Professional restaurant reviewer John Lancaster, in the New Yorker, says we should “Shut Up and Eat“:
… The specifics of how my mother came to be interested in cooking are unusual. She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after running a convent school in Madras. At the same time, though, her story is typical: people have come to use food to express and to define their sense of who they are. If you live and cook the same way your grandmother did, you’ll probably never open a cookbook. Cookbooks, and everything they symbolize, are for people who don’t live the way their grandparents did.
Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mì boom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that’s defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn’t true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be…
Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious. The infinite range of choices and possible self-expressions means that there are so many ways to go wrong. You can make people ill, and you can make yourself look absurd. People feel judged by their food choices, and they are right to feel that, because they are…
Karen in GA
I never understood co-workers who went on all morning about where they were going for lunch, then went on all afternoon about what they ate, unless they were going on all afternoon about what they’re having for dinner.
And my husband and his mother can talk forever about food shopping.
It’s just never been an interesting topic to me. You know what you like (or what you want to try). Find it, eat it, then get back to whatever interesting thing you had to stop doing in order to eat.
Ruckus
@Karen in GA:
Part of enjoying food is probably getting to eat something that your grandmother would never have made. At least for some of us. Food does have a lot of sensory input in our lives. But when something goes away a lot of that enjoyment can lessen as well. My sense of smell is almost completely gone, so unless I taste what I’m cooking, I have no idea if I’ve put in enough garlic. Or too much. But eating out suffers as well because I miss that aspect of the meal or even being able to walk in a place, take a whiff and decide to leave. On the plus side, fast food doesn’t smell either. Still tastes the same though. So I’m getting to be more like you, it’s food, I need it to sustain life.
Mike J
@Karen in GA: I’ve never understood people who like to build ships in bottles, but why should I care what they want to do? Different people like different things, and that’s ok. Unless you like cilantro, in which case you’re just wrong and stupid and a soap eater. But other than that, some people can enjoy cooking, some people can enjoy bottle bound ship building, some can be obsessive about music.
The idea that we should all just eat whatever our grandparents ate is moronic. Hell, my grandparents didn’t want to eat what they ate, they just didn’t have as much choice. The douchbag who wrote the article just wants us to feel more guilty. Fuck that.
burnspbesq
There is increasing speculation about the regional accrediting body imposing major sanctions on UNC.
Now would be an especially good time to be long in schadenfreude futures.
burnspbesq
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/10/24/unc-chapel-hill-should-lose-accreditation/
burnspbesq
@Karen in GA:
How’s Iggy?
karen
I got into the Food Network last year and became addicted to the show “Chopped.” I got better pot and pans (Circulon), a three in one multicooker and got better knives (Chicago Cutlery). The closest I was able to get to Pro.
What I love about Chopped is that the chefs get 4 random ingredients in a basket each round. There’s the appetizer round, the entree round and the dessert round and they have to make something creative that is executed well each round. Because I could see what each of the chefs were doing, it suddenly didn’t look as hard as I thought it would be and maybe I could cook something with random ingredients I had in my apartment. I learned a lot and I still learn. I’ve gained a love for cooking. I love to shop for things that I can use a few times but can be used in different ways like uncured bacon (everything is improved with bacon. Everything.)
I’ve learned about different kind of marinades and rubs, oils, spices, etc. Chopped helped me to realize I’m good at cooking and I’ve reached a point that I don’t eat microwave meals unless I feel too tired because I think my cooking is better.
Now all I need are people to cook for.
Karen in GA
@Ruckus: I don’t mind if other people are into it — I just don’t understand it. To each their own.
Maybe it’s because my grandmother was a miserable woman. Also, her daughter, my mother, was (and is) an old-fashioned Italian American woman who thought domesticity was the be all and end all. I remember being a hung over 19 year old sitting in the kitchen on a Sunday while my mother insisted on trying to teach me how to make tomato sauce. At 9 in the morning. Because it had to be ready by mid-afternoon. Um… no.
Cooking, cleaning, and raising kids were supposed to be my lot in life; no other interests mattered, and sense of humor and intelligence were character flaws (don’t want to intimidate any men, ya know).
So now if I want decent Italian food I’ll go to a restaurant. Or I might boil some pasta, open a jar of Ragu, throw some cheese on it, wolf it down and get back to practicing the banjo or playing with the dog or whatever I’m doing. That’s just me. YMMV.
(My husband cooks. I make him laugh. Neither of us wants kids. Happiest marriage my family has ever seen.)
Anne Laurie
@Mike J:
That’s not what he says. You should read the article!
(He’s in favor of good food, eaten with proper enjoyment. He’s just not into the anxious over-examination of every bite…)
Karen in GA
@burnspbesq: Doing well, thanks. Out of the crate for good on Saturday afternoon. Which means we’re both out of the downstairs spare room pretty soon.
opiejeanne
@Ruckus: In 2004/2005 I was treated for Hepatitis C for 48 weeks, with weekly Interferon shots and daily handsful of Ribavirin pills, and it affected my sense of taste but not my sense of smell. The smell of a steak would drive me nuts but when I’d take a bite it was like chewing on a washcloth. I could not taste it at all.
I could still taste some things, like the spices in Mexican food and sugar, and the chicken soup my husband made me one night because I had stopped eating, couldn’t look at food, and he thought I was going to die if I didn’t start eating again. We also made a few late night trips to Taco Bell for their burritos because it was one of the few things that tasted good then, on the days when I could consider eating.
When I was done with the treatment my sense of taste returned, and I haven’t been to Taco Bell since, but at the time it was one of the few things I could eat and enjoy, and keep down.
opiejeanne
@Anne Laurie:
That sounds a lot like where I have arrived. These days I cook better and healthier than I used to but I eat everything I like, just not so much of it.
Pete Mack
Mostly I lurk here, but the thesis of this article is preposterous: any good cook will use a cookbook for inspiration. Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer go way, way back. And they had huge sales from the start. More to the point, if you want to try a dish you’ve never cooked before, you need a cookbook just for pointers: how do you make frittata? Look at a few recipes, then change to suit your ingredients on hand. What about spanakopita? Without a recipe, you are sunk.
NotMax
What a load of pretentious twaddle.
Used to be rare to have a medium such as New Yorker not serve well done fare.
BethanyAnne
@karen: Chopped is fun. They get a little too weepy about their contestants for me sometimes, tho. Have you watched “Good Eats”? It was Alton Brown’s old cooking show and it’s wondermous. He taught me lots of what I know about how to cook different things.
Anne Laurie
@Pete Mack: RTFA!
Xboxershorts
I did up a steak tonight. Flat iron style. A little butter, a little olive oil and garlic powder.
Medium rare.
All 3 cats and the dog were demonstrating to me how loyal a friend they were.
If I didn’t shut up and eat, they all would have pounced.
Hobbes
“Cookbooks, and everything they symbolize, are for people who don’t live the way their grandparents did.”
My grandparents used cookbooks. My great-grandparents used cookbooks.
@Mike J: In recipes that call for cilantro try replacing it with coriander (only joking, but look around,you may find there’s a type of parsley which tastes good to you).
piratedan
i like cilantro, there… I said it .. damn foodie purists….
Bobby B.
Conservatives portray food as a political choice and proudly talk about eating meat because they’re Manly Americans (not to mention the Chick Fil A dustup), while portraying the left as a bunch of evil hippie vegetarians (not to mention Michelle O’s healthy eating campaigns).
Karen in GA
@NotMax: What you did there, etc.
Pete Mack
@Anne Laurie: I DID read the article. It’s a total mishmash of cheap emotion, anti-reality-TV grunts, and “my mother was the bee’s knees.” I wrote my critique on your quotation alone. But if you quote a different part of the article I can still write an equally good takedown.
Dexter's New Approach
@Anne Laurie:
I agree with idea of over-analyzing food, or any cultural experience, can diminish the effect. And some, maybe most people are not up to the task anyway.
But, for me, as I’ve taken up brewing beer over the last couple of years, I’ve changed my view. I used to worry I would lose that impact of just tasting something I just liked and enjoy it, and not having to deconstruct it. To make it clinical. Now, I see the value. Understanding the different elements, and how they come together, really raises the tasting experience. Of course, some people are not very good at this and fake it with lingo and pretension, but that’s true for anything.
Another Holocene Human
blah blah blah white people problems
I’m mentally exhausted just skimming it
Pete Mack
Anne-Laurie–
My basic problem with this article is “no shit, Sherlock.” Yea, it’s great to be able to cook, but this doesn’t mean that Dominos delivery doesn’t rock, if you really can’t motivate. As for foodies…those special snowflakes never made up more than 5% of the general population. Writing an article based on foodieism is just…too precious.
jimbo57
Free range this. Sprouted that. Organic. Locally-grown. Taste is good and presentation is pretty, but whatever you have on your plate, you know where it’s going to be four hours from now….
David in NY
@Mike J: People who hate and who love cilantro are just genetically different. It’s a case where taste is not a matter of taste, it’s a matter of heredity.
evap
I love to cook and eat, try new things, read cookbooks, go to ethnic restaurants… food is one of the great pleasures in life for me and my husband. The article leaves out the best part of food — sharing with friends and loved ones. My favorite evening is one where we cook a bunch of food, invite friends over, and spend hours eating, drinking, talking, arguing, and laughing. It was evenings like this which saved my sanity after the 2004 election.
MattF
I do agree with the notion that food-anxiety is common. It’s an everyday pathology that lies behind the periodic popular spasms of avoiding of this or that food. However, in my experience, foodies counter food-anxiety by being open-minded and adventurous and that’s a good thing.
Oh, and not liking cilantro is a sensory malady– to me, it tastes like soap.
Lurking Canadian
I don’t care what foodies eat. Foodies, by contrast, seem to spend a lot of energy worrying about what other people eat. I find that off-putting.
And as for obsessions about ingredients, I can only respond with three words: pink Himalayan salt.
chopper
@MattF:
I feel so bad for you. Cilantro is fucking awesome.
low-tech cyclist
What are these ‘cookbooks’ of which you speak? There’s this ‘internet’ thingy now.
And maybe food makes some people anxious. I’m just glad to have lived through to a time when there are a lot more choices than there used to be. There weren’t Thai or Indian or Ethiopian restaurants around when I was growing up; hell, you were lucky to find a Greek place. The ‘burbs 50 years ago were a culinary wasteland.
gogol's wife
@Another Holocene Human:
That’s the whole New York Times in a nutshell these days.
zmulls
Yes, there’s this internet thingy for basic recipes. A cookbook is a curated set of decisions by a single voice — worth it sometimes. I have some Rick Bayless and have learned some great things about Mexican cooking; and I have yet to find a bad recipe in Marcella Hazan’s books.
The whole food discussion (Michael Pollock, Top Chef, etc.) has increased my awareness of what I’m eating and what I can do with it. Sure I’ll wolf down a pizza sometimes. But I love to cook and have learned some basic techniques to coax out more flavor.
And I’m paying more attention to where the food comes from. After years of thinking about it, I bought a humungous freezer and just filled it with half of a cow, half of a pig, an entire lamb, and six chickens — all bought directly from a farm, grass-fed, and butchered according to my instructions (all vacuum sealed and instantly frozen). Should last me a year. (And man, the taste of that pork was unlike what I’ve been able to get even from a good butcher counter).
So I think all the talk has made a difference — some for the good.
debit
@David in NY: Really? I used to hate it, was utterly repulsed by it and its foul, soapy taste, then one day I loved it. I used to think that the change came when I quit smoking, but supposedly if you eat enough in small doses your taste buds will eventually stop screaming “Lifebuoy!” I blame/credit Chipotle and their rice.
Ben Lehman
“If you live and cook the same way your grandmother did, you’ll probably never open a cookbook.”
This statement is one of the most ignorant, hidebound, and pretentious things I think I’ve ever seen anyone say about food. And that’s saying a lot.
How the hell does a NYT food critic not know about Fannie Farmer? The Joy of Cooking? Is his head so far up his ass that he doesn’t consider them cookbooks?
Gin & Tonic
I happen to have several of my grandmother’s well-worn cookbooks, with her notations in the margins.
Rex Tremendae
People do this with everything…music, their favorite sports team, guns.
Over the course of your life, nothing is likely to bring you as much cumulative pleasure as food. It’s also hard to argue that food production doesn’t have tremendous political impact.
Right. Because they were poor. So this is one of those luxury-regret pieces.
Ruckus
@Karen in GA:
Wasn’t knocking your position, more like agreeing that food can just be something you need. And my sisters got the same treatment if not quite to the same degree. And even I was scarred a bit by it. Was in a relationship for a while with the other half having a daughter and I found out that I actually like acting like a dad and that I didn’t have to be like my parents. Oh well the things you learn too late in life.
Joel
Ultimately, there’s two kinds of food: good and bad.
Xantar
And what exactly is wrong with the banh mi boom, hmmm?
(Asks the Vietnamese guy)
shelley
I’ve always hated ‘the intersection of food and fashion’ going all the way back to that book ‘Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.’ I suppose it’s the association with ‘ladies lunch.’ But c’mon guys, it’s a savory pie. Eggs and cream, tons of cheese, onions and bacon. What’s so frou-frou about that?
And hearing folks like Tom Colicchio bemoaning that every restaurant has seared tuna on the menu, and how passe beet salad and kale are.
Joel
@Ben Lehman: Never mind this guy. “Formal” cuisine has been around for centuries, and (good, tested) cookbooks have been around for at least 200 years.
Mnemosyne
@Xantar:
That’s what I was about to say — the reason there was a bahn mi boom is that it is the world’s greatest sandwich and Americans finally discovered them. Discovering new foods isn’t all bad, Mr. New Yorker writer.
@Karen in GA:
It’s funny, because my half-Italian family was exactly the opposite — none of my aunts learned to cook and most of them ended up marrying men who are terrific cooks. I still remember one of my uncles barbecuing the Christmas turkey … outdoors, in a Chicago winter. One of my other uncles makes ravioli and other filled pastas from scratch. I’m somewhat unusual in the family because I like to cook.
Mnemosyne
I think I’ve recommended it before, but I have a really fun book called The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution. The heroine is obviously Julia Child, who saved us all from the processed, packaged food of the 1950s and made experimenting in the kitchen fun, but it covers all kinds of popular chefs from Alice Waters to Mario Batali.
Do we really all want to go back to only having ketchup and never getting to have salsa, because our grandmothers didn’t make it?
schrodinger's cat
What a pretentious idiot. There seems to be an insatiable demand for pretentious Brit twits in the media. According to this Lancaster food was always food. Wrong. What you eat always signaled your rank in society, it was a gauge of what you could afford, in India it is also a signifier of your religion and caste. And people have always felt smug about their own food choices, that is not new either.
BTW I love cilantro now, although I hated it as a child.
Steve from Antioch
It was interesting to compare the attitude of that article with the Gopnick one that followed it.
Steve from Antioch
@opiejeanne:
Exactly.
Having spent the last 15 years in SF immersed in the foodie scene with a s/o who worked in several name restaurants before starting her own, every word of the Lancaster article resonated with me.
Goodby to all that, as the saying goes.
kc
That’s weird because I have these cookbooks that belonged to my grandmother.
She was doing it wrong, I guess.
Mnemosyne
@kc:
I also suspect a bit of a cultural difference — it’s possible that a British guy didn’t have a grandmother who would make, say, Corn-Sausage Pie using all of the wonderful canned, boxed, and processed foods available to the 1950s cook.
Wait a second, what the heck is a British guy doing lecturing us about how much better his grandmother’s food was? Has he really decided that Heinz Baked Beans on toast are the shiznit and we should all be eating them?
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: hahaha!!!
I was just thinking that.
Ruviana
@Mnemosyne: This makes me think of one of Sylvia Plath’s letters home to her mother begging her to send Joy of Cooking because all the British ladies’ magazines had recipes like “Lard and Stale Bread Pie.”