“First, we eat. Then, we do everything else.”*…
Tomorrow is, of course, Thanksgiving Day in the United States… and for many, an occasion to take “the cousin walk.” (R)D will be off for the day, returning (no doubt with a tryptophan hangover) on Friday.
Meantime, Alicia Kennedy on what’s become of “the foodie” and what it would mean to take taste serously again…
The foodie is in crisis. For forty years, the word itself has been hanging out in the culture, signifying a person who doesn’t just eat but knows what farm the arugula came from and which chef in town has the hottest pedigree. Where once the foodie had Anthony Bourdain roving the world in a leather jacket, telling them how to travel, what to eat, and how to be in restaurants, his death in 2018 left a hole that seemingly nothing in today’s food culture can fill. How does food emerge from its post-Bourdain malaise? Not even Stanley Tucci searching for Italy could resuscitate the culture into a consensus about who the foodie is now and what they care about.
Perhaps the foodie has become imperiled by the transformation of so many of our meals, snacks, and grocery hauls into mere fodder for social media. Preparing, serving, and eating food is now too often only a prelude to posting: the dimly lit dinner party featuring a mountain of whipped butter beside sourdough bread, the Saturday breakfast with an espresso cup placed just so upon the salmon newsprint of the Financial Times, a sun-drenched spread of shellfish on a trip to Lisbon—all in service to the almighty god of content. Being a foodie is no longer about experience and knowledge. Documentation is in; expertise is out, even if we can all cite Bourdain explaining that Sichuan food with Coke is the best way to cure a hangover.
The problem isn’t just about the domination of food culture by internet aesthetics. Instead, it’s about the way food enthusiasts use those aesthetics to curate away complexity and discomfort, leaving food systems unchallenged and food culture shallow. If all you want is a nice meal on the table, you don’t have to think about the overworked and underpaid farmworkers who made it possible. If you want pop history or recipes, you can gorge on them. This may all be perfectly pleasant. But what’s been lost in the process is the foodie’s potential power as both tastemaker and advocate…
[Kennedy consider two recent books: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh (former star of The Great British Bake Off) and Marion Nestle’s (author of Food Politics and originator of New York University’s Food Studies program) newly updated version of her 2006 classic, What to Eat Now. “Taken together, these books model what we’ve lost and point toward reclaiming it.” She then considers the late 20th century cultural history of food and foodies…]
… there’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it.
Books like Tandoh’s and Nestle’s point toward closing that divide. They recognize that food can’t be detangled from industry and profit—that’s how it reaches our tables—but insist we look at the whole system. Behind the perfect peaches on social media feeds puppeteered by corporate algorithms are exploited farmworkers passing out from heatstroke. Behind every foodie is someone who just needs to eat, especially now that the federal government is fighting about SNAP. The question is whether those realities can coexist in our consciousness, or whether our fractured landscape will keep them separate.
For more than forty years, the word foodie has functioned as an inescapable shorthand for “someone who cares about food.” The shape that care takes is the real question. Nestle and Tandoh are arguing for rigorous care but in different ways: these books ask readers to remember the corporate and political power behind every option at the supermarket, and to be conscious of how various kinds of media are selling us certain sorts of gastronomic pleasure. Read in tandem, they ask us to be active participants in our daily meals beyond mere procurement. The first step toward a more conscientious foodie might be reclaiming the idea that our relationship to food exists not solely through recipes and memes but through power structures and systemic inequities that govern how food is grown, sold, and shared. A foodie’s appetite must have room for both pleasure and responsibility.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Was the Foodie?” from @aliciadkennedy.bsky.social in @yalereview.bsky.social.
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might recall that this date in 1789 was chosen by George Washington (on October 3rd of that year) as the ocassion of the young nation’s first official Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was first cellebrated as a regular national holiday on the fianl THursday in November, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, on this date in 1863.
Read the full text of Washington’s proclamation here (and of Lincoln’s here).
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