If anything marks our arrival on the dystopian shores of gross overconsumption, it’s the foodie movement. Because it takes a lot of late-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 basic thrust of manufactured demand.
But if one trait characterizes upper-middle-class citizens with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in fresh 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.
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 an achievement 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 isn’t tempted to throw his energies into a 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? Like so many other consumer hobbies, such extracurricular foodie activities are easy to engage in, relatively cheap, and come with their own built-in gustatory and social rewards.
Those who require that their hobbies also have a heroic sheen can turn to the lovingly itemized ideological bases of the so-called food revolution. A long train of exposés and manifestos 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 standpoint, is to repair all this systemic damage with better informed, more locally minded shopping. To combat the epidemic of fast food (and the kindred American plague of obesity), we’ve been schooled in the virtues of “slow food,” aka “locavore” cuisine, aka organic and regional produce, meats, and dairy products. All of which is worthy enough, as far as our individual consumption goes. We’re all likelier to lead healthy, slim, fulfilling, and flavorful lives when we nourish ourselves on farmers’ market fare, aren’t we? Not to mention that we feel better about ourselves as agents of ethical change.
Yet there’s not much evidence that this trend 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 one end of the spectrum, and a wasteland of overprocessed, cheap, and empty grub at the other.
Nonetheless, foodies have learned to transform the self-indulgent habit of spending more than $200 on a single meal into an intellectual and cultural badge of honor—a chance to loudly advertise their great taste in public, as they remark on the bright or redolent or flavorful undertones of whatever anxiously plated concoction they’ve just savored. Those with money to burn will always find creative ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as enlightened, discriminating, and honorable. And those who provide such indulgences are probably wise 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, seemingly unaware that most of humankind shares their passion), its overwrought quasi-religiosity picks up right where the rise of designer bottled water left off. “Food is everything!” foodies declare, or “Live to eat, not eat to live!”—battle cries apparently aimed at shaking the rest of the populace out of its imagined hunger strike. But purchasing a meal at Chez Panisse or Momofuku or Trois Mec is not enough. One must dine at all of Eater’s “essential” restaurants, murmur reverently of Michelin stars, 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 film critics rolling their eyes at Terrence Malick’s latest clumsy offerings.
And don’t forget the importance of chronicling 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 our communal diary, in which each diarist struggles mightily to mimic the hauteur of the establishment food critic. Take this review of a hot Italian restaurant in a fashionable neighborhood of Los Angeles:
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 reviews brandish the standard terms of food critics and blogs—ludicrous, decadent, earthy, brightness, umami—all mixed and matched in an invocation of devotion resembling an old Latin Mass.
And that’s not to mention the self-righteousness, which elevates a mundane consumer choice to the level of a heroic stand against…a ramen joint whose broth was insufficiently fatty? The Yelp reviewing customer emerges not as an audience member, bystander, or faceless nobody holding a wallet, but as 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 consumerist bewilderment. Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance, high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come to identify intimately with the embrace or rejection of said product (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen). They do so as if the world turns on their appraisals, awaits their Yelp verdicts like an anxious crowd in Rome waiting for the cardinals to elect a new Pope.
The foodie identity can be so completely constructed by its various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!) that it transforms itself from a statement of allegiance—like the sports teams you follow or the bands you like—and enters into the realm of the political. Being a foodie means taking a vow to save the Earth, to save small organic farms, and to save poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves. But then, empty self-righteousness has always paired nicely with a rich sense of entitlement. That earthy taste of stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil.
For an elevated sampling of these flavor profiles, look no further than the pages of A Taste of Generation Yum by Eve Turow (2015). Turow explains, from a conveniently ahistorical perch, that the food revolution began when millennials surveyed their parents’ very bad food choices and demanded something better. Yes, millennial foodies, whom Turow and others refer to as “Yummers,” are single-handedly driving the foodie movement with their hard-earned dollars. Or not so hard-earned, since, as Turow herself alleges, 38 percent of young adults were unemployed in 2013. These valiant Yummers are spending their boomer parents’ dough.
And even though so many of the millennials Turow describes don’t have jobs and are living off their parents’ money, they’re special because their “tastes are limitless.” They’re not just spending most of their money on fussily plated calf tongue; they’re eschewing straight jobs so they can pursue their dreams of “harvesting clams or milking goats or tilling the land.”
All of which can only suggest that millennials care more deeply about food than anyone else ever has. “Young people are actively, purposefully integrating food into their lives and giving it daily attention—and value—in a different proportion than any previous generation,” Turow writes. Members of certain agrarian societies—not to mention a boomer army of Julia Child and Joy of Cooking fanatics—would surely beg to differ. But then, millennials aren’t the first generation to declare themselves the driving force behind a movement that started fifty years before they were born, and they won’t be the last.
Yet as David Kamp suggests in The United States of Arugula: The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution (2006), the developments that characterize today’s foodscape began with the rise of fine dining and French cuisine in the States after World War II, helped along by James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne, who popularized fresh-baked bread and the art of fine home cooking at a time when women’s magazines encouraged housewives to embed canned mandarin oranges in lime Jell-O. What some view as a sudden food revolution is in fact the product of a long, slow evolution of tastes that’s taken place over the course of seventy-odd years, with new restaurant and food trends arising like clockwork every few years to replace the previous batch. Or as Nora Ephron succinctly put it in her 2006 New Yorker essay, “Serial Monogamy,” “This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce.”
Reducing what might otherwise be viewed as a “revolution” to a shift in trends of taste is not to understate the enormous quantity of cash in play today, though. No wonder the preferred view—advanced by those with a stake in food’s “revolutionary” status—is far more portentous than either Kamp’s or Ephron’s. But then, if your dinner isn’t revolutionary, how can you possibly justify spending a week’s salary on it?
Here’s where any argument about the fatuousness of the foodie necessarily teeters: When you actually taste that coffee, or those prosciutto-wrapped figs. A few minutes in a pricey cheese shop, speaking to a smart person who spends all her time thinking and talking about cheese, has a way of convincing you that high-quality fromage is one of the primary pleasures of life, worthy of its price, particularly if those dollars go into the hands of smart enthusiasts and the gorgeous, enlightened, loving dairy farmers of your vivid imaginations. (This seduction is a big piece of foodie culture’s appeal: We aren’t just shoving tasty stuff into our faces, we’re embracing and supporting some down-to-earth farmer who might count as a kind of a neighbor.) It’s all so sexy and sensual and honorable-seeming: We care about our bodies and we care about the Earth and its products, we tell ourselves. Not like those corn-syrup-swilling slobs sitting next to us on the train, gorging themselves on the products of unsustainable industrial monoculture.
This is the ugly class subtext of our earnest adoration of that Humboldt Fog chevre wheel with a layer of “edible vegetable ash.” Our hard-won locavore connoisseurship satisfies our senses and bestows upon us, via its $25-a-pound price tag, the feeling that we’ve paid tithes to the church of gourmet eating. But more than that, it separates us from the less sainted, the less antioxidized, and, meaningfully, the less wealthy among us.
This separation is savored privately, like a slice of eighteen-month-aged Manchego unloosed from a stainless steel double-wide fridge at midnight. But it’s also distinctly social. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times in 2012, foodie culture
is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.
The so-called food revolution may include many Earth-friendly initiatives—the emphasis on organic, pesticide-free products; the local farm-to-table efforts; the transition to vegetarian, vegan, or just mostly plant-based diets; the crop rotation and sustainable, environmentally friendly practices of small farms; the efforts to reduce food waste, etc. But the broad impact of elevating food to a rarefied luxury good has wide-reaching negative consequences for the planet. Because for every local organic farm churning out hormone-free basil butters and heirloom beets, there are countless other elite consumers feasting on foods flown in from around the globe. As Dan Barber points out in The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (2014), the second that those locally sourced lamb chops run out at the foodie farm-to-table restaurant of the aspirational classes’ fever dreams, the obliging restaurateur must secure a backup source that’s perhaps less local and less blessed by the purist foodie gods.
For the food revolution to save the Earth (or at least not hasten its demise), Barber argues, our whole way of thinking about food needs to shift. Instead of chasing fickle consumer tastes and allowing the gods of supply and demand to rape the Earth and dredge the seas until all of our ecosystems are utterly destroyed, we have to learn to appreciate foods that can be grown or raised sustainably, foods that support and enrich the environment. The next food preferences (those that might eventually graduate to trends) need to be carefully selected by chefs who forgo the sorts of “luxury” foods that are leaving their habitats denuded and unbalanced for more pragmatic choices—eco-friendly farmed fish, say, or plants that filter toxins from the soil or replete the soil’s much-needed nitrogen. As easy as it is to be cynical about politically correct, pretentious menus that read more like essays, the choices we make now as consumers will affect how we’re able to eat—not to mention survive—in the future.
Because if foodie culture wants to take credit for the rise of organic, sustainable, cruelty-free farming, it’s also going to have to take the blame for making us crave tasty slices of grass-fed venison and baby corn (a plate of food requiring an obscene and wanton waste of natural resources), or sushi rolls packed with four varieties of endangered fish, flown in from three different oceans. Devoted foodies may choose to believe that shoving pickled shishito peppers and chicken livers and herbed goat cheese into their gullets represents a divine embrace of earthbound pleasures. But like most other bourgeois hobbies, this one carries considerable costs. Not only has the elevation of food to luxury created absurd expectations around a dimension of survival that might otherwise involve as few exotic elements as possible, but it’s also warped our understanding of how we exist on the Earth and how we coexist with our fellow earthlings, the cuddliest and cutest of which also tend to taste really good the younger and lazier and the more stuffed with organic hazelnuts they are.
Take a deep dive into those giant, ever-prevalent Blue Apron boxes, filled with tiny plastic bags of purple basil and frozen slabs of minced lamb, and you’ll see that even mere commoners now feast like kings and queens. It’s time to acknowledge that our enthusiasms have taken us too far. We can’t continue eating most of the animals we’ve overbred and forced into short, filthy, miserable lives.
Once the world’s population sneaks up toward eleven billion, many have argued that we will require the supersized yields of industrial farming—which means that even though we might prefer small-batch brie from a darling mom-and-pop dairy farm in Vermont, we still have to vehemently support curbing the environmental recklessness of our industrial farms while we’re at it. As nice as it is to have organic free-range everything on your plate, imbuing that choice with deeper meaning and a larger sense of righteousness without addressing the bigger picture of how humanity feeds itself is like boarding a private jet and then congratulating yourself for not giving the highly polluting commercial airline industry any of your hard-earned dollars.
But beyond the fantastical idealism of foodie culture, there’s the simple fact that cooking a decent meal or dining at the right restaurant is an act of leisure-class consumption rather than a heroic or courageous feat to build your entire identity around. As former food critic John Lanchester asserts in The New Yorker, our choices about food are nowhere near the most important political choices we make. “If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives,” Lanchester writes, “perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale.” He takes it a step further. “Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, ‘I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.’ ”
Food is personal. It’s sensual, it’s nostalgic, it’s political. But contrary to the slogans of our officious foodie overlords, food is not everything. Wearing our foodie status as a badge of honor makes sense only if we’re prioritizing food advocacy—from promoting sustainable farming practices to reducing food waste to embracing and popularizing more sustainable crops to making healthy food more affordable to the poor—over our indulgence in wildly expensive plates of exotic fare. Before we dive into another dish of bluefin or veal brains or carrots with a 15.2 Brix reading, we should consider how we’ll look fifty years from now to the inhabitants of an overfished, polluted planet: decadent, callous, delusional, and above all, deeply unsavory.