Gluttony dressed up as
foodie-ism is still gluttony
The Atlantic March 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-moral-crusade-
against-foodies/8370/
The Moral Crusade Against
Foodies
Gluttony
dressed up as foodie-ism is still
gluttony.
By B. R. Myers
We have all dined with him in
restaurants: the
host who insists on calling
his special friend
out of the kitchen for some
awkward small talk.
The publishing industry also
wants us to meet a
few chefs, only these are in
no hurry to get back
to work. Anthony Bourdain's
new book, his 10th,
is Medium Raw: A Bloody
Valentine to the World of
Food and the People Who Cook.
In it he announces,
in his trademark thuggish
style, that "it is now
time to make the idea of not
cooking
'un-cool'-and, in the harshest
possible way short
of physical brutality, drive
that message home."
Having finished the book, I
think I'd rather have
absorbed a few punches and had
the rest of the
evening to myself. No more
readable for being an
artsier affair is chef
Gabrielle Hamilton's
memoir, Blood, Bones and
Butter.
It's quite something to go
bare-handed up an
animal's ass Š Its
viscera came out with an easy
tug; a small palmful of
livery, bloody jewels
that I tossed out into the
yard.
Then there's Kim Severson's
Spoon Fed: How Eight
Cooks Saved My Life, which is
the kind of thing
that passes for spiritual
uplift in this set.
"What blessed entity invented
sugar and cacao
pods and vanilla beans or
figured out that salt
can preserve and brighten
anything?" And I
thought I knew where that
sentence was going. The
flyleaf calls Spoon Fed "a
testament to the
wisdom that can be found in
the kitchen." Agreed.
To put aside these books after
a few chapters is
to feel a sense of liberation;
it's like stepping
from a crowded, fetid
restaurant into silence and
fresh air. But only when
writing such things for
their own kind do so-called
foodies truly let
down their guard, which makes
for some engrossing
passages here and there. For
insight too. The
deeper an outsider ventures
into this stuff, the
clearer a unique community
comes into view. In
values, sense of humor, even
childhood
experience, its members are as
similar to each
other as they are different
from everyone else.
For one thing, these people
really do live to
eat. Vogue's restaurant
critic, Jeffrey
Steingarten, says he "spends
the afternoon-or a
week of afternoons-planning
the perfect dinner of
barbecued ribs or braised foie
gras." Michael
Pollan boasts in The New York
Times of his latest
"36-Hour Dinner Party."
Similar schedules and
priorities can be inferred
from the work of other
writers. These include a sort
of milk-toast
priest, anthologized in Best
Food Writing 2010,
who expounds unironically on
the "ritual" of
making the perfect slice:
The things involved must be
few, so that
their meaning is not diffused,
and they must
somehow assume a perceptible
weight. They attain
this partly from the
reassurance that comes of
being "just so," and partly by
already possessing
the solidity of the absolutely
familiar.
And when foodies talk of
flying to Paris to buy
cheese, to Vietnam to sample
pho? They're not
joking about that either.
Needless to say, no one
shows much interest in
literature or the arts-the
real arts. When Marcel
Proust's name pops up, you
know you're just going to hear
about that damned
madeleine again.
It has always been crucial to
the gourmet's
pleasure that he eat in ways
the mainstream
cannot afford. For hundreds of
years this meant
consuming enormous quantities
of meat. That of
animals that had been whipped
to death was more
highly valued for centuries,
in the belief that
pain and trauma enhanced
taste. "A true
gastronome," according to a
British dining manual
of the time, "is as insensible
to suffering as is
a conqueror." But for the past
several decades,
factory farms have made meat
ever cheaper and-as
the excellent book The CAFO
[Concentrated Animal
Feeding Operations] Reader
makes clear-the pain
and trauma are thrown in for
free. The
contemporary gourmet reacts by
voicing an
ever-stronger preference for
free-range meats
from small local farms. He
even claims to believe
that well-treated animals
taste better, though
his heart isn't really in it.
Steingarten tells
of watching four people hold
down a struggling,
groaning pig for a full 20
minutes as it bled to
death for his dinner. He calls
the animal "a
filthy beast deserving its
fate."
Even if gourmets' rejection of
factory farms and
fast food is largely motivated
by their
traditional elitism, it has
left them, for the
first time in the history of
their community,
feeling more moral, spiritual
even, than the man
on the street. Food writing
reflects the change.
Since the late 1990s, the
guilty smirkiness that
once marked its default style
has been losing
ever more ground to pomposity
and sermonizing.
References to cooks as "gods,"
to restaurants as
"temples," to biting into
"heaven," etc., used to
be meant as jokes, even if the
compulsive
recourse to religious language
always betrayed a
certain guilt about the
stomach-driven life. Now
the equation of eating with
worship is often made
with a straight face. The mood
at a dinner table
depends on the quality of food
served; if
culinary perfection is
achieved, the meal becomes
downright holy-as we learned
from Pollan's The
Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), in
which a pork dinner
is described as feeling "like
a ceremony Š a
secular seder."
The moral logic in Pollan's
hugely successful
book now informs all food
writing: the refined
palate rejects the taste of
factory-farmed meat,
of the corn-syrupy junk food
that sickens the
poor, of frozen fruits and
vegetables transported
wastefully across oceans-from
which it follows
that to serve one's palate is
to do right by
small farmers, factory-abused
cows, Earth itself.
This affectation of piety does
not keep foodies
from vaunting their penchant
for obscenely priced
meals, for gorging themselves,
even for dining on
endangered animals-but only
rarely is public
attention drawn to the
contradiction. This has
much to do with the fact that
the nation's media
tend to leave the national
food discourse to the
foodies in their ranks. To
people like Pollan
himself. And Severson, his
very like-minded
colleague at The New York
Times. Is any other
subculture reported on so
exclusively by its own
members? Or with a frequency
and an extensiveness
that bear so little relation
to its size? (The
"slow food" movement that we
keep hearing about
has fewer than 20,000 members
nationwide.)
The same bias is apparent in
writing that
purports to be academic or at
least serious. The
book Gluttony (2003), one of a
series on the
seven deadly sins, was
naturally assigned to a
foodie writer, namely Francine
Prose, who writes
for the gourmet magazine
Saveur. Not
surprisingly, she regards
gluttony primarily as a
problem of overeating to the
point of obesity; it
is "the only sin Š whose
effects are visible,
written on the body." In fact
the Catholic
Church's criticism has always
been directed
against an inordinate
preoccupation with
food-against foodie-ism, in
other words-which we
encounter as often among thin
people as among fat
ones. A disinterested writer
would likely have
done the subject more justice.
Unfortunately,
even the new sociological
study Foodies:
Democracy and Distinction in
the Gourmet
Foodscape is the product of
two self-proclaimed
members of the tribe,
Josée Johnston and
Shyon
Baumann, who pull their
punches accordingly; the
introduction is titled
"Entering the Delicious
World of Foodies." In short,
the 21st-century
gourmet need fear little
public contradiction
when striking sanctimonious
poses.
The same goes for restaurant
owners like Alice
Waters. A celebrated slow-food
advocate and the
founder of an exclusive eatery
in Berkeley, she
is one of the chefs profiled
in Spoon Fed. "Her
streamlined philosophy,"
Severson tells us, is
"that the most political act
we can commit is to
eat delicious food that is
produced in a way that
is sustainable, that doesn't
exploit workers and
is eaten slowly and with
reverence." A vegetarian
diet, in other words? Please.
The reference is to
Chez Panisse's standard
fare-Severson cites
"grilled rack and loin of
Magruder Ranch veal" as
a typical offering-which is
environmentally
sustainable only because so
few people can afford
it. Whatever one may think of
Anthony Bourdain's
moral sense, his BS detector
seems to be working
fine. In Medium Raw he
congratulates Waters on
having "made lust, greed,
hunger,
self-gratification and
fetishism look good." Not
to everyone, perhaps, but
okay.
The Roman historian Livy
famously regarded the
glorification of chefs as the
sign of a culture
in decline. I wonder what he
would have thought
of The New York Times' efforts
to admit "young
idols with cleavers" into
America's pantheon of
food-service heroes.
With their swinging scabbards,
muscled
forearms and constant
proximity to flesh,
butchers have the raw,
emotional appeal of an
indie band Š "Think about
it. What's sexy?" said
Tia Keenan, the fromager at
Casellula Cheese and
Wine Café and an
unabashed butcher fan.
"Dangerous is sometimes sexy,
and they are
generally big guys with knives
who are covered in
blood."
That's Severson again, by the
way, and she
records no word of dissent in
regard to the
cheese vendor's ravings. We
are to believe this
is a real national trend here.
In fact the public
perception of butchers has not
changed in the
slightest, as can easily be
confirmed by telling
someone that he or she looks
like one. "Blankly
as a butcher stares," Auden's
famous line about
the moon, will need no
explanatory footnote even
a century from now.
But food writing has long
specialized in the
barefaced inversion of common
sense, common
language. Restaurant reviews
are notorious for
touting $100 lunches as great
value for money.
The doublespeak now comes in
more pious tones,
especially when foodies feign
concern for
animals. Crowding around to
watch the slaughter
of a pig-even getting in its
face just before the
shot-is described by Bethany
Jean Clement (in an
article in Best Food Writing
2009) as "solemn"
and "respectful" behavior.
Pollan writes about
going with a friend to watch a
goat get killed.
"Mike says the experience made
him want to honor
our goat by wasting as little
of it as possible."
It's teachable fun for the
whole foodie family.
The full strangeness of this
culture sinks in
when one reads affectionate
accounts (again in
Best Food Writing 2009) of
children clamoring to
kill their own cow-or wanting
to see a pig shot,
then ripped open with a chain
saw: "YEEEEAAAAH!"
Here too, though, an at least
half-serious moral
logic is at work, backed up by
the subculture's
distinct body of myth, which
combines
half-understood evolutionary
theory with the
biblical idea of man as born
lord of the world.
Anthropological research, I
should perhaps point
out, now indicates that Homo
sapiens started out
as a paltry prey animal.
Clawless, fangless, and
slight of build, he could at
best look forward to
furtive boltings of carrion
until the day he
became meat himself. It took
humans quite a while
to learn how to gang up for
self-protection and
food acquisition, the latter
usually a
hyena-style affair of
separating infant or sick
animals from their herds. The
domestication of
pigs, cows, chickens, etc. has
been going on for
only about 10,000 years-not
nearly long enough to
breed the instincts out of
them. The hideous
paraphernalia of subjugation
pictured in The CAFO
Reader? It's not there for
nothing.
Now for the foodie version.
The human animal
evolved "with eyes in the
front of its head, long
legs, fingernails, eyeteeth-so
that it could
better chase down slower,
stupider creatures,
kill them, and eat them"
(Bourdain, Medium Raw).
We have eaten them for so long
that meat-eating
has shaped our souls (Pollan,
The Omnivore's
Dilemma). And after so many
millennia of
domestication, food animals
have become
"evolutionarily hard-wired" to
depend on us
(chef-writer Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall, The
River Cottage Meat Book).
Every exercise of our
hungry power is thus part of
the Great Food Chain
of Being, with which we must
align our morals.
Deep down-instinctively if not
consciously-the
"hardwired" pig understands
all this, understands
why he has suddenly been
dragged before a leering
crowd. Just don't waste any of
him afterward;
that's all he asks. Note that
the foodies' pride
in eating "nose to tail" is no
different from
factory-farm boasts of "using
everything but the
oink." As if such token
frugality could make up
for the caloric wastefulness
and environmental
damage that result from meat
farming!
Naturally the food-obsessed
profess as much
respect for tradition as for
evolution. Hamilton,
in Blood, Bones and Butter,
writes of her
childhood dinners: "The meal
was always organized
correctly, traditionally,
which I now
appreciate." Even relatively
young traditions
like the Thanksgiving turkey
must be guarded
zealously against efforts to
change or opt out of
them. Foreign traditions
destigmatize every dish
even for the American. In Best
Food Writing 2010,
one foie gras lover asks
another whether he would
eat tortured cat if there were
sufficient
Mongolian history behind the
dish; the answer is
yes.
So tradition is an absolute
good? No. When it
dictates abstention from a
certain food, it is to
be rejected. Francine Prose
shows how it's done
in her prize-winning Saveur
article, "Faith and
Bacon." I need hardly explain
which of those two
she cannot live without. Prose
concedes that
since pigs compete ravenously
with humans for
grain, her Jewish forefathers'
taboo against pork
may well have derived from
ecological reasons
that are even more valid
today. Yet she finds it
unrealistic to hope that
humans could ever
suppress their "baser
appetites Š for the
benefit
of other humans, flora, and
fauna." She then
drops the point entirely;
foodies quickly lose
interest in any kind of
abstract discussion. The
reader is left to infer that
since baser
appetites are going to rule
anyway, we might as
well give in to them.
But if, however unlikely it
seems, I ever
find myself making one of
those late-life turns
toward God, one thing I can
promise you is that
this God will be a deity who
wants me to feel
exactly the way I feel when
the marbled slice of
pork floats to the top of the
bowl of ramen.
Yes, I feel equally sure that
Prose's God will be
that kind of God. At least she
maintains a civil
tone when talking of kashrut.
In "Killer Food,"
another article in Best Food
Writing 2010, Dana
Goodyear tells how a
restaurant served head
cheese (meat jelly made from
an animal's head) to
an unwitting Jew.
One woman, when [chef
Jon] Shook finally had
a chance to explain, spat it
out on the table and
said, "Oh my fucking God, I've
been kosher for
thirty-two years." Shook
giggled, recollecting.
"Not any more you ain't!"
We are meant to chuckle too;
the woman (who I am
sure expressed herself in less
profane terms) got
what she deserved. Most of us
consider it a
virtue to maintain our
principles in the face of
social pressure, but in the
involuted world of
gourmet morals, constancy is
rudeness. One must
never spoil a dinner party for
mere religious or
ethical reasons. Pollan says
he sides with the
French in regarding "any
personal dietary
prohibition as bad manners."
(The American foodie
is forever projecting his own
barbarism onto
France.) Bourdain writes,
"Taking your belief
system on the road-or to other
people's
houses-makes me angry." The
sight of vegetarian
tourists waving away a
Vietnamese pho vendor
fills him with "spluttering
indignation."
That's right: guests have a
greater obligation to
please their host-and
passersby to please a
vendor-than vice versa. Is
there any civilized
value that foodies cannot turn
on its head? But I
assume Bourdain has no qualms
about waving away a
flower seller, just as Pollan
probably sees
nothing wrong with a Mormon's
refusal of a cup of
coffee. Enjoinders to put the
food provider's
feelings above all else are
just part of the
greater effort to sanctify
food itself.
So secure is the gourmet
community in its
newfound reputation, so sure
is it of its
rightness, that it now
proclaims the very
qualities-greed, indifference
to suffering, the
prioritization of food above
all-that earned it
so much obloquy in the first
place. Bourdain
starts off his book by
reveling in the illegality
of a banquet at which he and
some famous
(unnamed) chefs dined on
ortolan, endangered
songbirds fattened up, as he
unself-consciously
tells us, in pitch-dark cages.
After the meal, an
"identical just-fucked look"
graced each diner's
face. Eating equals sex, and
in accordance with
this self-flattery, gorging is
presented in terms
of athleticism and endurance.
"You eat way past
the point of hitting the wall.
Or I do anyway."
If nothing else, Bourdain at
least gives the lie
to the Pollan-Severson cant
about foodie-ism
being an integral part of the
whole, truly
sociable, human being. In
Bourdain's world,
diners are as likely to sit
solo or at a
countertop while chewing their
way through "a
fucking Everest of shellfish."
Contributors to
the Best Food Writing
anthologies celebrate the
same mindless, sweating
gluttony. "You eat and
eat and eat," Todd Kliman
writes, "long after
you're full. Being
overstuffed, for the food
lover, is not a moral
problem." But then, what
is? In the same anthology,
Michael Steinberger
extols the pleasure of
"joyfully gorging yourself
Š on a bird bearing the
liver of another bird."
He also talks of "whimpering
with ecstasy" in a
French restaurant, then
allowing the chef to hit
on his wife, because "I was in
too much of a
stupor Š [He] had
just served me one of the
finest dishes I'd ever eaten."
Hyperbole, the
reader will have noticed,
remains the central
comic weapon in the food
writer's arsenal. It
gets old fast. Nor is there
much sign of wit in
the table talk recorded.
Aquinas said gluttony
leads to "loutishness,
uncleanness,
talkativeness, and an
uncomprehending dullness of
mind," and if you don't
believe him, here's
Kliman again:
I watched tears streak down a
friend's face
as he popped expertly
cleavered bites of chicken
into his mouth Š He was
red-eyed and breathing
fast. "It hurts, it hurts, but
it's so good, but
it hurts, and I can't stop
eating!" He slammed a
fist down on the table. The
beer in his glass
sloshed over the sides. "Jesus
Christ, I've got
to stop!"
We have already seen that the
foodie respects
only those customs,
traditions, beliefs,
cultures-old and new, domestic
and foreign-that
call on him to eat more, not
less. But the foodie
is even more insatiable in
regard to variety than
quantity. Johnston and Baumann
note that "eating
unusual foods is part of what
generates foodie
status," and indeed, there
appears to be no
greater point of pride in this
set than to eat
with the indiscriminate
omnivorousness of a rat
in a zoo dumpster. Jeffrey
Steingarten called his
first book The Man Who Ate
Everything. Bourdain
writes, with equal swagger,
"I've eaten raw seal,
guinea pig. I've eaten bat."
The book Foodies
quotes a middle-aged software
engineer who says,
"Um, it's not something I
would be anxious to
repeat but Š it's kind of
weird and cool to say
I've had goat testicles in
rice wine." The taste
of these bizarre meals-as
researchers of oral
fixation will not be surprised
to learn-is
neither here nor there.
Members of the
Gastronauts, a foodie group in
New York, stuff
live, squirming octopuses and
eels down their
throats before posting the
carny-esque footage
online.
Such antics are encouraged in
the media with
reports of the exotic foods
that can be had only
overseas, beyond the reach of
FDA inspectors,
conservationists, and
animal-rights activists.
Not too long ago MSNBC.com put
out an article
titled "Some Bravery as a Side
Dish." It listed
"7 foods for the fearless
stomach," one of which
was ortolan, the endangered
songbirds fattened in
dark boxes. The more lives
sacrificed for a
dinner, the more impressive
the eater. Dana
Goodyear: "Thirty duck hearts
in curry Š The
ethos of this kind of cooking
is undeniably
macho." Amorality as ethos,
callousness as
bravery, queenly
self-absorption as machismo:
no
small perversion of language
is needed to spin
heroism out of an evening
spent in a chair.
Of course, the bulk of foodie
writing falls
between the extremes of
Pollan- esque sanctimony
and Bourdainian oafishness.
The average article
in a Best Food Writing
anthology is a
straightforward if very
detailed discussion of
some treat or another, usually
interwoven with a
chronicle of the writer's
quest to find or make
it in perfect form. Seven
pages on sardines.
Eight pages on marshmallow
fluff! The lack of
drama and affect only makes
the gloating
obsessiveness even more
striking. The following,
from a man who travels the
world sampling
oysters, is typical.
Sitting at Bentley's lustrous
marble bar, I
ordered three No. 1 and three
No. 2 Strangford
Loughs and a martini. I was
promptly set up with
a dark green and gold
placemat, a napkin,
silverware, a bread plate, an
oyster plate, some
fresh bread, a plate of deep
yellow butter
rounds, vinegar, red pepper,
Tabasco sauce, and a
saucer full of lemons wrapped
in cheesecloth.
Bentley's is a very serious
oyster bar. When the
bartender asked me if I wanted
olives or a twist,
I asked him which garnish he
liked better with
oysters. He recommended both.
I had never seen
both garnishes served
together, but Š (Robb
Walsh, "English Oyster Cult,"
Best Food Writing
2009)
I used to reject that old
countercultural
argument, the one about the
difference between a
legitimate pursuit of pleasure
and an addiction
or pathology being primarily a
question of social
license. I don't anymore.
After a month among the
bat eaters and milk-toast
priests, I opened Nikki
Sixx's Heroin Diaries (2008)
and encountered a
refreshingly sane-seeming
young man,
self-critical and with a
dazzlingly wide range of
interests. Unfortunately, the
foodie fringe
enjoys enough media access to
make daily claims
for its sophistication and
virtue, for the
suitability of its lifestyle
as a model for the
world. We should not let it
get away with those
claims. Whether gluttony is a
deadly sin is of
course for the religious to
decide, and I hope
they go easy on the foodies;
they're not all bad.
They are certainly
single-minded, however, and
single-mindedness-even in less
obviously selfish
forms-is always a littleness
of soul.
