The Good Life--It’s All a Matter of Taste

If you regard food as commerce, the bottom-line bores will tell you that all the action is happening in the laboratories of biogenetics. If you approach food as fuel, the cook-by-numbers folks are dreaming up still more “foolproof” preparations so that we can get through dinner quicker with less fuss and fewer dishes.

But if you look at food as culture, there are contrary and more satisfying happenings underway. Americans are being drawn back to the time when people lived closer to nature’s bounty. Simultaneously, we are being propelled forward into dizzying realms of variety, quality and imagination.

I’m on a different kind of health food kick just now.

The unsettling cross-currents of industrial foodstuffs may have met their match here in Northern California’s neighboring valleys of Sonoma and Napa. Famed for wineries, these are also now valleys of olive oil, cheese, garlic, honey, vinegar, apple, egg, butter, Indian corn, sweet corn, beef, lamb, jam, cider, fig, boysenberry, to name just some.

For a change, we aren’t hearing that we should have been around last year, or 20 years ago. This is the best of times to satisfy our primordial appetite. The modern-day quest to see how cheaply we can sustain ourselves is being challenged by a different question: How well can we eat?

In places like this, and the others like it that thrive across the country, food plays a larger role in community. Locals and visitors tend to have higher expectations for quality; a greater grasp of possibilities. They draw more of their daily pleasures from the appreciation of mealtime. It is an advancing and, I hope, unstoppable idea that doesn’t get enough serious attention outside of the food pages.

To value our food is itself a fundamental value. It brings us closer to nature and thus closer to ourselves because nature is our ancestral home. Besides, novelty notwithstanding, basic satisfactions are best.

Take olive oil--now the rage.

“We sell everything we can get our hands on and wish we had a little more,” says Ed Stolman of The Olive Press in Glen Ellen.

Olive oil is the healthiest fat you can eat, or so the experts say. It is also the tastiest.

And its variety, lore and complexity beg for the same obsessive pursuit that many give wine.

There are green Tuscan oils with peppery bite and tawny gold oils from the late harvests with the softness of butter. And dozens in between.

For too long, Americans have been stuck with Southern Europe’s bland and poorly labeled leftovers. But a decade ago, serious oil-making began from the trees planted around California’s famed Spanish missions. Today, new trees in many varieties are going in by the thousands, and there are presses scattered across the region. Recognition of quality is spreading.

Stolman, who recently won an Italian prize for his Lunigiana Estate California oil, predicts that appreciation of olive oil will catch on like, well, ice cream. He should know.

Some years ago, he believed that a specialty treat from a Chicago candy store would have larger appeal, so he arranged for national distribution of the Dove Bar.

Or take cheese.

Ig Vella’s family has been making medal-winning cheese in Sonoma since 1931 with an old-country attitude: Good food is a comfort that belongs to every working family, not a fad to be hijacked and mystified as another extravagance for the wealthy.

“Don’t be polemic about it. Don’t give me some Sermon on the Mount,” Vella growls.

Nothing pleases him more than a youngster at the sample counter who asks, “Mom, how come you don’t get us cheese like this?”

Back in 1975, restaurateur Alice Waters and chef Jeremiah Tower at Chez Panisse in Berkeley created a sensation. Using the best regional and seasonal ingredients, they pioneered the idea of “California cuisine.” Their philosophy, plus the mushrooming growth of organic food and surely the ready mood of the nation, has lifted Americans’ culinary expectations, not by increments but by leaps.

The results can be seen in the spread of farmers markets across the country and in the success of grocers who offer new terms for a bargain: If you pay half again as much with a discriminating eye, you can eat twice as well.

The trend reaches its apogee in the Napa Valley village of Yountville. Here, at the French Laundry, for the price of a good seat at an NBA game, chef Thomas Keller combines kitchen artistry with the world’s very best ingredients to create the transcendent dining experience of our age.

Keller explains: “Respect for food is a respect for life, for who we are and what we do.”