Well, I’m listed as a contributing writer in this week’s issue of Post-, the Brown Daily Herald‘s more irreverent little sister, which covers food, sex, booze, books, and the like. Surreal? Just a little bit (especially because they got the accent mark correct when they printed my name!). See you guys in the New York Times. For the article itself, click here.
It’s summer 2009 and you’re looking for a movie. Not just any movie, but a high-grossing, low-brow movie rife with at least one of the following: grandiose special effects, scantily clad chicks, drunken buffoonery, Sacha Baron Cohen. Perusing the spread, you nod in approval: Terminator 4. Transformers 2. The Hangover. And, wait, there’s that new one, Julie & Julia. Now tell me: what’s wrong with this picture?
And then there’s the runaway success of such TV shows as “Top Chef.” The cult following of The Food Network. Books like Eat Pray Love, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s new full-length opus, Born Round. The celebrity of food bloggers, and the subsequent rise of a new genre: the blogger cookbook. All around us, gourmet culture is proliferating at a hyperactive rate – and it’s doing so far beyond the boundaries of physical restaurants.
Compared to other creative endeavors like art and literature, food is becoming a hobby for the masses – an irony, if you consider that the aroma of sautéed shallots is an ephemeral gift, or that the utter velvetiness of a masterfully crafted risotto transcends the boundaries of the written word. But then “Top Chef” comes on, and damn it if you can’t hardly smell the bacon as it sizzles seductively under the camera. If food is in fact such an immediate and fleeting stimulus, why then does it keep sprouting up when we turn on the TV or check the New York Times bestseller list?
Well, there’s the small detail that food and the various instances in which it is prepared and consumed are a critical, regular part of each of our lives. To like books is to be intellectual; to like food is to be alive. And isn’t the purpose of any creative endeavor to penetrate beyond our innumerable differences to the fundamental, visceral qualities that unify us? More than being simply sustenance, it’s a real universality, giving us perspective on the threads that bind us together. Colleen McDonald ’12 calls it “one of our most basic drives. An appreciation for art… can be cultivated, but biologically, there’s some mechanism for the desire to eat” that makes the dining process more holistic and pleasurable than perfunctory. For Samuel Choi ’13, seeing these “palatable sensations [in the media] is a heart-pounding experience,” a vicarious means by which to tap into this central human commonality. Our voracious response to this recent barrage of food-centric media is thus little more than reflex, a deeply wired instinctual craving.
In constructing a rich culture around this most elemental of needs, we create for ourselves an art form that can be enjoyed thrice daily, a resourceful merger of routine and indulgence. If food is what binds us together, this plethora of new outlets fleshes it out, glorifies and secularizes it, lodging it into our common mentality so that it’s not an incidentally tasty necessity but instead an incidentally necessary luxury. As Choi puts it, “food… enraptures all the senses,” rendering it as manifold and complex as a classical artwork. Where it could be habituated, it is instead celebrated, transforming the vital into something deliberate, as much an artistic medium as it is a progressive channel or a whimsical foray. Michael Goodman ’13 describes this as an “apotheosis,” saying that “taking something that is essential to our survival and making it into something with power and meaning” is a noble and inherently human pursuit.
That we eat is nothing new. But the various media that have cropped up so quickly in recent years function as reminders of the meaning behind the age-old practice. Far from a one-dimensional habit, the dishes portrayed on The Food Network or in a bestselling book about food are comprised of an intensely complicated fabric of synesthesia and sentiment, of craftsmanship and cultivation, of boundless opportunity and creative license. Says McDonald, “it’s this combination of smell, sight, texture, taste… that connects so well with memory and sensation” to transform it into the deeply meaningful ritual that it is to us today: in our homes, on our TVs, and on our bookshelves. The allure lies in an awareness of our action – so next Friday, tackle those V-Dub chicken fingers with full force. Your humanity depends upon it.
