“There is something at once decadent and abstemious about the way foodism elevates food to a higher plane than simple refuelling”
The Towngate Tea Room and Deli in the village of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, opened in March 2009. Before then, hungry hikers and pilgrims to Sylvia Plath’s final resting place could pick from two pubs, one of which offers a “pie, peas and a pint” special. In the Tea Room, the cakes are housed in a towering glass display case. The coffee and walnut sponge is uncommonly good. Savoury fare is proffered on laminated menus, propped between the salt and pepper pots on Ikea pine tables. Sandwiches are toasted, jacket spuds come variously filled, and breakfast lasts all day. Then there’s the “balsamic reduction.”
Gastroculture has a lot to answer for. As well as daubing the nation’s plates with foams and emulsions, it’s made celebrities of chefs, and chefs of celebrities, providing lucrative publishing deals to both, not to mention spin-off saucepan lines and ready-meals. It’s monopolised television schedules and made forays onto the big screen dressed up as a quest (Eat Pray Love), a crusade (Food, Inc.) and a rodent with a dream (Ratatouille). It’s spawned live events and even muscled its way into music festivals via gourmet food trucks and VIP dining tickets. Internationally, our appetite for all things gastro has promoted high-end foodie multiplexes like Eataly, which is plotting outposts in Chicago and São Paolo after an initial expansion from Turin to New York City. And then there’s the culinary tourism, the urban foraging and the obsession with provenance. Food, which has long been a staple of “lifestyle,” has also become religion, theatre, environmentalism, fashion, even sex. Its reach is such that we’re still neologising to accommodate its girth: neurogastronomy, gastroporn, locavorism, molecular gastronomy.
Yet having gone mainstream enough to have made it onto plasticised menus, its moment appears to be waning. It’s ripe for the sending up, of course, and not just from the usual satirical sources (see, for example, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan’s television series The Trip). Some of gastroculture’s chief evangelists are also getting in on the act. Anthony Bourdain has published a graphic novel skewering it. Ted Allen, who hosts a show on America’s Food Network, has appeared in a video for The Onion in which he prepares “a stupidass trendy piece of fish coated in some kind of nut you’ve never heard of served alongside a purée of baby something-or-other.” Earlier this year, the Cooking Channel itself launched a spoof series on its website titled “Fodder.” To this list we may now add a new book by Steven Poole, the author who called time on the mumbo-jumbo he dubbed “unspeak” and seeks to do the same for gastroculture or “foodism,” as he terms it in You Aren’t What You Eat. A light but piquant polemic, its publication is scheduled for “Super Thursday,” the same October date that sees the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson release their shots at Christmas bestsellerdom.
Candidly, people who don’t like food give me the willies, yet I also run screaming from anything involving cob nuts, heirloom tomatoes or the word “artisanal.” If foodism really is about to fizzle, it’s hard to imagine what its legacy will be. Foodists are slavish in their devotion to authenticity, but flipping through bygone cookbooks rarely leaves a person licking their lips. Most of it is revolting. A decade hence, aren’t Heston Blumenthal’s spruce-spritzed mince pies likely to seem just as off-putting? In truth, some molecular gastronomical creations (gorgonzola cheese volleyball, anyone?) don’t sound all that far removed from foodstuffs you’ll find at the nether-end of the dining scale (I’m thinking Turkey Twizzlers and Tater Tots). Naturally, devotees insist that ideas flow in the opposite direction: high-foodism is to the average plate as the Milan catwalk is to the high street. But while it’s true that nouvelle cuisine, for instance, brought us the Roux Brothers—“the Beatles of gastronomy,” as Heston described them—couldn’t a case be made for Delia Smith having had far more impact on what we actually cook?
Of the many contradictions that this sprawling cultural phenomenon presents, one of the most striking is that while we can seemingly gobble up hours of television shows whose contestants use tweezers to pluck leaves from basil plants, we don’t have time to make supper for our kids. But if gastroculture isn’t really about cooking, it’s not so much about eating, either. Luxe restaurant culture has thrived in the past decade, but as any food critic will tell you, the food is only a small part of the dining experience. I know of one restaurant where diners are asked not only if the music is too loud, but also whether the room temperature is to their liking.
Foodism often seems determined to defer eating. Take the slow food movement, for instance. This is not for the hungry, as I learnt a couple of years ago at a Fourth of July concert in the forest outside Woodstock, New York but it could just as well have been Hampstead’s Kenwood House. As the programme cantered from Schumann to Copland our hosts—food writers both—passed around the dishes that made up their “picnic.” I never did find out what was on my fork at any given moment, since no amount of applause proved long enough to accommodate their descriptions. Except for the marinated watermelon, not a single food item seemed to have taken less than a week to prepare. Oh, for a cheese and pickle sarnie on sliced white.
Foodism also promotes an obsession with invisible ingredients. At my local train station recently, free Nature Valley bars were being thrust at passing commuters with the cry: “May contain nuts!” It brought to mind a scene from Michael Frayn’s latest novel, Skios, in which an exasperated Greek chef is quizzed by the organiser of an international banquet. Gluten-free, nut-free and salt-free are taken care of, but what about onion-free? He sighs. When he was a kid, just two sorts of food existed: “Was food, and was no food.”
It might be useful at this point to consider the distinction between foodie (think Michael Winner) and foodist (let’s say Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). You knew where you were with a foodie. There was jollity to their gluttony, which was flaunted frankly and without pretence. By contrast the foodist (as Poole notes, echoes of “nudist” are not unhelpful) claims to be ethically motivated or else spiritually searching.
And it’s this, more than anything else, that unifies an otherwise diverse collection of culinary stances. There is something at once decadent and abstemious about the way foodism philosophises food, elevating it to a higher plane than simple refuelling, or else analysing its nutritional content to the point where you feel like you’re about to munch your way through a fistful of vitamin pills. Carbs are demonised, pomegranates (never local in the UK) and fish oil (sustainably caught?) are elixirs. Meanwhile, as was noted in a recent article in The Atlantic, most omnivores do not have a dilemma. They simply want to get lunch.
Gastroculture is insular and show-offy. It is low-fat but ego-inflating, self-absorbed and self-satisfied. Yet ridiculous though its component fads are, they often speak to ancient urges, their herd-like stampedes recalling a time when food was a more communal endeavour. We sowed and harvested together, we shared around a campfire, swapped recipes and took our loaves to the village oven. Likewise, food has always been used to express identity, whether through what we eat (Sunday roasts, chicken kormas) or what we don’t eat (pork, beef). And you need only ask someone over 65 to describe the food of their childhood to be reminded that taste really does contain whole worlds. But there’s a chasm separating that from the scents with which trendy chefs spritz their food and the headsets they hand to diners. The self-consciousness of foodism is what makes it all so deeply unpalatable. It seems part of a broader weakness for phoniness that’s made the creators of Instagram so rich. And just like that mobile photo app, it has a homogenising effect even as it claims to seek out and celebrate the local.
Stripped of its primary role as a sustenance provider, much of the cooking that foodists champion looks like mere playing with food, which isn’t to say that it can’t still be fun in the same way that making mud pies as a kid is fun (the rediscovery of tripe and brain and entrails as ingredients provides an identical yucky thrill, too). Though there is undoubtedly artistry involved, the culinary arts ought properly to be called culinary crafts. Or perhaps domestic science, which despite its $625 price tag, the six-volume Modernist Cuisine essentially is. Co-written by Nathan Myhrvold, a theoretical physicist and former chief technology officer of Microsoft, it’s the Bible for sous-vide cooking, an incredibly exact process that originates in industrial food preparation and can sound a lot like boil-in-the-bag. A meal, be it Michelin-starred or made with love by grandma, will not leave you feeling full in the same way as a Beethoven symphony. A similar point was made by self-confessed foodist Adam Gopnik earlier this year. He was taking part in a live discussion on gastroculture hosted by Zócalo Public Square, and went on to quote his daughter: “And tomorrow we’ll all be hungry again.”
Tomorrow—that’s what really calls gastroculture’s bluff. Humankind faces very real challenges in terms of feeding ourselves and feeding ourselves well. The global downturn has already brought some changes to the foodist landscape: the decision to close elBulli was made before Spain’s hospitality industry fell into the clutches of a crisis that has seen upscale restaurants offering BYOB. Elsewhere, small plates have replaced taster menus, and food trucks and pop-up, cash-only eateries are all the rage. The fact remains, however, that despite farmers’ markets and meatless Mondays, despite Jamie Oliver’s ardent crusading and Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable patch, gastroculture has done markedly little to improve the eating and cooking habits of most. A balsamic reduction seems unlikely to help. Nor, regrettably, will it set the taste buds singing.
