Anti-Anti-Foodie
I admire your restraint and equanimity, Noah. The Atlantic anti-foodie screed you reference elicits in me not discomfort, but mostly this:
It’s hard to know where to even begin. The piece would deserve a thorough fisking but I’m not sure I have the time.
The piece staggers to and fro like a drunk, with no purpose, rhyme or reason, violently hurling at whatever comes near. There is no there there, only inexplicable, intense contempt for a vague class of people who have a hobby the author doesn’t understand.
Let’s try to summarize what the author hates about foodies: they really, really like food. They spend a lot of time and money on it. And they feel morally superior to non-foodies (he does have a bit of a point here).
People who have hobbies tend to be overly enthusiastic about them, care passionately about minutiae, and spend what is to an outsider lots of money and time on it. That’s what hobbies are. I don’t really “get” making and owning and playing with plenty of model trains as an adult. I don’t, however, see myself dedicating several pages in a prominent publication to virulently mocking and insulting people who have that hobby, and publicly defecating all over their subculture. Whatever floats their boat, man.
Foodies (a group never defined, by the way), we learn, are “barbari[ c]”, “quickly lose interest in any kind of abstract discussion”, and have no “interest in literature or the arts—the real arts”, a bigoted litany so self-evidently ridiculous that one is left with no recourse but the repeated banging of head against desk.
It is endlessly hinted at, but never actually explicitly said, that the author’s real beef (ahem) with foodies is that they eat meat from animals, and that the author regards this as immoral. Which, well, let’s set aside the merits of that proposition for now, but if he wants to make that argument, perhaps he should make that argument, instead of rambling incoherently and hatefully for five pages.
I originally intended to write here a ringing defense of foodism, but this loony logorrhea requires none. It’s only a helpful reminder of Chateaubriand’s remark that “the world is full of the needy, so I must be sparing with my contempt.”
I’ve been limiting my magazine subscriptions recently, even getting rid of some sentimental favorites, but over the last seven or eight years, I’ve come to see The Atlantic as untouchable. This might seem narcissistic or paranoid but…I’m starting to view the magazine’s insistence on running occasional articles by B.R. Myers as designed specifically to mock or taunt me.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 22, 06:57 AM · #
I don’t like to be the kind of person who admits ever to listening to NPR (and I’ve been breaking myself of the vile habit ever since what they did to Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas) but one of the worst things on it is the Splendid Table. Some of my family like to listen to it; I like to denounce it for being obnoxious and stupid. Food is for eating, not for talking about. Good food is fine, but why do people have to try to put in words what cannot be put in words, at least not by the people who run that program?
Ben Franklin’s puritanical parents had it right: Shut up and eat. By setting yourself up as a judge of what’s good and what isn’t, you remove the capacity to be grateful for good food. And you hinder your own enjoyment of it.
Maybe if the people on that Splendid Table program had a vocabulary adequate to the task it wouldn’t be so bad.
Mind you, I like to talk about good coffee. I consider myself a coffee snob. I roast my own beans, and generally keep 10 to 20 varieties of green beans on hand. My palate isn’t good enough to identify all the subtle flavors that Tom of Sweet Maria’s can. But it’s getting to be more discriminating than it used to be. And there is a vocabulary that can be used to describe, objectively, the various flavors and aromas.
When it comes to food, if people use the word “exquisite” it means they’re not up to the task. I have been sorely tempted to use the word “exquisite” to describe the roasting that is done by Jack at Great Northern Roasting Co. of Traverse City, who is my favorite roaster outside of myself, but I have refrained. It’s not very informative to say that.
It IS informative to talk about roasting techniques. I’ve learned from the discussions of home roasting at coffeegeek.com. But mostly, good coffee is to be enjoyed, not talked about.
— The Reticulator · Feb 22, 08:34 AM · #
The Reticulator:
The great French theater play Le Souper portrays a dinner between Talleyrand and Fouché after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo where they decide the fate of the nation over fine cuisine. Talleyrand is an aristocrat’s aristocrat, while Fouché came from the people.
After the dinner, two glasses of cognac are brought. Fouché picks up the glass, downs it in one gulp and emits a satisfied “Ahhh!”
Talleyrand tsk-tsk’s. (Quoting from memory) “No no no. Here is how one drinks cognac. One picks up the glass, one takes in the color, then one smells it, and then puts down the glass.”
Fouché: “And then?”
Talleyrand: “And then, we talk about it.”
— PEG · Feb 22, 10:12 AM · #
>The piece staggers to and fro like a drunk, with no purpose, rhyme or reason, violently hurling at whatever comes near. There is no there there, only inexplicable, intense contempt for a vague class of people who have a hobby the author doesn’t understand.
Not true. I don’t think he has any problem with people’s hobbies. What he seems to really object to is people valorizing and moralizing their foodie-ness. As a foodie myself, I can relate.
But I’ve caught myself doing the same thing: my daughter and I visited a midwest small-town diner, she asked for oil and vinegar as an alternative to what we expected (quite reasonably based on experience) would be low-quality bottled dressing. They brought her white vinegar and canola oil. We just couldn’t help feeling that that was wrong. For purely (effete?) aesthetic reasons.
It’s actually funny that Myers goes after this crowd, given his granola-crunching ways. They say that liberals fetishize food the way conservatives fetishize sex…
— Steve Roth · Feb 22, 02:38 PM · #
I’m with PEG. The original article displays a kind of cramped Puritanical priggishness that can never quite get its footing and own up to what it is. The guy’s problem, at base, is that someone, somewhere, is enjoying something he doesn’t, and they should be stopped.
Yes, there is pretentious writing in the world of foodies, but so what? There’s pretentious writing everywhere. Yes, it can be a insular world of people who make the trivial important in their lives but so what? So is fantasy baseball, or collecting Simpsons trivia.
Food is one of the great pleasures in life. If people want to develop their capacity to enjoy that pleasure, it enriches them without impoverishing me or anyone else, save some animals who have it coming for being so delicious.[*] I say go for it. (Also art, music, dance, sport, or LOLcats).
[*] I don’t actually endorse cruelty to animals in pursuit of deliciousness, and I actually won’t eat veal, despite it being one of the most tasty memories I have. But I don’t really feel qualified to judge people who do.
— J Mann · Feb 22, 04:58 PM · #
Well put. Meyers comes across as the loopy, bloodshot, uncle-in-the-attic type. Once curious statistic — among all the angry denunciating he has time to deploy only a couple — is that there are 20,000 slow food advocates in the nation. How did The Atlantic fact-check this assertion? What was the source? Was I counted — I enjoy food that’s been leisurely, lovingly, slowly cooked and then slowly savored. How the fuck did this article end up in my second-favorite magazine?
— Joel MaHarry · Feb 22, 08:26 PM · #
I agree with Pascal, something that may only happen this once. In fact, I would go further: it seems to me that our culture suffers from a chronic overdose of indignation. Indignation against someone who has done actual harm to others makes sense whether those others include the person feeling the indignation or not. On the other hand, we have enough truly serious conflicts of interest to deal with without indulging people who somehow find it necessary to attack a preoccupation that may offend them in some aesthetic sense, but which does them no real harm at all. Anthony Bourdain happens not to appeal to me, so I don’t watch his TV show. I suggest Mr Myers might do the same, and hold off the anger, at least until Mr. Bourdain starts a crusade to have people save the forests by canceling their magazine subscriptions.
— John Spragge · Feb 22, 11:15 PM · #
PEG, thank you for that great illustration. I hope I will remember it better than I remembered what Benjamin Franklin’s wrote about his father’s policy. I just now looked it up. From his autobiography:
At his table he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life; and little or no notice was ever taken of what related to the victuals on the table, whether it was well or ill dressed, in or out of season, of good or bad flavor, preferable or inferior to this or that other thing of the kind, so that I was bro’t up in such a perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite indifferent what kind of food was set before me, and so unobservant of it, that to this day if I am asked I can scarce tell a few hours after dinner what I dined upon. This has been a convenience to me in travelling, where my companions have been sometimes very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification of their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes and appetites.
Inside my mind, I remembered that this policy was based on the idea that the act of praising food arrogates to one’s self a position of judgment, thereby killing any ability to be properly grateful and appreciative of it. But that part apparently didn’t come from Franklin’s autobiography. I must have mooshed his story together with other things I’ve learned in the 45 years since I read it.
I am glad I had this opportunity to correct the voices in my head.
— The Reticulator · Feb 23, 03:58 AM · #
I was actually looking forward to the Atlantic foodie slam before I saw that it was cranky-Myers writing it, because, though I’m not anti-foodie nor anti-talking-about-food, I live in the Bay Area and there is a great deal of a specific kind of foodieism that, in its anhedonic minimalism, is oddly well-matched to B.R. Myers’ own “Puritanical Priggishness.” So I thought it’d be nice to see the locavores come in for an eye-poking. I keep paying for meals that more or less demand that I worship the simple Freshness of the ingredients, as if cooking were merely a handmaiden to ecologically mindful shopping. A typical experience in the highly rated Chez Panisse-spawned restaurants around here is realizing that the most flavorful thing on my plate – way more flavorful than the hand-fed Sonoma County chicken roast with locally mined rock salt – is the side dish of sauteed spinach and white beans, finding myself treating the meat dish as an afterthought because the white beans…they taste like…beans, and wondering if I’m a foodie philistine because it’s not the Freshness of the beans or the Shortness of the Distance and thus the negligible amount of greenhouse emissions they bear the stigma of, but rather the salty-tangy beanness of them, which I have to admit I’m recalling from cans of Campbell’s Chunky White Bean Soup I ate in states of raging munchies back in college. And that beany sauce really wakes up the exquisitely Fresh and delicately sauteed spinach by infusing it with the rich taste of beans. Still, it feels odd the next day, looking back on my 3-star meal and being able to summon to my flavor-memory only a very good Pinot Noir, and beans.
— Matt Feeney · Feb 23, 07:25 AM · #
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
— Joules · Feb 25, 12:14 AM · #