How Food Ate the Culture

I was a little too early.

Twenty years ago today, my book The United States of Arugula was published. I wrote it because I wanted to read a fun, lively history of America’s culinary evolution in the 20th and early 21st centuries but couldn’t find one. I set to work speaking with chefs, restaurateurs, grocers, farmers, and cookbook authors and editors. I was keen to make the case that food, in 2006, was experiencing a magnificent breakout moment, taking its place as a pillar of American culture alongside our literature, art, music, and movies. Its stars and thought leaders were becoming celebrities and public intellectuals, consigned no longer to the recipe pages. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma had just come out. Anthony Bourdain, borne aloft by Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, was gaining steam as a multimedia phenomenon. Marcona almonds were newly a thing.

But I might have been wise to wait. The book, while well received, arrived just ahead of the hyperdrive era that propelled food and food discourse into the stratosphere. Looking back, some of the opinions shared within it appear quaint. Danny Meyer expressed ambivalence bordering on guilt about opening a second, Upper West Side location of Shake Shack, concerned about replicating the deluxe quality of the burgers and dogs he was selling in Madison Square Park. Tom Colicchio, in the early stages of building out his Craft empire and personal brand, told me, “I wake up every morning asking myself, ‘What the hell am I doing this for? Do I need another restaurant?’”