The Salt Exchange

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to have the chance to talk with The United States of Arugula author David Kamp. Kamp is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and GQ, and he maintains a pretty great blog in which he discusses the coffee fixation of Steig Larsson characters and mourns the loss of Law and Order. He was incredibly generous with his time - I expected him to be able to spare only 15 minutes and we ended up chatting for 45 - and, in an incident that occurred not long after our chat, a coffee spill on my laptop led to the loss of the audio and we are left without any proof that said generous, thoughtful interview ever took place.

Major bummer.

We reached out to Kamp because Charlie is head-over-heels in love with Arugula, a book that documents the rise of food culture and appreciation in the United States. The book has been praised for many reasons, particularly its smartness, and especially its optimism, which - for those who remember the pre-rise-of-Pollan mid-Aughts - was particularly rare with regard to food back in 2006. Optimistic is an appropriate way to describe Kamp's general attitude and he brought much of that optimism to our conversation. He remains fascinated by food, and the movement that has built around it.

We talked Top Chef, which had not yet reached the air when Kamp was researching for and writing the book. He explained that he had talked with Chef and show creator/host Tom Colicchio while researching, and that Colicchio wasn't even sure the show was going to work out (seven seasons later…) We discussed the role of the small, artisan farmer as the new punk rock hero, and we chatted about food snobbery, a subject that Kamp has playfully meditated on in his snob series.

We also touched on Kamp's upcoming book about the 70s, a decade he explained gets an undue bad rap (see: optimism). The subject is one that he became more intimate with by way of the research he did for Arugula, and if Arugula is any indication, it should be well worth the read. Do check it out should you get the chance. I was very lucky to have the chance to chat with Kamp, and I thank him for his willingness to do so. Should he ever find himself in Portland, I hope the next time we talk farms, punk rock, and Tom Colicchio, it will be over a bottle of wine and a great meal prepared by Chef Jacob and his team here at The Salt Exchange.

- Alex Steed

A couple of years after its publication, Charlie has finally gotten around to reading - and loving - David Kamp's The United States of Arugula. If you are not familiar with it, upon the book's publication, Alison Arnett of the Boston Globe described wrote that the book is "a lively assessment of how far we've come as food mavens and who got us here." She goes on to say that it "stands out from a sea of issue-oriented books written in the last few years."

We're lucky to have an interview with Kamp for the blog lined up for next week. In preparation for that, we've dug up some Arugula-related treasures online, which we think you'll find interesting whether or not you have read the book.

Kamp's website is hilarious, as it features blog entries entitled A Borscht Stain on the World Wide Web and A Valediction on the Passing of "Law & Order." On the latter subject, he writes (in the style of Auden):

It was my North, my South, my East and West,
My DVR mainstay and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that L&O would last forever: I was wrong.

(We feel your pain, David)

• The New York Times Book podcast interviews David Kamp here.
• You can here more audio of Kamp here, this time on NPR's On Point, on which he discusses his book in the context of Thanksgiving. 
• The New York Times' A.O. Scott reviews Kamp's "lively, smart, horrendously titled new book," explaining, "The cover depicts Lady Liberty clutching a bunch of greens in place of her torch, proving that Kamp’s publishers have turned a deaf ear to the wisdom of a leading American gourmand, Homer Simpson, who once observed that you don’t win friends with salad."
• Joe Meyers, of Connecticut News, wrote of Arugula: Clearly, we were long overdue for a book explaining how this all came to pass in a country where TV dinners and Howard Johnson galvanzied the populace only 50 years ago." He goes on: “The United States of Arugula” is so well written that you don’t really have to be a foodie to enjoy it: Kamp makes a strong case that the story he tells is as important as the rest of the cultural history of the past half-century.
• Powell's features this talk with Kamp, in which he reflects on the book, being lucky enough to interview Don DeLillo, and author A. J. Liebling, who Kamp claims "ate food the way Charlie Parker played sax."
• And finally, David Kamp shares with New York Magazine his favorite NY food books.