THEY SPEAK OF A POST-9/11 WORLD. They could just as easily speak of a post-fried world. In the before-world, food— as in fat and fried—connoted flavour, finger-licking, indulgence. Eating was time-out. Consuming involved some effort, albeit enjoyable effort: there was chewing, the teeth were involved, cud was not that far off. I can imagine a time, in the days before the war on fat, when lingering over a tasty, fatty morsel of meat was a wholly positive experience. Now we live in a new era— defined perhaps by the fact that the ‘Fried’ has gone from Kentucky Fried Chicken, a handy omission afforded so serendipitously by the abbreviation KFC.
In the after-world, food and especially fat, are mostly bad. We’re into light and lean (consider those pre-packed, home-delivered services like ‘Light ’n’ Easy’). There are big demands on food these days—it needs to be everything: fast, economical, minimal, tasty, diverse.
Overall, it’s less interactional and more transactional. It gets things done; it’s not trying to improve the quality of one’s relationships. It’s also blurred its edges so that it bleeds into ‘lifestyle’. When the doctor says, ‘Let’s talk about lifestyle factors that can impact on your condition’, you have to be nuts not to read between the euphemisms. We’ve entered the Asian cup-o-soup world, a far cry from the crackling cosmos we came from. ‘Gravy’ is now a bad word—whether it goes with ‘train’ or just with the roast. I know this because of the number of gravy boats that have been appearing of late in St Vincent de Paul op-shops. If gravy is going out, the boat’s not needed.
Related to the banishment of ‘fried’ is the accumulating knowledge and dissemination of information about nutrition. Most specifically, here, about fat. I mean surely we who are living today know more about fat than anyone who has ever lived on this planet. Hands up those who haven’t been living on a desert island and don’t know about bad fats, as in hot chips and Danish pastries, and good fats, as in nuts (some nuts, not all nuts) and avocado. Now, keep your hands up if you think your grandparents knew what you know. Mmm,I thought so. Back then, when they sat on verandahs and chewed the fat, you can bet it wasn’t the Omega kind.
So, it’s not a big assertion to state that food isn’t what it used to be. I say this in a descriptive rather than an evaluative sense. I’m not about to nostalgically reminisce about the home, hearth and repasts of yore, but nor am I going to wax lyrical about contemporary cuisine. I’m simply noting the difference, neither grieving the loss, nor celebrating the gain. Very postmodern of me.
So let’s see what this amounts to. Food has changed, both substantively, in terms of the ‘what’ of food and the ‘how’ of cooking; and representationally, in terms of how we talk about such matters. And, of course, it’s the language that we’re primarily interested in here, not the niceties of social history. The two phenomena are linked—a poke around in the language will usually yield some important insights into how we used to live compared with how we live now.
At the substantive level, there are new crops, new cuts and new taste combinations available that simply were not around years ago. The dinner table, or more correctly, that which appears on top of it, is qualitatively different. Gone are the stalwarts of a former cuisinary era—chicken Maryland, beef stroganoff, bombe alaska, flummery, lemon delicious, bread and butter pudding (which may be making a little come back). All that offal we now eschew—brains, lamb’s fry, sweetbread, itself named as a euphemism—spurring on the sympathetic if etymythological notion that ‘offal’ and ‘awful’ are joined at the hip. The humble choko and squash are almost vanished, and pumpkin has to have ginger or coriander or crumbled Bulgarian fetta or a hint of Thai spices to render it acceptable. And despite the fact that sweet potato has an old, even prehistoric look, I don’t ever remember it as a part of my childhood; nor do I recall more than two kinds of regular potatoes, unlike the seventy-one varieties now vying for our vegetable dollar.
In their place, a host of cuisinary arrivals. Take ‘rocket’, for instance, which launched itself onto the gourmet market a few years ago, its sexy piquant flavour forcing poor old lettuce into the nearest corner to limp out and cry. Then ‘broccolini’ arrived—lean, delicate, enticing—its very presence beginning to shame the mother plant, broccoli, which started to look comparatively shabby, much as cauliflower did when broccoli first appeared. Is this a kind of vegetative justice—what goes around, comes around? Or is it Realpolitik, writ small: out with the rogue state vegetable, in with the newly arrived (supposed) democratic replacement?
Then there’s lamb ‘backstrap’—delicious, expensive, versatile. And ‘frenched’ cutlets, which are nowhere near as lewd as they sound. And ‘tenderloin’ of chicken. I recall when I first heard it said, it almost made me blush, recalling my earliest encounter with ‘loins’, at least loins of the literary kind, in the D.H. Lawrence texts of English 101, where I wondered at length about the proximity of ‘loin’ to ‘groin’, both phonically and anatomically. Even ‘lovely legs’ caught me by surprise in a way that ‘drumsticks’ never would have, but then a lovely leg is not simply a drumstick by another name, is it?
And don’t get me started on cheeses because, really, in my youth, cheese was cheddar and cheddar was cheese, and there you had it, in a nutshell. The only other place that cheese featured was in the instruction to smile. My European parents would bring home some smelly foul-looking thing they called cheese (I presumed they’d got the English wrong), and would then proceed to eat it while my brother and I would hold our noses, aghast. We called it ‘stinky cheese’ (sometimes pronounced ‘shtinky’), and it wasn’t affectionate.
As for taste combinations—what was mixed with what in the cooking and what was served with what on the plate— who’d have thought of adding pulp of passionfruit to a salad dressing or putting cloves in rice? It’s a wonder that a generation reared on meat-and-two-veg can so nonchalantly combine an Asian-style entrée with a Moroccan main and an Italian dessert. How did the palate change, and did anyone notice it was happening?
All these changes—it’s no wonder that the way we represent food has also changed. There’s not a lot you can say about meat-and-two-veg to increase its power of seduction. By contrast, the menu in a classy restaurant can leave your heart aflutter. The flaked crab, lying back on a bed of pumpkin puree, yearning for the gentle touch of the avocado and coriander salsa, while the hand-fed calf emerges as a thin slip of an escalope, poached with a light squeeze of lemon and a hint of oregano, and served with tender baby carrots barely out of infancy. Sometimes you don’t know where to look.
Food has changed because we look at it differently. And the new approach brought an extra something—a whole new dynamism. It’s not just the shepherd’s pie that’s gone; even more important is the passing of stasis itself. Now, not only are our palates re-educated; they have ditched the very notion of restraint and now expect to continue to be challenged. So, not only do we look at matters of food differently from the way we once did, but we’re continually re-constructing both ourselves and our eating styles. We’ve moved from a food-as-fuel society where food languished with ‘shelter’ right at the base of the Maslowian triangular hierarchy of needs. Now it’s moved up, right to the apex, where it joins other elements of our self-actualising selves. It’s part of our identity now. I am what I eat. I eat therefore I am. We define ourselves by our dietary predilections, our food intolerances, what we crave and what we eschew.
Food is now an aesthetic, a commodity, an accessory, a statement, a credential, a promise, a lifestyle, a philosophy. It sports an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic blend of the epicurean, the sensual and even the spiritual. As someone said to me recently in an email inviting me out to lunch and inquiring about any dietary restrictions or ideological orientations: ‘You’ll need to tell me if you’re into a personal boycott of venues serving llama with jus de Anglican cumquat.’ Indeed a whole etiquette has grown up about announcing and catering for your dietary peccadilloes. So much for being grateful for the plate that’s served to you.
Perhaps it’s best summed up as: whereas now we consume, before we ate. ‘Eat’ has always been fairly close to the ground. Like the German equivalent, essen—not as close as fressen, which is what pigs do, but along the lines thereof. ‘Consume’ is of an altogether different order. It implies something else; it suggests possibilities unknown to ‘eat’. In terms of range, you eat foods, but you consume books, films, opera, paperclips, boyfriends. If ‘eat’ involves the highly mechanical, if naturalised, process of ingestion, digestion, absorption, elimination, helped along by the graciousness of the odd enzyme, and all of it pretty autonomous—then ‘consumption’ is all about volition, selection and indulgence. Of course, there are exceptions—there’s little to get excited about in, say, ‘electricity consumption’.
Yes, ‘eat’ is the low-grade Germanic cousin to the classy, passionate Romantic ‘consume’. And at that nexus of sensuality and consumption, we find a new way of representing the world of food and cooking, a discourse that goes, tellingly, by the name of ‘food porn’. Here an intermingling of sexuality and ingestion brings boundaries to the point where they simply don’t matter. In the following advertisement for new-season oranges, the text becomes a romantic letter. The lover/ consumer languishes forlorn and adrift in a dyad of unrequited love, addressing the food item as they would an object of carnal desire. As ever, the language sends its own meta-messages:
Dear Blood Orange,
You are the apple of my eye. Upon your return each winter season, my appetite gets aroused and dopamine starts to course through my body. The others—Valencia, the navel, for instance—lack your panache, your pure passion . . . It’s not just your brilliant flesh that excites, but your tangy taste. Oh, how I love to pair you with a julienne of fennel and mint, covered with rich olive oil and Maldon salt. Raw fish desires your gentle acidity. Married to champagne, you make a mean mimosa. How fortunate am I that you now reside locally, [for] Sicily made our relationship tenuous. Still, you torture me with your transience and I fear this wintry romance is nearing its end. Please forgive me as I part you from your pith and pulse you in a blender . . . You’ve wound your way into my heart.
This is not the food that was once associated with home, hearth, mother and comfort. It’s not food as fuel, gotta eat, gotta live. This food has ditched utility and adopted aesthetics. It’s something you look at—whether that be gazing at amazing pictures of dishes that you know you’ll never cook, watching Naked Chef Jamie Oliver doing his thing, or partaking in a classy foodies’ do, where miracle dishes—requiring ‘food stylists’ as much as chefs—are created in front of you amid no pretense that anyone’s going home to give it a whirl.
Food writer Molly O’Neill captures it well when she defines food porn as ‘prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience’. It’s in the removal from real life that food becomes objectified, making it, in the words of Anthony Bourdain—the Kitchen Confidential author who destroyed forever the innocent trust with which one once dined out—‘a glorification of food as a substitute for sex.’ But is there not something sadly Warholish about displays and descriptions of food preparation for an audience that has no intention of actual consumption?
In an article for Columbia Journalism Review, O’Neill found an inverse relationship between the amount of money people spend on kitchen appliances and the amount they cook. I know a woman who acquired a second rice cooker (‘It had such lovely lines, I couldn’t resist’), even though she already had one, which she’d used twice in as many years. It now sits alongside the first one, both of them waiting silently. Do they console one another? Or have they accepted their fate?
Cooking is now something to talk about, watch, read and generally know about, yet not something everyone can do. There are dozens of weekly TV shows to choose from. You can have your chef naked or in iron, or take bites of Nigella or Huey for breakfast, lunch, or anytime at all on the Lifestyle Channel. Watch them all if you like—order in, and keep watching—then, when it’s all over, go out to eat. If you prefer to get your information from the internet, key in ‘carbonara’ or ‘white bait’, and sit back and choose. Read them and then go out to eat. If you prefer the print medium, there are magazines by the dozen, as well as cookbooks so glamorous, so seductive, they’re inching, in both size and aesthetics, towards being coffee-table books. Then there are books—like Chocolat—that interweave an intimate narrative in and around personal recipes. Who beyond the locals and the globe-trotting jetseterati knew about Tuscany and Provence before the genre of olive-oil literature?
So food literacy is up. Seems everyone’s a foodie now. They know all about what’s new, what’s on, what goes with what, what wine to drink and what not to drink with what dish. Monolingual foodies can navigate the hyper-self-conscious French or Italian of the menus with finesse and panache. Stolid, boring married men watch Jamie Oliver as entertainment. None of this implies they can cook. To be a foodie is to know about, not to know how. We really need two different verbs for the two different kinds of knowledge.
At home, foodies can have a secret cache of comfort food—baked beans or Nutella on white bread—that they’d die under torture rather than fess up about. Where once you might have checked out the contents of the bathroom cupboard, when invited over, now you might sneak a peek in the pantry to see what secrets lurk backstage in your host’s life and psyche.
For, of course, the new urban apartments have no real kitchen. It’s the stainless-steel galley look. It’s not a kitchen; now it’s a nook. Urban contemporary. Sharp clean lines. No clutter. No time to spend in kitchens. Cartoon yuppies— singles, marrieds, live-in companions—who can’t boil water between them but can use the complicated espresso machine. Got to get your priorities in place. Some people don’t associate ‘home’ with ‘food’. They can’t/won’t cook. They only eat out— a bite on the run for breakfast, a mid-morning coffee somewhere close by, lunch from the little bistro down the way, grab a meal on the way home or come home, shower and change, and go out to dine. Stop off somewhere else later for dessert. There’s that chocolate place that’s to die for. Next day, it starts all over again. Your old family restaurant—à la Sizzler—is so déclassé. McDonald’s doesn’t get a look-in.
Molly O’Neill suggests that perhaps consumers of food writing/shows are lured by the seduction of another reality ‘where cooking is slow and leisurely and imbued with a comforting glamour’—all the reassurance of the traditional home comfort without the messy sink or the dowdy oil-spattered apron. If urban-dwellers living in an increasingly violent world watch crime shows to feel safe, then perhaps food-watchers turn to objectified and glamorised food for reassurance of another kind.
An interesting development within the engourmisation of a nation is its strange bifurcation. At some point, it seems to have gone off in a sensual and aesthetic direction, dispensing, almost entirely in some cases, with the boring bits, the daily drudgery, the grind and grudge factors—purchase, preparation, serving and cleaning up. This is food that doesn’t mess things up, not even a little. Like those off-white, minimalist Belle-style house interiors where you can’t imagine yourself, or anyone else, actually living. No way would you have children there.
Is there a gender factor mixed in with the ingredients? The old-style approach to food and cooking was uber-gendered. Molly O’Neill tells us it distinguished between those who cook (traditionally, women) and those who savour but tend not to cook (traditionally, men). These boundaries have blurred somewhat. There’s a story told, it may be apocryphal, about a former politician who wanted to marry a woman who happened to be a merchant banker. In response to his proposal, she said, ‘I don’t cook, I just don’t cook.’ A suitcase full of meaning is packed into that line: it has to do with expectations and assumptions, traditional roles, laying down your cards, setting conditions—‘If you want a wife who cooks, look elsewhere.’ I’ve been telling my daughter for years that it’s a great line, one she should keep a note of and keep at the ready for use at the appropriate time. She just laughs, more at the idea of marriage itself than at my recommended strategies.
Of course, at the pointy end of the social triangle, things have always been done differently from the way they’re done down among the great unwashed. The air up there is more rarified, I’m told. For instance, when the American Gourmet magazine was introduced in 1941, food was not its focal point. During its first ten years, its tenor was unashamedly elitist, with the target demographic indistinguishable from ‘a pre-war London gentleman’s club’, according to food historian Anne Mendelson. We’re talking in other words about ‘a small social elite that could afford to hunt, fish, and travel, and that viewed fine dining much as it did art, theater (sic) and opera: as something one need only appreciate in order to possess.’
In a way, the much more common contemporary urban approach to food has borrowed its sensibility from the old Gourmet, but dispensed with the terribly passé social pretensions. They-with-the-shiny-galley-kitchen spend the time they’ve saved (by not tiresomely preserving traditional social graces) on earning the big bucks that enable them to live the throwaway lifestyle they want.
So it’s a new world in the kitchen. Out has gone the all-purpose bay leaf, the baking soda, the chickory and the cochineal (is that related to the implant?). Out, too, has gone the mixmaster and the pressure cooker. Now you have to have a kitchen gadget that has multi-task dexterities. It’s got to slice, dice, chop and grate, and also look good just sitting there, otherwise you won’t consider it. But even within the new trends there are seeming contradictions: with all this relentless change, who would have guessed that the trendiest of us would take so much pride in making our own ice-cream and bread.
And anyway, pass the wasabe, will you?