I finally got around to picking up The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp. It is a fun read and I knew I would enjoy the book immensely when I read this passage:
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 pedigree 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 Plugra, and 80 percent for your basic supermarket Land L'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 Dr. Seussian names as jaggery, piloncillo, muscovado, and demarra. 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 power, 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?
From Kemp, Preface pages x - xi
