flower ravioli with guanciale (cured pork jowl and cheek) will wow your guests, while shrimp in ginger butter sauce can be thrown together in 15 minutes from.
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culture REVIEWS
how to be a foodie by shyon baumann and josée johnston
Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appétit Fall 2008 issues Food magazines are designed to appeal to the senses, and last fall’s issues were no exception. The September cover of Saveur offered up a juicy watermelon, along with the promise of the “best brownie recipes in the world.” The cover of Bon Appétit featured a plate of cheesy chicken parmesan from chef Mario Batali’s restaurant. Gourmet enticed readers with the colorful vegetable bounty of an outdoor Parisian market. Looking at the stunning food photography, you may begin to feel hungry, and maybe even excited about cooking. Much has been made of the relationship between contemporary food journalism and pornography. The “gastroporn” comparison focuses on sensual close-ups of food and aspirational eating involving fantastical creations that, like many stereotypical porn scenarios, are probably never realized in the audience’s homes. Yet, gourmet food writing isn’t simply about food fantasies that never materialize. Instead, these magazines provide illuminating guidance not only about food, but cultural sophistication more generally. On one level, gourmet food magazines are explicitly didactic; they offer recipes, cooking tips, shopping locations and information, and travel advice. They
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tell the audience about how, where, and what to cook and eat. While there are heaps of handy cooking tips and useful information, the messages can be more subtle than how to cut up a duck or make homemade ice cream. Food writing also provides faint cues about culture, status, and the good life more generally. After all, the subtitle of Gourmet is “The Magazine of Good Living.” We all eat, and food is life. But we don’t all eat well, and by implication, we don’t all live well. A close reading of the genre opens a window on the contemporary vision of the good life, with all its attendant contradictions and nuances. The September 2008 issues of three of the most popular gourmet food magazines—Gourmet, Saveur, and Bon Appétit—reveal what the good life looks
you might normally purchase at a grocery store or order at a restaurant. Saveur teaches you to make your own ricotta (you’ll need liquid animal rennet, and you can get that at www.cheesemaking.com). Bon Appétit offers a lesson in wrapping foods for baking in banana leaves (place the food in the middle of the rectangular leaf, fold the short edge nearest you over the food, then the long sides toward the center, and keep folding it into a packet). Gourmet will tutor you on piping a perfect macaron (you have to grind the almond-sugar mixture very fine, and you should hold the pastry bag vertically, keeping it low to get the mounds smooth and even; also, the batter keeps moving after you stop its flow, so plan ahead). Regular features in Bon Appétit allow readers to ask questions of the
Rather than instructing readers about what to do, these implicit instructions teach them how to be. By suggestion, these preferences and dispositions are held by a person sophisticated enough to enjoy gourmet food. like, what ideals they uphold, and how they’re packaged—if only for their generally educated and affluent audiences. In a very straight-forward way, these magazines are how-to guides. The writing is explicitly instructive and all provide recipes alongside top-notch food photography. Indeed, the recipes can be wonderful, clever, and helpful. Cauliflower ravioli with guanciale (cured pork jowl and cheek) will wow your guests, while shrimp in ginger butter sauce can be thrown together in 15 minutes from start to finish. The magazines also provide comprehensive expositions on preparing foods
“BA Foodist,” and Molly Wizenberg’s column “Cooking Life” regularly documents her adventures learning techniques for making things like homemade marshmallows, leek confit, and slow-roasted tomatoes from her favorite neighborhood restaurant. Do you know how to poach? Gourmet gives us a definition (“cooking something completely submerged in liquid over gentle heat”) and explains how to poach eggs, pears, and “oeufs a la neige,” or egg whites whipped into meringue and poached in milk rather than water. The instruction continues by telling us that using cardamom in the milk, rather than the customary vanilla,
will update the dish and prevent it “from being a period piece.” Bon Appétit provides a detailed set of solutions to the problems associated with deep frying. Sprinkling about a quarter teaspoon of salt into the oil before frying will prevent splattering. To minimize the attendant odors, boil cinnamon sticks or a bay leaf in an uncovered pot, or position small dishes of ammonia throughout the house during deep frying. For hungry readers and avid home cooks, there’s a lot of really useful information in these sources, although it’s true many people enjoy just reading about and poring over pictures of these foods. They’re no substitute for a degree from the Culinary Institute of America, but the enthusiastic home cook will be fully occupied until next month’s issues appear. Over and above the explicit didacticism, the sociologist will also find an implicit set of instructions about cultural consumption and lifestyles more generally. These instructions emerge from depictions of the contexts in which food is produced and consumed—restaurants, kitchens, homes, farms, and countryside scenes in the United States and around the globe. Rather than instructing readers about what to do, these implicit instructions teach them how to be. They suggest by example the preferences, dispositions, values, and ideals held by the kind of person thought sophisticated and cultured enough to enjoy gourmet food. In a way, the magazines are a window into the habitus of a privileged subset of the American population. The values and ideals these magazines promote are specific. First, be authentic. That means no shortcuts, no cheating, and no accepting easy substitutes for the real thing. True foodies are sticklers for getting it right. And to get it right, you might have to do something by hand that you’re not used to, like canning your own tuna or curing your own bacon. You might have to travel someplace very far away—perhaps to Fuchu,
in Japan, because the town’s local barley and rice taste unique and its climate is ideal for growing the bacteria that give miso such complexity and depth of flavor. You need to pay attention to the identities of chefs and food producers— whose restaurant will you go to in Paris, Alain Ducasse’s or Joel Robuchon’s? And don’t just say you like watermelon—say which variety you like and why. Yellow Doll, for its soft flesh and extra sweetness? Starlight, for its juiciness? The broader lesson is that cultural sophistication requires a preference for genuine, original experiences, which themselves require a great deal of expert knowledge to find and enjoy fully. Second, be adventurous. Don’t just stick with the familiar, the everyday, or the expected. Instead, develop a taste for new flavors, new combinations, and new textures. Recommendations from these three magazines range from the somewhat adventurous—espresso coffee soda, pickled cauliflower, and mocha mousse with Sichuan peppercorns—to the highly adventurous—stuffed pigs’ trotters, lamb brains, and cow udder. The prescription for adventure is to be taken in the sense of actually going on an adventure, too. The magazines all feature travel as part of the search for good food. Saveur’s story on watermelon features pictures from Turkey, Pakistan, China, Gambia, and the United States. Gourmet’s September issue is devoted entirely to Paris—not the tourist-trap Paris, rather the lesserknown, insiders’ Paris, which involves a sense of urban adventure. The message being, of course, that cultural refinement requires avoidance of the banal. It would be possible to eat delicious food without being adventurous, but how boring that would be? The manifest function of informing readers about “new” (depending on your perspective) foods and dishes is to provide practical knowledge, e.g., don’t settle for boring lemon when you can add acidity with yuzu juice from the rare and aromatic Japanese citrus fruit. But the
Contexts, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 62–64. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2009 American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.1.62.
latent function of publishing monthly new finds or bringing back “forgotten” foods is to facilitate the adventurousness for which cultured eaters should strive. Food magazines teach a third implicit lesson. To be a sophisticated and urbane cultural consumer, you must disavow traditional trappings of wealth and high-class status. In the context of food, the formality and stuffiness of traditional fine dining now ruins the contemporary meal. As the editorial in Bon Appétit pronounces, “the places that draw us in these days tend to be extensions of our home, and not the more spiffed-up special-occasion-type spots. (Read stiff, expensive, daunting.)” The constraints of the conventional fine dining repertoire— basically, high-end French with a little room for Italian or Continental classics— are now considered deeply passé. Instead, foodies should embrace the street food of whichever country they’re in and choose their foods and restaurants based on their deliciousness, homey-ness, and innovativeness. Don’t think you’re eating well just because the tablecloths are white and the maître’d puts a rose in a vase for the lady of the table. In fact, run from such a place; they’re trying to dupe you. Rustic, relaxed, casual, and unceremonious are in. Each of these three lessons sidesteps the question of whether eating well must necessarily be expensive, but the third implies it probably shouldn’t be. Indeed, a central theme of Gourmet’s special “Paris” issue concerns how to find the best food on a budget. But it’s plain to see that eating authentically and adventurously generally isn’t cheap, and that the ideal eater constructed in these magazines is not a poor person. Bon Appétit provides readers with information about parking with a valet service, as well as tips about staying thin on a gourmet diet—only eat food that you absolutely love, and don’t eat all the food available to you—that wouldn’t apply to anybody with a limited food budget. It’s fine to suggest to readers
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culture REVIEWS that excellent honey can bought at the Luxembourg Gardens only on two days in September out of the whole year, but readers are left to figure out whether the trip to Paris fits their work schedules and budgets. Even if you can squeeze in a trip to Paris, the first hotel featured in an article about affordable places to stay has rooms beginning at $620 per night. And it sure would be an adventure to travel to Tokyo to experience the unparalleled Japanese technique in mixing cocktails, but, again, who can afford it?
While canning tuna yourself might be the real deal and improve the flavor and texture, there’s no way to do it more cheaply than it would cost to buy a decent brand from the supermarket. An interesting contradiction emerges: at the precise moment foodie culture becomes fixated on casual, relaxed food that possesses “downhome” charm, class inequality in the United States suggests many of these relaxing food experiences will only be available to a select minority of the pop-
ulation. This isn’t to say that only elites read gourmet food magazines, just that the cutting-edge foodways profiled in this writing prop up an ideal that is only fully attainable to those with ample cultural and economic capital. Shyon Baumann and Josée Johnston are in the sociology department at the University of Toronto. Baumann studies the sociology of culture, media, the arts, and inequality. Johnston studies the sociology of food, social movements, and consumerism.
why we go home again by kevin fox gotham ing the victims themselves. The result is a distinctively sociological portrait of human resilience in the face of disaster and recovery.
Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (Ginny Martin & Kate Browne, 2007) Soon after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, anthropologist Kate Browne collaborated with filmmaker Ginny Martin to document the effects of the disaster. Filmed over a period of 17 months, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina follows the families of three African American women, Connie, Katie, and Janie, as they work to rebuild their lives and community in the aftermath of the devastation. The women’s hopes for reclaiming life as it once existed in New Orleans are set against the challenges of rebuilding and a government that seems intent upon denying the extent of human vulnerability and suffering, obfuscating the social sources of the disaster, and blam-
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The entire St. Bernard Parish, including the town of Violet, which is home to many of the three women’s family members, was flooded with anywhere from five feet to 12 feet of water after Katrina hit. More than 66,000 people were displaced from their homes in the parish and not allowed to return for months after the storm. Some never make it back. Janie and her husband, for example, are unable to return due to chronic health problems and thus give what’s left of their flooded home to a daughter. Away from the place they had called home for their whole lives, theirs is a struggle against the trauma of displacement. The families that do return find support networks and community ties as precarious as the waterlogged buildings that awaited them. Katie’s elation upon returning to her home soon turns to disappointment and concern as she wonders what life will be like if her other neighbors don’t come back and rebuild their homes in post-Katrina New Orleans. If she rebuilds, will her home be the only one
on the block? Will she be a pioneer in the recovery effort or an isolated resident on a doomed block that may not receive city government services? These questions grow only more imposing as Katie is forced to wait six months for the handicapped-accessible trailer she needs because of persistent poor health and physical disability. And even after she gets a trailer, Katie has to endure the frustration of financial insecurity as her grant money promised through Louisiana’s federal-assisted The Road Home rebuilding program is delayed for months. Confusion reigns against the backdrop of the lethargic rebuilding process and a paucity of government support for devastated communities and their families. More than three years after the storm, Hurricane Katrina itself is no longer the problem, but rather the anxieties, fears, and aggravations of the recovery and rebuilding effort. Many residents lost or changed jobs because of the hurricane’s destruction. The frustration of not being able to finance home repairs combined with the agony of living in semi-deserted neighborhoods fuels depression and mental anguish. The sluggish emergency response by the Federal Emergency Management
