Do you use the f-word?
Saturday, November 15th, 2008
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.
