MODERN LIVING: Let Them Eat Pat

éMODERN LIVING

Seldom before had so many fancy foods been set before the gourmets and gourmands—eel from Canada, white asparagus from Belgium, kangaroo steak from Down Under, smoked Ostyepky sheep's-milk cheese from Czechoslovakia. The occasion was the fourth annual Fancy Food and Confection Show last week, and buyers marched into Manhattan's caviar-class Waldorf-Astoria to examine 20,000 food products—four times as many as last year.

Their enthusiasm was more commercial than epicurean. Sales of luxury foods in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1954, will pass $100 million this year. The boom is...