the Hesses’ complaints about American eating habits were valid—the rise of processed foods, the increasing percentage of junk foods in the American diet, the sundering of connections between farmers and consumers—the couple’s default argumentative position of irate-granddad apoplexy severely compromised their credibility. In
The Taste of America’s
first chapter, entitled, with characteristic restraint, “The Rape of the Palate,” they stated at the outset that “Our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs,” and favorably quoted from a recently published, apropos-of-nothing letter to the
Times
in which an eighty-nine-year-old woman complained, “What a rotten world we are handing down to our grandchildren,” citing “violence and football on TV” and “screaming records on the radio and adulterated foods to eat” as her grievances.
*

The Hesses also had a bizarre disdain for spicy foods (Szechuan, Mexican) that belied their worldly multiculturalism, and a propensity for cheap-shot, nyah-nyah put-downs that is even more acute in person. In an interview for this book, Karen Hess (whose husband died in January 2005) referred to Child as a “dithering idiot,” Mimi Sheraton as “stupid,” Alice Waters as
“so
stupid,” Claiborne as “disgusting,” and Franey, most preposterously, as “what the French call
routinier
, merely ordinary; a hack.”

But the one section of
The Taste of America
that steered clear of vitriol was John Hess’s account of the farmers’ market in Syracuse, New York, which he adapted from articles he’d written for the
Times
and other publications. As Hess wrote in his original
Times
dispatch from 1973, Syracuse had bollixed up its thriving downtown in the 1960s in much the same way as other cities had, by bulldozing the old blocks at the heart of the city and putting in highways, thereby encouraging white flight to the suburbs and turning vibrant urban centers into grim ghost towns.

Recognizing the error of their ways in the seventies, Syracuse’s civic leaders took the radical step in 1972 of closing off a city block to traffic once a week to make way for a European-style open-air market in which farmers could sell their wares directly to consumers. The resulting bustle pleased not only the farmers and their customers but the surrounding downtown stores, which noted an appreciable uptick in business on market days. One local lettuce farmer, doing brisk sales, told Hess, “Our stuff is number-one quality, but the commercial buyers will not take it if it’s spotted or dirty—we’d get maybe nine cents a head. We’re getting twenty-five cents here. In the supermarket, it’d be maybe forty-nine cents, and not picked this morning, either.”

This was the scenario that motivated Benepe, who was so inspired by Hess’s report, he says, that “We originally modeled Greenmarket on Syracuse.” The effect was the same. While Benepe and a handful of farmers were setting up at the original Greenmarket location on Fifty-ninth and Second, in a fenced-in lot where the police used to keep their unmarked cars, Benepe noticed customers “lined up at the gate, waiting to get in. I felt like a general
reviewing the troops.” Similar models were being tested out in other communities, with the same salutary effect. Nina Planck, who would grow up to be one of the nation’s leading advocates of farmers’ markets and local foods, remembers vividly from her childhood the day in 1980 when her parents, vegetable farmers in northern Virginia, drove with their cukes, corn, beans, beets, chard, tomatoes, and squash to a fledgling farmers’ market in the parking lot of the Arlington courthouse, just outside of Washington, D.C. “We got to market an hour late, and it was
packed
—as if customers had waited all their lives for farmers to come to town and put their tailgates down,” she says.