Finding the Flavors We Lost
From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The multiple-James Beard Award–winning restaurant critic for Los Angeles Magazine delivers an arresting exploration of our cultural demand for “artisanal” foods in a world dominated by corporate agribusiness.
We hear the word “artisanal” all the time—attached to cheese, chocolate, coffee, even fast-food chain sandwiches—but what does it actually mean? We take “farm to table” and “handcrafted food” for granted now but how did we get here? In Finding the Flavors We Lost, acclaimed food writer Patric Kuh profiles major figures in the so-called “artisanal” food movement who brought exceptional taste back to food and inspired chefs and restaurateurs to redefine and rethink the way we eat.
Kuh begins by narrating the entertaining stories of countercultural “radicals” who taught themselves the forgotten crafts of bread, cheese, and beer-making in reaction to the ever-present marketing of bland, mass-produced food, and how these people became the inspiration for today’s crop of young chefs and artisans. Finding the Flavors We Lost also analyzes how population growth, speedier transportation, and the societal shifts and economic progress of the twentieth century led to the rise of supermarkets and giant food corporations, which encouraged the general desire to swap effort and quality for convenience and quantity.
Kuh examines how a rediscovery of the value of craft and individual effort has fueled today’s popularity and appreciation for artisanal food and the transformations this has effected on both the restaurant menu and the dinner table. Throughout the book, he raises a host of critical questions. How big of an operation is too big for a food company to still call themselves “artisanal”? Does the high cost of handcrafted goods unintentionally make them unaffordable for many Americans? Does technological progress have to quash flavor? Eye-opening, informative, and entertaining, Finding the Flavors We Lost is a fresh look into the culture of artisan food as we know it today—and what its future may be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Food made by small mom-and-pop producers tastes great and is more spiritually filling, according to this lively but at times overripe history of the artisanal food movement. Restaurant critic and ex-chef Kuh (The Last Days of Haute Cuisine) surveys pioneering rebels against flavorless, pasteurized, shelf-life optimized American industrial food: a hippie couple who started making their own cheese on a Michigan farm in the 1970s; the founder of an artisanal bakery in Los Angeles who struggled to recreate old-style French bread recipes; chef Jean-Louis Palladin, who made a crusade of scouring the U.S. for regional ingredients to ship to his Washington restaurant; and Ann Arbor's iconic Zingerman's Delicatessan, a countercultural fount of food novelties made into a thriving business by a former anarchist. Kuh's accounts, mainly based on interviews with participants and his own reportage, shine when he delves into neophytes' labors in developing their recipes and immerses readers in cheese-making, beer-brewing, dough-raising procedures. He goes over the top in hymns to art-food's soulful authenticity and sublime expression of terroir, and sometimes swallows the industry's marketing whole. Still, Kuh's exuberant prose and rapt observation makes for delectable food porn.
