The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation By David Kamp Published by Broadway Books; September 2006;$26.00US/$35.00CAN; 0-7679-1579-8

This entertaining and informative book by by David Kamp, writer and editor for Vanity Fair and GQ, tells of the gourmet eating revolution in America that affects our everyday lives.

The following is an excerpt from his book The United States of Arugula:

"What Dean & Deluca did was give the food market a clean artistry that made it very now, very tied into the moment when SoHo was being noticed," says Florence Fabricant, the New York Times food-beat scoopmeister, who wrote about the store nearly from its inception. "Jack Ceglic was responsible for a lot of that, the industrial look. And Giorgio and Joel were really fanatic about ferreting out product. It all tied together. And the other important thing they tapped into was the need for prepared foods."

Indeed, the time had at last arrived when it was socially and economically acceptable for young professionals -- and even harried moms in the suburbs -- to take home freshly prepared entrées, along with salads and sides purchased by the pound. In an earlier era, prepared foods were problematic: they seemed too fancy and expensive (as Jean Vergnes found out during his brief experiment with Stop & Shop in the sixties), and, for women, they seemed a cop-out, a betrayal of their domestic duties.

Next >>>