A Steady Diet of Nothing

This week our mailbox (or rather, the pile on the floor by the mail slot) was graced by another insert-laden double issue of the New Yorker. These double issues are so particularly welcome because they provide special opportunities to review the latest trends in magazine Òspecial advertising sections,Ó sections I get to know intimately as I tear them carefully out of the magazine in hopes that I can then actually figure out where the articles start and end.

I neednÕt, in this case, have bothered, because reading the ads might have been a better route to getting both information on food and some editorial content that didn't make me think about canceling my subscription. Whether itÕs underwhelming sandwich-worship, an under-reported treatment of restaurant inspectors, or a dance around the edges of what could be an interesting piece about wine, this issue has got something half-baked for every customer.

Food writing, I submit, is a trap for most writers. It highlights pretention, reveals stuff that savvy essayists (as opposed to crankish and undisciplined webloggers) should keep close to the vest, and demands a very hard-to-satisfy balance between the need to convey expertise and to relate what the writer experiences. Many writers arenÕt experts about food, yet not-so-secretly fantasize that theyÕre in, like, the 97th percentile of Those-Who-Know-About-Food. There is something about writing about food that drives a person to protest very seriously their amateur status, and yet toss off the fact that they yearly at Christmas whip up their grandmotherÕs recipe for [insert arcane continental dish here], and that (of course) theyÕve often thought about how their lives would be different if they had taken up...

Above, writing about food and the cooking profession opens the door to a horde of clichŽs, which, unless one has some other line of defense, immediately barge in and take over the piece. The chef is the last of the craftsman-artists, yes, yes. The kitchen is a rough-and-tumble environment. Who knew? After work chefs drink and smoke and get fuckinÕ crazy, man. Gosh! Thanks, Bill Buford! Mario Batali sure is an enigmatic man-child!

And eating is like music, itÕs like philosophy, and of course (the old favorite) like travel, preferably to appropriately rustic location that sounds both exotic and comforting (this almost always means Tuscany, by the way). Adam Gopnik, IÕm looking in your direction.

(All of this goes down particularly badly because of another thing you smell a lot of in this issue: the chokingly self-satisfied sense of entitlement. All eating as event-dining, even (and especially) when it is formulated as casual. Page after page, this issue is a chronicle of conspicuous consumption of the most depressing kind. And it comes wrapped in page after page of writing which points up the close friendships between the writers and their subjects: there's not a chef here who comes off poorly. Nor is there a moment of self-consciousness in Bill Buford's head that he is getting, as a joyride, the kind of training other people desperately hope to acquire. It's all just part of the big, glamorous party! And isn't that what food is about?)

What else? Oh, and flavor combinations which sound weird really taste quite good, because these chefs are geniuses! Also, if you go and really work with a chef, like in his professional environment, youÕll have great anecdotes to tell, which will sound a little like Tony BourdainÕs, but, you know, different.

That Trillin piece I linked to above Ð is there a more irritating pretension than pretending to be just an ordinary guy? A perfectly good idea: can people tell red wine from white? Nifty. But this is not that article. This is an article about how funny it is to Trillin that people say that they can, and how he is from Missouri. It didnÕt really tell me anything about wine. This may be the purest subtlety, and perhaps I simply have not developed the proper taste to appreciate it. But to paraphrase a famous New Yorker moment, I say itÕs a lousy, self-indulgent issue, and I say the hell with it.

Posted by BT at August 15, 2002 11:40 PM