Already at that point Sokolov (now writing about food for the Wall Street Journal) described an “era of bicoastalism, of foreshortened horizons and rampant social homogenization.” In his introduction, Sokolov regretfully recalls 1957, when he served on his high school debate team; the topic that year was the farm surplus “problem” and what to do about it. “At my school,” Sokolov remembers, “we hedged our position ingeniously by blaming the small farmer and proposing his elimination. When our coach came up with this crafty plan, we recognized it as a winning tactic…but we never thought it would actually come to pass. Or that the decline of the country’s rural populace would bring with it such terrible consequences: social disruption on a vast and ghastly scale as well as an unspeakable degradation of food quality.”

Well, Sokolov certainly isn’t responsible for the laws that privileged price supports rewarding farmers for growing more instead of the Soil Bank, which rewarded them for growing less, but he seems to be ruing his high school defense of the “efficient agribusinessmen…[who] have brought us the bounceable tomato.”

The rest of the book, thankfully, perks up, a picaresque, lively, loving narrative describing the country people still cultivating native persimmons and gooseberries, hunting squirrels for their Brunswick stew, harvesting wild rice the old-fashioned way, and foraging for morels in Michigan.

And in the new edition of the book, republished in 1998, Sokolov writes about his surprise at seeing America change for the better as local and regional food traditions have been reclaimed—but, he adds, this observation “does not invalidate [his] original concerns. The nouvelle American cuisine is not a deeply rooted social phenomenon; it is a blip on the screen of postmodernism.” Let’s hope he’s wrong again.