It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, signaling the modern public’s staggering ability to suspend its disbelief, or simply to miss the central tenets of manufactured demand.
But if one trait characterizes Americans with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in brand new ways. The more pedestrian the product in question, the greater its seeming potential to evoke untold volumes of feeling and meaning. A few centuries into the future, inhabitants of a ravaged globe may look back on this time as the crucial moment at which delusional fervor around unremarkable, overpriced things reached its apex.
Oh, there are lovingly itemized ideological whys-and-wherefores behind the so-called food revolution, to be sure. A long train of exposés and manifestos has shown in chilling detail the myriad ways our foodstuffs have been too long tainted by chemical manipulations, resource-intensive factory farming, overprocessing, and general tastelessness. The solution, from the consumer’s vantage, is to repair all this systemic damage with the homely remedy of better informed, more locally minded shopping. To combat the epidemic of fast food (and the kindred American plague of mounting obesity), we’ve been schooled in the virtues of “slow food,” a.k.a. “locavore” cuisine, a.k.a. organic and regional produce, meats, and dairy products.
All of which is plenty worthy and salubrious, so far as our individual food intake goes. We’re all likelier to lead healthy, slim, fulfilling, and flavorful lives when we nourish ourselves on farmers’ market fare—and to feel better about ourselves as agents of ethical change.
But as no end of other right-thinking crusades have shown, there’s a fine line between right conduct and smarmy self-righteousness. As we weather one discursive foodie sermon after another and choke down the aristocratic excesses of today’s foodie media complex, we may long for a sweet taste of silence. After all, there’s scant evidence that the vogue for artisanal cuisine has produced anything close to a more just, affordable, and robust food economy. If anything, it has driven our already class-segmented food system into still greater polarities, with privileged access to rabbit larb and Japanese uni at the upper end of the spectrum, and a wasteland of overprocessed, cheap, and empty slop at the other. To better grasp just how things got to be this way, let’s venture into the dark belly of the modern-day cult known as foodie-ism.
Food, Glorious Food
The glorification of food seems understandable enough, at first glance. Everybody’s got to eat. And as with any other animal urge or act of survival—masticate, copulate, procreate, repeat—it’s not exactly challenging to move this activity to the center of one’s value system. What upper-middle-class college student doesn’t emerge from six months abroad in Barcelona swearing fealty to the crown of jamón ibérico? What leisurely plutocrat with too much time on his hands isn’t tempted to throw his energies into some hobby with immediate built-in payoffs, like becoming an overnight expert on the expensive aged cheeses of the world? What better pastime for a wealthy faux-hippie housewife than raising egg-laying hens (they’re adorable!) or learning to pickle the organic vegetables her child is growing at his pricey progressive preschool?
Why not, in short, transform the rather self-indulgent habit of spending more than $200 on a single meal into an intellectual and cultural badge of honor—a chance to loudly matter in public as you remark on the bright or redolent or flavorful undertones of whatever anxiously plated concoction you’ve just overpaid to savor? The bourgeoisie will always find creative new ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as highly enlightened, discriminating, and honorable—if not downright heroic. And those who provide such indulgences (and who are, in turn, rewarded handsomely for them) are more than happy to collude in this fantasy.
Of course, the fantasy itself grows more baroque and involuted as the foodie cult nets an ever-greater number of well-heeled recruits. In spite of the self-congratulatory earthiness that foodie culture tends to favor (“I just really love food,” earnest foodies will confess, never bothering to notice that most of humankind shares their passion), its overwrought quasi-religiosity picks up right where the rise of designer bottled water left off—i.e., with the world-conquering condescension of the enormously cultivated consumer.
“Food is everything!” foodies often declare, in a fervent yelp apparently aimed at shaking the rest of the populace out of its imagined hunger strike. Even so, simply purchasing a meal at Chez Panisse or Momofuku or Trois Mec is not enough. One must dine at all of Eater’s “essential” restaurants, and speak in an authoritative, Top Chef–tutored tongue on the importance of balancing sourness and sweetness and umami in every single bite. The solemnly important task of delivering “thoughtful” and “inventive” food to every semi-hip town in America has been accomplished, and food culture mavens have officially overshot their mark: eating out now means being served sweetmeats on a slab of brick while listening to the neighboring table grouse about the inadequate “acidity” of their last plate in the self-serious tones of CIA operatives on a top-secret mission.
And every bit as vital as the digestion of precious food is the copious chronicling of the eating experience. If eating is a deeply private and emotional activity, laced with personal meaning and nostalgia, then the Yelp restaurant review corpus is a mass community diary, documenting with a hopelessly public, community-focused slant the turmoil of a food revolution. Here, each determined diarist struggles mightily to mimic the hauteur of the practiced establishment food critic. Take this review of a hot Italian restaurant in Silver Lake:
This same sense of ethereal chosenness is what rhetorically elevates a mundane consumer choice to the level of a noble stand against . . . a ramen joint with a pork broth this expert deems inadequate? As these legions of pompous reviews unfold, the customer emerges not as an audience member, bystander, or faceless nobody holding a wallet, but someone central to the entire production, the star of the show, even. This incoherence of self goes straight to the heart of what makes foodie culture such a vibrant manifestation of high-capitalist bewilderment. Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance (even with all of this money, I am no one!), high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come, very intimately, to identify with the embrace or rejection of said product (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen!), beyond reason, as if the world turns on such appraisals, and awaits each of their Yelp verdicts with bated breath.
Here is also the point of transubstantiation: the moment when the foodie’s identity, so completely cobbled together from various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!), intersects with the precious precepts of foodie-ism as political activism. Just as the food-chewing subject has been alchemized into an all-knowing, all-savoring telos for the preparation of ritzy grub, so is that subject mystically charged with the power to save the Earth—and its poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves—with one effortless bite of a really good foie-gras-smeared, grass-fed burger. After all, a rich sense of entitlement has always paired nicely with empty self-righteousness. The stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil, is eventually mistaken for stone tablets, bearing the word of God.
But if one trait characterizes Americans with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in brand new ways. The more pedestrian the product in question, the greater its seeming potential to evoke untold volumes of feeling and meaning. A few centuries into the future, inhabitants of a ravaged globe may look back on this time as the crucial moment at which delusional fervor around unremarkable, overpriced things reached its apex.
Oh, there are lovingly itemized ideological whys-and-wherefores behind the so-called food revolution, to be sure. A long train of exposés and manifestos has shown in chilling detail the myriad ways our foodstuffs have been too long tainted by chemical manipulations, resource-intensive factory farming, overprocessing, and general tastelessness. The solution, from the consumer’s vantage, is to repair all this systemic damage with the homely remedy of better informed, more locally minded shopping. To combat the epidemic of fast food (and the kindred American plague of mounting obesity), we’ve been schooled in the virtues of “slow food,” a.k.a. “locavore” cuisine, a.k.a. organic and regional produce, meats, and dairy products.All of which is plenty worthy and salubrious, so far as our individual food intake goes. We’re all likelier to lead healthy, slim, fulfilling, and flavorful lives when we nourish ourselves on farmers’ market fare—and to feel better about ourselves as agents of ethical change.
But as no end of other right-thinking crusades have shown, there’s a fine line between right conduct and smarmy self-righteousness. As we weather one discursive foodie sermon after another and choke down the aristocratic excesses of today’s foodie media complex, we may long for a sweet taste of silence. After all, there’s scant evidence that the vogue for artisanal cuisine has produced anything close to a more just, affordable, and robust food economy. If anything, it has driven our already class-segmented food system into still greater polarities, with privileged access to rabbit larb and Japanese uni at the upper end of the spectrum, and a wasteland of overprocessed, cheap, and empty slop at the other. To better grasp just how things got to be this way, let’s venture into the dark belly of the modern-day cult known as foodie-ism.
Food, Glorious Food
The glorification of food seems understandable enough, at first glance. Everybody’s got to eat. And as with any other animal urge or act of survival—masticate, copulate, procreate, repeat—it’s not exactly challenging to move this activity to the center of one’s value system. What upper-middle-class college student doesn’t emerge from six months abroad in Barcelona swearing fealty to the crown of jamón ibérico? What leisurely plutocrat with too much time on his hands isn’t tempted to throw his energies into some hobby with immediate built-in payoffs, like becoming an overnight expert on the expensive aged cheeses of the world? What better pastime for a wealthy faux-hippie housewife than raising egg-laying hens (they’re adorable!) or learning to pickle the organic vegetables her child is growing at his pricey progressive preschool?
Why not, in short, transform the rather self-indulgent habit of spending more than $200 on a single meal into an intellectual and cultural badge of honor—a chance to loudly matter in public as you remark on the bright or redolent or flavorful undertones of whatever anxiously plated concoction you’ve just overpaid to savor? The bourgeoisie will always find creative new ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as highly enlightened, discriminating, and honorable—if not downright heroic. And those who provide such indulgences (and who are, in turn, rewarded handsomely for them) are more than happy to collude in this fantasy.
Of course, the fantasy itself grows more baroque and involuted as the foodie cult nets an ever-greater number of well-heeled recruits. In spite of the self-congratulatory earthiness that foodie culture tends to favor (“I just really love food,” earnest foodies will confess, never bothering to notice that most of humankind shares their passion), its overwrought quasi-religiosity picks up right where the rise of designer bottled water left off—i.e., with the world-conquering condescension of the enormously cultivated consumer.
“Food is everything!” foodies often declare, in a fervent yelp apparently aimed at shaking the rest of the populace out of its imagined hunger strike. Even so, simply purchasing a meal at Chez Panisse or Momofuku or Trois Mec is not enough. One must dine at all of Eater’s “essential” restaurants, and speak in an authoritative, Top Chef–tutored tongue on the importance of balancing sourness and sweetness and umami in every single bite. The solemnly important task of delivering “thoughtful” and “inventive” food to every semi-hip town in America has been accomplished, and food culture mavens have officially overshot their mark: eating out now means being served sweetmeats on a slab of brick while listening to the neighboring table grouse about the inadequate “acidity” of their last plate in the self-serious tones of CIA operatives on a top-secret mission.
And every bit as vital as the digestion of precious food is the copious chronicling of the eating experience. If eating is a deeply private and emotional activity, laced with personal meaning and nostalgia, then the Yelp restaurant review corpus is a mass community diary, documenting with a hopelessly public, community-focused slant the turmoil of a food revolution. Here, each determined diarist struggles mightily to mimic the hauteur of the practiced establishment food critic. Take this review of a hot Italian restaurant in Silver Lake:
We ordered the chicken liver crostone, the octopus, and the chopped salad “amigliorata” to start. The chicken liver was ludicrous—airy and creamy in texture, and absolutely rich with flavor. It came with thick crusty hunks of grilled bread and a tart black plum mostarda, a thoughtful accompaniment to the decadent liver. The octopus was tender and toothsome, served over a bed of black barley, roasted carrots, and red onion—a nice, earthy dish with some balancing brightness.Or how about this one, for a ramen joint nearby:
Everything in the Ozu pork ramen was on point, except for the broth. The pork was tender and flavorful, the ajitsuke egg was cooked to perfection, and I liked the tangy flavor added by the mizuna on top. The broth was on the lighter side—not to my liking (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen)—but what made it fail for me was the lack of depth. Even lighter broths need that umami flavor to be good, and Ozu’s broth fell flat on its face on this dimension. . . . I will not come back to Ozu East Kitchen until they add a richer, fattier pork broth.Both (entirely representative) reviews brandish the standard adjectives of food critics and food blogs and food everything—ludicrous, decadent, earthy, brightness, umami—all mixed and matched in an invocation of transcendent morsel-adoring delight that resembles nothing so much as the old Latin Mass. And as with the Mass, and other elite cultures of metaphysical self-congratulation, the obscurantism of the relevant content is itself a mark of chosenness.
This same sense of ethereal chosenness is what rhetorically elevates a mundane consumer choice to the level of a noble stand against . . . a ramen joint with a pork broth this expert deems inadequate? As these legions of pompous reviews unfold, the customer emerges not as an audience member, bystander, or faceless nobody holding a wallet, but someone central to the entire production, the star of the show, even. This incoherence of self goes straight to the heart of what makes foodie culture such a vibrant manifestation of high-capitalist bewilderment. Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance (even with all of this money, I am no one!), high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come, very intimately, to identify with the embrace or rejection of said product (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen!), beyond reason, as if the world turns on such appraisals, and awaits each of their Yelp verdicts with bated breath.
Here is also the point of transubstantiation: the moment when the foodie’s identity, so completely cobbled together from various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!), intersects with the precious precepts of foodie-ism as political activism. Just as the food-chewing subject has been alchemized into an all-knowing, all-savoring telos for the preparation of ritzy grub, so is that subject mystically charged with the power to save the Earth—and its poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves—with one effortless bite of a really good foie-gras-smeared, grass-fed burger. After all, a rich sense of entitlement has always paired nicely with empty self-righteousness. The stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil, is eventually mistaken for stone tablets, bearing the word of God.
by Heather Havrilesky, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Jensine Eckwall
[ed. See also: Heather's new book of essays What If This Were Enough?]
