Momstuff podcast response--"Stuff Mom Never Told You"; Discovery.com

In re: episode Dec. 26^th 2012

“Is foodie culture the new art?”

Charles Imbelli

New York, NY

12/28/12

The following are my thoughts on food and art and sex and hipsters, in no particular order.

On Food and Cooking

I have always found it somewhat ironic that until recently, cooking was seen as somehow feminine. That is to say, as a kid with a serious cooking habit as early as, I don’t know, ten, there were still home economics classes. Girls took classes on baking and boys took shop. Still, the majority of professional restaurant cooks and chefs were men. In fact, the Culinary Institute of America (which is worthy of it’s own crazy long rant, or hey, maybe a podcast) was originally founded as a technical school for former military. Now it’s all rich white kids (a totally viable alternative to a regular college), and career changers (most of whom don’t realize just what it takes to be a professional chef).

I will say that there is certainly something very feminine about cooking, in that it’s about feeding people—again, I use this expression loosely. It’s absolutely about servitude, whether in the home or in the professional kitchen. It’s the “service” industry. We cook in service to tradition, to ingredients, to taste, and to the guest. We take care of people.

So the stay at home mom in the fifties and the tattooed former marine are both engaged in the “womanly arts.” There is a tendency in the modernist cooking movement to get away from this sense of spiritual food and care taking. There is an unfortunate trajectory among the hobbyists away from the emotional experience of dining, and towards the technical, the scientific and the easily replicable.  This recipe as chemistry approach to cooking appeals, I’m sure, to the traditional male, stuck in notions of cooking as feminine, wherein the only “manly” way to cook is to turn it into science, or throw it on the grill.

I do not want to give the impression that I’m against modernist technique, especially in the professional kitchen, where part of taking care of the guest is making sure the food is always perfect. It’s just that in the home kitchen, this sort of hobbyist approach lacks the soulfulness of the sort of cooking as art that I’m trying to sort through.

Food Can’t be ART, can it?

Let’s define art. I think at it’s most basic, art is anything that makes people feel. Additionally, art needs to stand on its own. That is to say, if it’s an absolute necessity, it’s not art, it’s a craft.

It’s been generally accepted that the culinary “arts” are in fact crafts, in the sense that the people at the top of their fields, from a technical standpoint, are essentially craftsmen—chefs take something we need, and elevate it to the level of craft through proper technique and ingredients. Of course, there’s just food, too—ramen noodles in a package, canned soup, anything commercially produced. Moreover, most “hipster food fads,” the taco trucks and the retro stuff and the fancy junk food—that’s all craft. Jojo’s Sriracha is craft. If you can buy it on scoutmobbe, or Etsy, or learn how to do it from Martha Stewart and her army of stylists, it’s a craft.

I love Martha Stewart. I love food trucks. I love “artisanal” everything. It’s usually better. But it’s a craft.

So. What makes food art, then? It’s all about intention.  Food at the level of art has behind it a clear ethics and philosophy, above and beyond pure technique. The ethics is the political idea driving the dish, or the restaurant. The philosophy is the intended emotions that the dish or the restaurant is trying to invoke.

Folks concerned with the elitist nature of organic/artisanal have bandied about much criticism of foodies. The claim is that being a foodie isn’t necessarily accessible to the regular folks out there. But hasn’t every cultural movement started as the interest of a select privileged few? I mean, people protesting in the occupy movement aren’t typically on food stamps, or welfare.  Or if they are, they tend not to have started that way. Nearly every revolution in culture and politics has come out of the middle class.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with privileged white people standing for things, just that there’s a lack of self awareness about just how privileged most white people that go to college and care about stuff actually are.

That being said, look at the course of food culture over the last 30 years. Alice Waters has probably done more to advance the cause of good, healthy food for all than any single person until Michael Pollan. And she’s not even a chef—Jonathan Waxman and Jeremiah Tower were the real chefs at Chez Panisse.

As mentioned above, every aspect of mainstream culture tends to be filtered through the sub-culture, or “hipster,” according to Norman Mailer’s original definition of the word. As the mainstream media jumps on any particular bandwagon, and Old Navy starts releasing off the rack “vintage” t-shirts, the mainstream adopts the sub culture and hipsters move on to the next cool thing. I don’t mean to sound too tongue in cheek or derogatory about any of this. “The next cool thing” is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the interest is not in cool for its own sake.  This is probably the only example of a trickle down philosophy actually working, and in the long run, benefitting the proletariat at large.

From the NY Times, Oct. 26, 2012 (William Deresiewicz)—point.

We’re “confusing our palates with our souls?”

“Food doesn’t express emotion?”

Food doesn’t let one “see the world in a new way?”

It doesn’t provide “insight into other people?”

It won’t let one take an “inventory of the soul?”

From everything we know about society and life and taste--counterpoint

“Confusing our palates with our souls?” That’s a bad thing? Really?  “Ratatouille” already addressed this question, brilliantly, in the penultimate scene, where the food critic, who is probably supposed to be that famous grump William Grimes, also of the NYTimes, is transported through the years to a childhood that was full of wonder and new tastes and small, good things (with apologies to Raymond Carver).  Hell, we even have a tendency to refer to pithy expressions as “food for the soul.”

Sure, Proust had  a thing or two to say about the madeleine. And sure, the resulting piece was art. But why not the madeleine itself? Why shouldn’t a meal inspire further thought, or in the case of Alice Waters, and finally, Michelle Obama, political action?

I can virtually guarantee that if Americans tried cooking for themselves three times a week, instead of buying whatever government subsidized MRE available from the grocery store, or McDonald’s, or the school cafeteria, we would lose weight. We would be happier (because cooking and eating together makes people happy). We would share more stories with each other and create ritual and tradition that can be shared.

But how do we get there? We get there when the elite becomes the mainstream. We get there when a handful of food hipsters get enough attention through social and traditional media that people in Missoula start to pay attention. When we realize as a government that maybe modern nutritional theory is actually more harmful than helpful (see the margarine debacle). When we start to realize that maybe subsidizing corn to the point where there’s so much of the stuff (and it’s inedible in its raw form) that we need to turn corn into sugar and fuel for our cars.

If it weren’t for Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, and those dudes with the thick glasses waiting for the Korilla Truck, would Mayor Bloomberg have taken steps to address the public health crisis that is government subsidized sugar? Would NYC be as proactive about teaching minorities how to cook real food? Would we have programs to provide EBT access at greenmarkets throughout the city? Would we have as many greenmarkets as we do, especially in areas that are considered “food deserts?” It’s now easier in many parts of the city to buy greenmarket produce a couple of times a week than it is to get to the grocery store.  At least in most major metropolitan areas, green market shopping, let alone eating in fine dining restaurants is no longer the provenance of “stuffy old white folks,” and that’s not a bad thing.

The idea that foodie culture is somehow callous or frivolous when there are “people [who] can’t afford a good meal,” is fallacious, especially given the fact that there’s literally no reason to not be able to afford a good meal. Further, as mentioned previously, dining itself is frivolous. As soon as refrigeration became possible, fire and spice became obsolete, except as a matter of taste. Before that, fire killed bacteria, and spice covered up the taste of rotten food. But we still cook with fire, and we still season our food, because it’s tasty.

I remember the first time I ate at Per Se. Afterwards, I told my dining partner that I wanted to pay with a bag of pennies. It would have been a VERY heavy bag, but that meal was worth every single one.  It was a transformative experience—not just in the way I think about food, but in the way I saw the entire dining experience.

Yes, we need food to live. But since art and entertainment is essentially a diverting experience, dining is food elevated to the level of art, wherein the experience of eating is sublimated into a purely emotional response to good food, good service and good conversation. The very experience of dining is inherently diversionary. It’s not that conversation necessarily stems from the food itself, but rather the experience is a seamless melding of socializing and dining, wherein one necessarily informs the other.

And that, in the end, is the goal of art—it’s frivolous, it’s something people do because they can. It’s pretty, or at least interesting (or for our purposes, tasty). But somehow, against all odds, it’s more than all of that. It’s an alchemy of the soul, that stands on its own, and provokes if you let it.

Miscellanea:

On the subject of food and gender, I just picked up the book “Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen,” by Charlotte Druckman. If I had read it yet, I would be able to comment on the book itself, instead of my own experience, but I haven’t. Still, maybe check it out.

 Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where George couldn’t, um, climax without a Sandwich? Now that’s my kind of food and sex. Forget whipped cream. Forget naked sushi. Just gimme a sammich and I’ll be happy.

Also, check out:

KCRW’s “Food is the new rock” podcast

A note on hipsters: The rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated…

Why the vitriol? First: Everyone hates hipsters, but no one will self-identify as one. I’ll be the first. Why? I love food, movies, literature, mostly non-popular music. I wear ray-bans. I have a tattoo of the cover of “The Great Gatsby.”

Anyway, it’s not even a good insult. Like, “oh, I’m sorry I have such good taste in stuff.” And it doesn’t even work semantically—like, “tipsters” leave tips, “pollsters” take polls, “jokesters” make jokes. But hipsters are . . . douchebags? Maybe call “hipsters” what they actually are—taste makers.

Some hipsters/“revolutionaries” that are actually  worthy of disdain:

From the infamous NYU Occupation Protest of ‘09

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q6KAg6qEGY)

Take note of the incredible juxtaposition of the phrase “corporate water,” and the surfeit of apple products.