Patric Kuh discusses "Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food"

“Patric Kuh brilliantly explores our journey to recapture the fresh flavors that we forgot. ...Finding the Flavors We Lost is a fascinating history of how good food (and drink) reclaimed their place at the American table.”--David Lebowitz, author of My Paris Table

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.

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Patric Kuh is a Paris-trained chef who has worked in preeminent restaurants in France, New York, and California. He has written for Gourmet, Esquire, and Salon.com and is the author of two previous books, An Available Man and The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants. Kuh is a winner of the James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, and has been nominated for the James Beard MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and the James Beard Award for Magazine Series. He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two children, where he works as a food critic for LA Magazine.