This is a little break for those who have been overwhelmed with the news of the previous week — but it’s not a complete break…
Over my thirty year career as a journalist and author I have rarely written about politics. My passion is exploring food and culture, and I have rarely felt that I had anything unique to contribute to discussions of current affairs. It’s also true that the readers of my food articles probably aren’t concerned what I think about politics any more than they are with what our editorial columnists are eating that day. They do their thing and I do mine.
I have crossed that line, or rather, straddled it, because I realized something important about how a passion for food, or for anything else, can affect our civic participation. There’s a topic shift toward the end that was intended to take readers by surprise.
This article is being syndicated so I can’t post the whole thing in this forum because I need to keep the copyright. So far it has appeared in the Easy Reader News and Random Lengths News in the Los Angeles area and in the Tulsa Voice in Oklahoma. The link is to the Easy Reader News in Hermosa Beach, CA.
If you look at the attention and energy devoted to the dining scene, it’s hard to say this isn’t a golden age. It’s not just that people are willing to spend more on their food, though they are. You can get a $75 hamburger topped with caviar at Petrossian in Beverly Hills, or a $150 burger with shaved truffles, wagyu beef, and lobster tail at downtown LA’s Nick and Stef’s. These might have been put on the menu as gimmicks, but people are actually ordering them.
Novelties such as this aside, there has been an explosion of places that offer wildly experimental dining experiences, often at nosebleed prices. The French Laundry in Napa, where a meal can easily top $500 per person, mainstreamed culinary combinations that never previously existed in any culture, and many others have followed. The creativity is undeniable, and to some people it’s worth it. (I dined there in 2004, and it was worth it to me, but then again somebody else was paying.) I still remember many details of the 21 course dinner.
If you have an esoteric meal that you will remember years later, that changes the way you think about food, is that worth the $250 per person that Vespertine charges for dinner without wine? To some people the answer is yes, and they patrol the hot spots looking for peak experiences.
More importantly as a sign of our national evolution, food from cultures all over the world is being treated with respect. This is true at all price levels and in all communities, and it is breaking down barriers in society. When the foodie crowd hears of a great dining experience, they’ll venture into neighborhoods they’d usually avoid to get bragging rights. Some items have mainstreamed to the point where they’re now just another American food. Twenty years ago the average American had never tasted Pad Thai or Korean-style short ribs, and now you can get both in the frozen section at Costco. Neither is as good as you’d get at a real Thai or Korean restaurant, but the Costco meatballs aren’t as good as an Italian grandmother can make either.
Want further evidence of our fascination with food? I can tell you from personal experience that twenty years ago, if you photographed your meal in a restaurant the entire staff was alerted that a critic was in the house. Nobody else did that. I bought a small camera and a jacket with large pockets, but sometimes I was still caught at it. Fast forward to now and as soon as your plates arrive, at least one person at the table has a phone camera out. The shot is on the internet seconds later with a pithy comment. Food porn has been a thing since Gourmet Magazine pioneered luscious food photography in the 1940’s, but it has become a sport of the masses. I don’t even need to mention how food porn and the moving image have combined to create multiple TV channels and untold numbers of video streams about experiences near and far, but I will anyway just to remind people that the term “celebrity culinary explorer” would have been so much gibberish only a decade or so ago. The fact that Anthony Bourdain’s death affected so many people so deeply shows how he and his endeavors touched both the self-selected elite and the masses.
The rest of the piece, with a gorgeous graphic by artist Tim Teebken, is here. I hope it starts some conversations, both among DK reades and in the households around my neighborhood where people are surprised that the the food guy is talking about bigger things…
If you are interested in my other writing, my website is at richardfoss.com