Food, vainglorious food

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Steven Poole tell us what silly twits “foodists” can be but of course the recipe jockeys and food fetishists can efficiently demonstrate that themselves. Most days in the public prints you can find us prattling, back-scratching and indulging in quite effortless bouts of self-parody. Here are some tasters from a single recent weekend: What do celebrity chefs “really cook at home”? Nigella Lawson serves her family Heston’s Blumenthal’s burgers and “mini versions of my cappuccino pavlova”. Heston, in turn, eats yoghurt after previously inserting a tampon in his mouth to remove moisture and thus enhance the taste.

In the Sunday Times the restaurant critic Adrian Gill padded out his inches: “This is the age of the restaurant not as a theatre of civility or a temple of edible offerings, but of a business,” (No! Can restaurateurs have sunk so low?) Meanwhile in Turin, at the biennial global foodies’ summit the Salone del Gusto, it was agreed that, since “processes of laceration and recomposition often pass through food,” a good meal is the best way to recover from the trauma of an earthquake or hurricane.

Purple and pompous writing about eating has been a pastime for hacks at least since Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and his Ur-foodie thesis of 1825, La Physiologie du Goût. Steven Poole adapts Brillat-Savarin’s most famous remark for the title of his polemic. But I think there is a double misquote there. Precisely translated, Brillat-Savarin wrote “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are” — which implies anthropological analysis and is a trick quite easily pulled off. We all know what sort of chap travels to Barcelona for foam of snail liquor and what sort will settle for a salad of locally foraged sorrel leaves and Fairtrade quinoa.

Poole is very entertaining as he mocks all manifestations of foodism, from obscure ingredient-raves to gastroporn and the chefs who take it all too seriously — in Poole’s phrase, “bunny-broilers getting a Christ complex”. The targets go down pretty easily. He’s never wrong, though I wouldn’t attach quite so much significance as he does to such ephemeral phenomena as Waitrose’s daft advertising slogans.

It is the decadence of this culture that makes him so wittily cross but he misses the most significant cause of the foodism “revolution”. That is not excessive wealth, crazed neophilia, nor snobbery. Rather it is that middle-class people make most of their food choices because they are worried about their health. And what could be more decadent than the already long-lived and uniquely healthy importing food from abroad (and throwing a third of it away) in order to be even healthier? In a pot of Danone Activia yoghurt lies the real inanity of foodism.

Despite Poole’s contempt for the gastro-commentariat (sorry, but this suffix is addictive), food and what we do with it can brilliantly illuminate society, as the historian and food columnist Bee Wilson has shown before. Her new book on kitchen tools and gadgets is full of treasures to savour. There is Hitler’s use of the one-pot meal as an ideological tool, to put alongside roast beef’s historic role as a totem of British exceptionalism. There’s the startling theory that cutlery has changed the shape of the human face, the deep overbite of the Chinese having evolved to help chopsticks into the mouth. Our overbites are smaller, because it wasn’t until 1,000 years later that we deployed knives and forks. And in some primitive societies, front teeth still meet edge-to-edge.

Other cookery innovations have reshaped human lives. As the Lebanese chef Salma Hage told me recently, the arrival in the Seventies of the electric food processor meant hers was the first in untold generations of Middle Eastern women not to live with the continual shoulder-ache that comes from pounding with the pestle and mortar.

Wilson makes the case that the arrival of pottery cookware (10,000 years ago, probably from France) prolonged human lives because the ageing toothless could ingest food that didn’t need to be chewed. The arrival of brick-enclosed fires 500 years ago let women into the kitchen, because their skirts were no longer in danger of catching alight. When ovens came, cooks could work without stripping off, and so respectable women could write cookbooks. And so, eventually, the kitchen’s endless invention produced Nigella.

Alex Renton writes a food column on The Times.

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