Back in 2014 when I was studying food writing I became swept up on the tidal wave of the foodie culture that was swamping every element of the food industry from the beast in the field to the brasserie on the corner. I was in fact late to the party – very late. According to a number of sources, the term “foodie” originated in the early 1980s with its first use credited to Gael Greene, a restaurant critic for “The New York Magazine”. In a 1980 review of a Paris restaurant, she describes the devotees of chef Dominique Nahmias as “serious foodies”. Not an opening of the floodgates exactly but an unacknowledged precedent for a dissection of the phenomenon by Paul Levy and Ann Barr in “The Official Foodie Handbook” published in 1984. A “foodie” is defined here as “a person very very very interested in food”. Not a greedy or starving person as might befit the description, but someone who “talks about food in every gathering … [salivates] over restaurants, recipes, radicchio”. Foodies, we are told, consider food a high art, on a footing with painting or drama.

Mocked though the concept of food as art has been since as far back as ancient Greece, to question it in the current climate amounts to heresy.  Food is an art moreover that keeps on giving, begetting multifarious offspring – books, television shows, movies, painting, sculpture, poetry and more.

Someone who has mounted a strident offensive against foodies (or what he calls “foodists”) is Steven Poole in his 2017 book “You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up With Gastroculture”. Despite the title it’s not so much a refutation of Brillat-Savarin, as it is a polemic about the modern day fetishization of food that insists what you eat is more important than almost anything else. The act of eating, he says, has become exalted. An aura of suspiciously religious mysticism has burgeoned around things that used to be just vegetables or grains or meat. To see food as embodying any meaning beyond sustaining the body is “only a short step to saying that this meaning can be artistic … that food itself can be art”, he claims with enough apoplexy to provoke severe indigestion if he happened to be munching on paté, bread, parmentier de confit de canard or chocolate at the time (food he likes but doesn’t spend much time thinking about).

It’s not only this element of cultural obsession that alarms Poole, he’s afraid that, as Frank Bruni suggests in a 2011 article called “Dinner and Derangement”, the food craze is veering into the dangerous territory of psychosis, sending us tumbling into the black depths of an “organic rabbit hole”, where salvation presumably will only come from a reversion to what Poole calls the “more civilised” precepts of 1930s cookbooks such as “The Joy of Cooking”, by Irma Rombauer, where the author’s aim is simply “to help you cook nicer food, every day.” A yearning for the good old days is something that afflicts us all in these turbulent times but we’d do well to remember that nostalgia is a distorting lens. Many 1930s households weren’t so much interested in cooking nicer food as in getting hold of any food at all. Still, I know what he means. Sometimes the relentlessly groaning table of the food obsessed media makes me think back fondly to the days when kitchens (Australian ones at any rate) followed (with an almost religious fervour) just one food bible – The Green & Gold Cookery Book (Australia’s equivalent perhaps to Irma Rombauer).

An especially alarming aspect of foodie culture is what Poole deftly defines as an “ersatz spiritualism”, where food is equated with self-identity and meaning far beyond the satisfaction of hunger. Food writers have proposed this idea before of course. MFK Fisher, for one, has famously conflated food (or to be precise) hunger with love. But Poole is talking about something more disturbing – the search for meaning in food.

Is it that contemporary life has become so spiritually barren that we are desperate to assign meaning to anything novel that captures our attention no matter how fleetingly? Instagram is a medium that judging by the fervour of its disciples provides the kind of self-actualisation formerly accessible only through the practice of the creative arts or religion, or to be fair, possibly photography. Self-actualisation, meaning, identity, spiritualism – these are weighty concepts, ones we are obliged to seek and keep seeking according to modern day gurus on the art of living. But I wonder, like Poole, if those who profess to find them through their digestive tracts are serious or simply trying to peddle their own version of fake news. When even the esteemed Michael Pollan declares in a perhaps unintentional suggestion of the communion wafer, “what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world” it’s worrying.

It’s only a short step from declaring food as spiritual to seeing those who prepare it as priests, or “druidic conduits to the ineffable”. Those “conduits” Poole singles out for special opprobrium such as Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adrià, Thomas Keller, are making handsome livings out of converting the gullets of the gullible and the lucrative nature of their crusades probably renders them immune to occasional servings of ridicule (not that Poole allows that notion to cramp his well-honed buffoon piercing lance). We are told that in 2011 a select coterie of celebrity chefs launched a manifesto called “Open Letter to the Chefs of Tomorrow”, a decidedly evangelistic document studded with noble sounding declarations such as “cooking is more than the search for happiness …cooking is a powerful, transformative tool that …can change the way the world nourishes itself.”

According to Anthony Bourdain, author of the mega best-seller “Kitchen Confidential”, high-end restaurant kitchens are meccas for masochists, coke-sniffers, sociopaths and thieves, where, to name just a few health inspector nightmares, drains back up with raw sewerage, salmonella cultures hatch in days old fish and unused bread and butter is recycled. Rather than being temples of transformative, socially conscious culinary crusades, such places are “hot, airless spaces … ruled by despotic leaders” where, with a multitude of sharp weapons conveniently at hand, fights regularly break out, an observation confirmed by Marco Pierre White in his book “White Slave” in which he describes much bad boy behaviour in the kitchen, from bashing pans, shouting, making cooks stand in the corner to throwing cheeseboards at the wall. 

Like any social fad, foodie culture has spawned its own lexicon. Buzz words such as gastroporn, neurogastronomy, artisanal, locavore, paddock-to-plate, nose-to-tail-eating are sprinkled about foodie-land as liberally as holy water in a high mass.  Poole takes special delight in poking fun at “gastroporn”, noting that “everyone revels in the ‘filthiness’ of what they are naughtily pleased to call ‘gastroporn’. Lest we think that Poole may be tempted to indulge in any naughty pleasure himself, he hastens to disabuse us in what can only be called a below-the-belt manner. “One might also suspect that this is because, bloated and obsessed with food, they [foodists] aren’t actually getting all that much physical love, even if they are always committed to swallowing”. Foodists are not just over-enthusiastic eaters, they are “sexualiz[ing] [their] gluttony, a practice that quickly comes to look like a desperate kind of compensation”. Foodists, in other words, when in the mood and Tinder or an unobliging partner have failed them, subsume their lust in salivating over the latest edition of “Gourmet Traveller”. In Poole’s view, foodies are not only piggish slaverers at the trough but driven to compulsive oral gratification by unfulfilled sexual desires. A little harsh, although better the objectification of food than women.

Gastroporn, of course, is not really new. As Poole himself notes, like sexual porn, arousal can be just as well achieved through words, the orgiastic potential of which has been demonstrated by writers as far back as Zola (said by Anthony Bourdain to be the “greatest of food pornographers”).  

In a chapter called “The Real Thing” Poole turns his attention to a subject close to my heart (for reasons disclosed below) – a phenomenon he calls “nostalgic pastoralism”. Otherwise described by the French term “nostalgie de la boue”, or “nostalgia for mud”, it’s a modern-day appropriation of the agrarian social philosophy that had its origins somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. Agrarianism is characterised by a fundamental connection to the land which is not only seen as sustaining life but represents a spiritual affinity between man and earth. Planting, nurturing and harvesting in harmony with the seasons is promoted as being inherently superior to modern day agricultural practices. Authenticity is the catch-cry of what Poole calls this “sub-strand” of foodist rhetoric and it focuses on “heritage” produce, “heirloom” varieties of fruit and vegetables and rare-breed animals, all of which demonstrate a “caring ecological concern for ‘biodiversity’”. Agrarianism preaches that a primary connection between the land and the raising of food is not only purer, but morally and ethically superior. Respect for food in its animal or vegetable form, is reasonable, Poole concedes, but when that respect is extended to the soil itself, he sees it as absurd. Those like Michael Pollan, who in his book “In Defence of Food” says (or burbles as Poole would have it) “… it is only by cooking fresh food in your own kitchen that you know this food ‘is no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings … each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil”.   It’s not too far from this rhapsodic hyperbole to this …

“Everything is grown according to organic principles. What this means in practice is that the animals are fed from the vegetable garden, the chickens and pigs are rotated through the orchards and paddocks, geese and ducks lay eggs and occasionally grace the table, goats provide milk and cheese, the apiary provides honey and pollinates the plants … it’s classic Agrarian farming, working with nature to preserve the quality of the land as well as the animals and plants it nurtures.” (Taken from an article I published in the Winter 2015 edition of Taste & Travel magazine).

It’s uplifting imagery. There’s something comforting and mantra-like about this writing, this anthropomorphising of the earth as a benign and beneficent deity, whether clinging to the farmer’s boots or imagined as the gently rotating orb that roots us to our origins. Its threatened sanctity demands obeisance, requires that we get down and dirty, pull the vegetables from the soil with our own hands, know the pigs whose bacon accompanies the eggs from the adjacent free-range pasture, be on first name terms with the farmer who cultivates the wheat for our bread. It’s nostalgic and as soothing as a warm bath to immerse ourselves in this idea of a quest to regain a lost purity, where the past, simply by virtue of not being the present, is claimed to be immeasurably better. Poole has a point (even if an unnecessarily disparaging one) when he says ”the foodist muncher’s solemn invocation of his own ‘respect’ for what he is in the process of destroying looks dangerously like just another way of trying to sanctify his own guttishness”.

It’s easy enough to dismiss the extreme manifestations of the foodie culture as a harmless illusion, albeit one rooted in hedonism, but on the other side of that is a cruder reality, one where the culture is contaminated with racial, gender and class inequities. You won’t find foodies among the poor, the disadvantaged, the discriminated against. For far too many people sustainability as an environmental, ethical or spiritual prerogative is outweighed by that of survival in the sense of getting food on the table at all, regardless of its origin or aesthetic desirability.

In drawing our attention to the blind spots of self-congratulation, pretension and faddishness that characterise the most egregious aspects of the foodie culture, Poole reveals (unearths?) the reality beneath the hype and prompts us to see the emperor’s new clothes for what they really are. His more rancorous assertions, although compellingly and wittily put, seem more a striving for effect than valid criticisms of a cultural trend that in its less strident forms provides a great deal of enjoyment, enlightenment and variety to the otherwise commonplace acts of eating and cooking.