Food Freaks
We take it too seriously & it’s making us nuts
WHY have we gotten so weird about food? Beyond even the “gluten-free” everything and taking photos of our food before eating it, we’ve turned food into a competition and try to use it to say something bigger about ourselves and the wider culture.
Something has shifted in our understanding of food in the last few years, and it’s causing a bit of cognitive dissonance.
On one hand, cooking shows on the Food Network seem to highlight the power of food to bring people together. “Cook all the time!” the shows say. “Invite people over!” “Take care in the preparation!” “This isn’t that hard!”
On the other hand, there’s the “foodie” culture, which is less about sharing food with other people and more about finding the “best” of something, and only the best — and the fewer people who know about it, the better.
The Netflix show “Master of None” highlights this food ob- session of the main character, Dev. In the last episode of the first season, Dev goes on an allout search for New York City’s best tacos. He asks friends for recommendations, goes through all the “Best of ” lists and then arrives at the taco truck to find he has taken too long in his search and they’ve run out of food.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Dev yells on the sidewalk. “Go eat the second-best taco like some kind of a--hole?” That’s foodie culture in a nutshell. If you’re not getting the best, why get it at all?
In The New York Times last week, David Brooks had a widely teased paragraph in his column where he described taking a friend, who had only a highschool education, out for lunch:
“Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodoro’ and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.”
Brooks paints this type of food as some kind of “cultural signifier” and thinks the problem is that his friend only has a highschool degree. But that isn’t quite right.
Many times friends and I have been out at a restaurant and had the waiter stand by to explain incomprehensible words on the menu because that’s the strange place our culture has gone — the more exotic and confusing a menu item sounds, the better. We have several graduate-school degrees between us, but none of them featured a course in elaborate food names.
Brooks’ friend lacking a college degree isn’t why she couldn’t understand the words. “Food culture” is why, and it has been moving in this annoying direction for a while.
Brooks isn’t wrong about food’s newfound divisiveness, he just tapped into the wrong example: It has nothing to do with education. The average highschool graduate living in Bensonhurst would absolutely know what “Pomodoro,” “soppressata” and “capicollo” are, even if they had no Italian heritage whatsoever. It’s part of the culture and, most importantly in our foodie world, it’s authentically part of the culture.
A foodie likely wouldn’t be caught dead in the kind of shop Brooks mentions. As the writer Emily Zanotti pointed out, “striata” is Italian and “baguette” is French, so even those of us with graduate-school degrees wouldn’t automatically be able to understand what this pretentious sandwich shop is trying to say. (Admittedly “baguette” is a commonality now, but it’s the outlier in the example.) If there’s a dividing line between those who get food and those who don’t, Brooks might find himself on the wrong side, no matter how many degrees he has.
Foodie culture started from a good place. The search for authentic, great meals wasn’t a problem in and of itself.
But as with many things in our exhibitionist social-media culture, it’s gone too far. Peruse some foodie accounts on Instagram and you’ll see people ordering more food than they could possibly ever eat so they could photograph and share it and be seen in proximity to it. The actual taste is an afterthought.
To keep up with all that, restaurants end up using “striata baguette” language, in an attempt at food relevancy. We all need to relax, enjoy food again and encourage restaurants to simplify the way they describe food instead of complicating it. And we need to remember that sometimes the second-best taco is really good enough.