Saturday, February 12, 2011
Food media The 'pomposity and sermonizing' of foodies
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 12:39 PM
The essay is every bit as hyperbolic and sermonizing as the foodie movement he attacks, but it is nonetheless a great read. I note that Eater snarkly says that Myers takes 3,700+ words to describe his dislike of foodies. Yes, Myer's essay belongs to the genre of "longform writing," but that's part of what makes it such a wonderful read. It is far more than simply an expression of dislike. It looks at recent relevant books and their authors, going into great depth about the moralism that often substitutes for ethics among foodies, to say nothing of the elitism of the weird.
It's difficult to pick a single sample from the essay, but here's one I thought particularly cool, considering my interest in the relationship of food and spirituality:
Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy—as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling “like a ceremony … a secular seder.”
One odd aspect of the essay is its complete lack of levity. Dwight Garner, writing in the New York Times in 2007, made the same observation about an earlier Atlantic essay by Myers: "I admire and look forward to his stuff, even though I often disagree with it. He’s bracing, and somehow his humorlessness is an asset. He comes on like Cotton Mather in cotton Dockers. "
One very strong objection I have to the piece is Myers' dismissal of the aesthetics of dining:
And when foodies talk of flying to Paris to buy cheese, to Vietnam to sample pho? They’re not joking about that either. Needless to say, no one shows much interest in literature or the arts—the real arts. When Marcel Proust’s name pops up, you know you’re just going to hear about that damned madeleine again.
Okay, I plead guilty to the criticism of the Proustian allusion, but the idea that cooking is not an art in some people's practice is absurd. And that has nothing to do with the obsessive-compulsive effort of many foodies to outdo one another's extremism. History has been full of writing on both sides of this issue. In fact, the West's probable first novel, Satyricon, includes a lengthy spoof, "Trimalchio's Banquet," that satirizes the vulgarity of foodie-ism.
Really, read the essay. It's quite amazing.
Comments (1)
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Having recently read the column I have to say my major objection to it is that it is included in the "Books" section. There is actually very little of a review of any of the titles listed. I would say it would have more realistically been a stand alone article or in the "Dispatches" section as it was mostly a polemic using small extracts of text to support his argument. Even if it had actually been a review it would sort have been like someone from the Chamber of Commerce reviewing A Billy Bragg album. Not exactly a dispassionate point of view.
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