Grandma's chicken doesn't cut it anymore

Would you like to know just how backwards I am? I think something either tastes good or it doesn’t. Which evidently leaves me badly behind the times.

I’m not just baffled that food trends come and go. I don’t get trends at all. Even conventional fashion puzzles me. How can something be elegant and dazzling today and hopelessly awkward and displeasing in a year or two?

I won’t dwell, in a family paper, on Cosmopolitan discovering some fabulous new sex technique every month. But unless women grew extra limbs while my nose was buried in a book about Richard III, whatever looked good on Lauren Bacall, Anne Neville or Cleopatra should still look good today. Given centuries of experimentation with style and fabric since Cleopatra was bewitching them in a toga, modern women (and men) should have a timeless collection of classics to choose from.

As David Warren commented years ago, in current photos Queen Elizabeth II’s outfits look slightly tame and dated while those around her look sharp. But go back through the archive and she always looks classy while the others seem to have stepped out of a costume party. And apparently those were the good old days. Trends have moved on.

Being clueless in such matters, I just discovered one that started in 2000, which arguably makes it old hat now. Ugly old hat. Boo. Why did we ever wear those?

Sorry. I digress. Mark Schatzker’s The Dorito Effect informs me that McCormick (the spice firm) puts out an annual Flavor Forecast predicting what will taste good in the coming year. Schatzker calls it “the industrial food world’s equivalent to Vogue’s September fashion issue.” Which might give you pause if you didn’t know there was an “industrial food world.” It might also give you pause because of this whole notion of food fashion.

The Forecast is very successful and influential. It predicted chipotle in 2003, and later touted sea salt, smoked paprika and coconut water. I enjoy three of them — and I still will in a decade, exposing me to jeering or shunning. You see, just tasting good is so, well, grandma. And modernity is restless as well as voracious and ruthless.

As Schatzker notes, the 2007 Flavor Forecast went from things that taste good to things you must have together to be chi-chi, such as wasabi and maple. By 2012 our jaded palates and test tubes required larger groupings; rosemary strutted down the culinary catwalk alone in 2000 but by 2013 was in a foursome with “smoked tomato, rosemary, chile peppers & sweet onion.” Like debauchees, we seem to be chasing the dragon. Which rarely ends well.

From my rocking chair, modernity is clearly running amok, and not just in the restaurant or the factory where “custom flavour solutions” are injected into processed meat. (You may not be interested in food science but it’s interested in you and you are eating it, all those “natural” flavours made from things other than those whose taste they mimic, another ghastly triumph of technique.)

There was a time when it was bold to be open to innovation, to challenge traditional approaches and attitudes. But it was long ago. Lately we’ve gone from being willing to question things to being unwilling not to.

The dedicated modernist, Chesterton’s “Mondayist,” is the mirror image of the hidebound reactionary rejecting everything new. Today we reject everything old, a term we increasingly seem to measure in years or even weeks rather than decades or centuries. We won’t eat grandma’s chicken precisely because it is grandma’s chicken.

It’s not as if McCormick, or Vogue, were just going about saying “Hey, we discovered something else that tastes good” or “looks good” or “Look what delicious thing people have long been eating over there” or “what beautiful thing they’ve been wearing.” We’re talking “cutting-edge” flavours and looks, the kind you like in order to be oh-so-up-to-date one day and shun for the same reason the next.

As to grandma’s chicken, Schatzker also explains that the obsession with innovation in agriculture has created enormous flavourless babies we cram with spices and chemicals and marinate in Coca-Cola, liquid smoke, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce before adding cayenne because otherwise it tastes like “teddy bear stuffing.” Grandma’s chicken needed only salt and pepper because it dependably tasted like chicken year after year.

But even if we must now flavour our food artificially to make it seem real, surely we should be trying to make it taste good, not modern.

If that sounds hopelessly fuddy-duddy, prepare to breakfast on Skhug Sauce, grill lunch on a plancha and dine on egg yolks with Shakshuka. This year, anyway.