The Food Snob's Dictionary is here! The Food Snob's Dictionary is here!

Publication days are happy ones, particularly when they involve The World's Second Best Accidental Food Writer, David Kamp. (First place goes to Anthony Bourdain, although after four books, two TV shows and a bunch of mystery novels, he's sort of an editor emeritus; it's been years since he's seen the dark side of a restaurant kitchen.)

In any case, "The Food Snob's Dictionary" is the unholy love child of Kamp's twin obsessions: pop-culture lexicons of "aspirational satire" and the rise of America's food(ie) culture, which he documented brilliantly in "The United States of Arugula" (which, in paperback, has a fabulous new tagline: "The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution").

Kamp's FSD, like his dictionaries that came before it (Rock Snob's, Film Snob's), is dedicated to celebrating and righteously tweaking the cultural obsessive. In this case, it's:

"Part groupie, part aesthete, part stark raving loon, the Food Snob is someone who has taken the amateur epicure’s admirable zeal for eating and cooking well to hollandaise-curdling extremes. He wears Bastad chef’s clogs even though he works in publishing or property law. He owns an $8,000 gas range with six burners and a griddle. He’s collected the cookbooks not only of James Beard’s first-tier protégés, Marion Cunningham and Barbrara Kafka, but also of the all-but-forgotten second-tierers John Clancy, Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, and Maurice Moore-Betty. He makes his own stocks, has taken a night course in mycology so that he may forage his own mushrooms, casually alludes to the “sugar work” he performed in the course of whipping up his famous homemade Christmas confectionery, and bakes rustic sourdough loaves daily from the pain au levain starter he’s had going since 1996."

Be still, my heart.

Food snobbery explained [Snobsite.com]
Snobbery rules [Salon]
The Food Snob's Dictionary [Amazon.com]