Omnivore Atlanta

Uh oh, it’s foodie backlash.

Comedian Jessie Klein takes on foodie culture in her blog on the Daily Beast. A sample:

I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb. Foodies who need everything to be caramelized, sauteed in a blabla reduction, nested in a bed of shredded whatevers, served with a mushroom top hat and a julienne of leeks that have been knitted into a sequined scarf. It’s not that wonderful food doesn’t make me drool—I’m a bit of a St Bernard when I start thinking about cheese—it’s just the foodie chatter I can’t stand, the circle jerking in print and on an ever growing number of websites over this new place and that revamped old place, the obsessive fawning over such and such amuse-bouche, the kerfuffle over truffles.

Nick Weston — chef, blogger and cast member of the UK reality show, “Shipwrecked” — detests the term “foodie” itself. On his blood-guts-and-good-flavors blog, Hunter-Gatherer, he writes:

1984 was a dark year. A year in which a book was released, written by Paul Levy, Ann Barr and Mat Sloan called “The official foodie handbook.” It was due to these people alone that the term “foodie” was first coined. I loathe the word, I hate it so much that I would rather drink turpentine and piss on a bonfire than utter it out loud. So, as you can imagine writing this is no easy task for me, but it has to be done. The word is so offensive that as I type it up it is the only word underlined in red!

That’s just the warm-up of his full-out rant.

Personally, I am indifferent to the word “foodie” but, like Klein, I do suffer bouts of contempt for foodie culture now and then, even though I’m also subject to Proustian reverie when something tasty gets all up in my palate.

The argument about foodie culture, as Klein is describing it, isn’t really different from the perennial debate about the comparative merits of fine and popular art, high culture and low culture. The term “foodie,” as Weston writes, was originally intended to cleanse the obsession with good food of the pretensions of words like “gourmet” and “gourmand.” Weston argues, though, the word has now assumed its own aura of classist pretension.

Probably so. But then I wonder if he — especially he — and Klein haven’t fallen into reverse-snobbery, a version of that 19th century attitude that glorified the primitive and the savage. We’ve never really given that up. You know — like the glorification of Joe the Plumber, not on the basis of objective measurements of rationality, but on the basis of his saltiness of the earth, the hairiness of his brow, the length of his assault weapon. He’s, you know, like a human Big Mac. Real. Not!

Reverse snobbery, primitivism, is why it was such a big deal when Barack Obama let slip that he eats arugula from Whole Foods while zillionaire John McCain bribed reporters by barbecuing ribs, meat of the masses, for them at his ranch. It took months of publicly consuming corn dogs and the like to erase Obama’s refined foodie vibe. I am sure each bite of a corn dog was worth five electoral votes for him. (Remember: George Bush, the ultimate blue-blooded reverse-snob, sang the praises of “corny dogs” himself.)

Isn’t the appeal of Paula Deen and Rachael Ray in great part their blending of high and low dining culture? They’re the gastronomical equal of paint-by-numbers. They make it relatively safe to be a foodie with their relentlessly common touch. (”Paula — she’s the real deal,” a woman told me at a Deen book-signing. “Ain’t nothing fake about her.”)

The whole argument is kind of silly, really. As Klein and Weston both argue, to be human is to be preoccupied with your next meal and the intensity of that concern is least of all measured in gastronomical sophistication. There’s also that little thing called hunger and its unfortunate excessive expression in famine. The literally starving are the real foodies, right?

The mind reels. It is interesting, though, to see how a term like “foodie” acquires the kind of meanings its adoption was intended to escape. I wonder what the next synonym will be.

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Posted in Food & Life, Food media, Restaurants | Add a comment

Tags: foodies, Jessie Klein, language, Nick Weston, Paula Deen, Rachael Ray.