Category Archives: Contemporary Food Culture

Lies and Moral Panic About Food and Health

18 Monday Feb 2019

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scary headlinesWho’s trying to mislead us and why?

Here is a recent story from the NY Times about the dangers of processed meat. (Thanks to Michael O’Hare for pointing this out)

We see a 4 percent increase in the risk of cancer even at 15 grams a day, which is a single slice of ham on a sandwich,” said Dr. Nigel Brockton, director of research for the American Institute for Cancer Research.
Eating a more typical serving of 50 grams of processed meat a day would increase the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent, a 2011 review of studies found.

From what I understand, the background rate of colorectal cancer is roughly 4%. So one natural way of reading this passage is that if you eat one slice of ham per day your risk increases to 8%. And if you eat 3-4 slices per day, a more typical serving for ham lovers, your risk would increase 18% which, when added to the 4% background rate, brings your risk to 22%. In other words, according to this literal reading, over 20% of people who eat ham, bacon, pastrami, sausage, etc. every day get colorectal cancer.

This of course is nonsense. The incidence of colorectal cancer is no where near that high. The passage is systematically misleading.

What’s going on here is that the good doctor and the reporter for the Times are failing to describe how we should understand this data. It’s about relative risk not absolute risk, as the underlying research report makes very clear.

Let me explain:

If the background rate of colorectal cancer is 4%, an increase of 4% from one slice of processed meat per day is an increase of 4% relative to the background rate. 1.04 X 4=4.16. Your risk increases by less than a quarter of a percent. If you’re in that group that has a bologna sandwich packed with 4 slices everyday, your risk increases to 18% over the background rate. 1.18 x 4=4.72. Round it up to 5%. A really nasty habit of eating 50 grams, almost 3/4 lb. of deli meat per day, increases your risk of getting colorectal cancer about 1% over the background rate of 4%.

If you really love deli meats, isn’t that worth the risk?

I’m not suggesting that people eat as much processed meat as they want or that we should ignore health warnings. The cumulative effect of too many indulgences would indeed add up to an unhealthy diet. But if processed meat is one of your few guilty pleasures, surely a 1% increase in risk is not worth worrying about.

Yet, the headline says:

Is Eating Deli Meats Really That Bad for You?

Even small amounts of processed meat increase the risk of colorectal cancer.

The story goes on to point out all the chemicals that go into processed meats and the health warnings associated with them. Nowhere in the article is the small risk effect mentioned.

One would expect that reporters and editors who work for the NY Times would be aware of the difference between relative and absolute risk. Surely doctors and researchers know the difference. They also are quite aware that most readers are not sophisticated when it comes to statistics. Yet they make no attempt to correct the potential misreading.

Rather than worrying about eating that piece of salami that is beckoning, perhaps we should worry about why the NY Times is unnecessarily scaring people. Could it be because it’s click bait and sells advertising? They wouldn’t do that would they?

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Do Americans Love Food?

31 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food History

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eating in front of tvThe food revolution has come to the U.S. The past several decades have witnessed the emergence of farmer’s markets and a focus on local food sources, high quality cheese and coffee producers throughout the country, a robust specialty food arena, Michelin starred restaurants in most major cities, and entire TV networks devoted to food. Very little of this existed 30 yrs. ago.

Yet:

  • The average U.S. household devotes the smallest proportion of its expenditures on food than almost any other country.
  • As women moved into the workforce throughout the 20th Century, men showed little inclination to take over household chores resulting in a massive loss of cooking skills and food knowledge as convenience foods became the norm.
  • The average U.S. adult spends 75 minutes per day eating, about 35 minutes a day in food preparation and clean-up, and 5 times that amount watching television.
  • We employ nearly 10 million people in food service and preparation—most of these jobs are low-paying, high stress, physically demanding, and insecure.

One might conclude from these facts that typical Americans don’t care much about food as long as it is plentiful, fast, and cheap. The American way of eating is plowing through a bag of chips while watching celebrity chefs on the Food Network cook.

What Do You Sell When You Sell Wine?

24 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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vineyard-3619525_960_720The form of the question suggests that wine is more than wine, more than an alcoholic beverage.  In thinking about the problem of slowing growth in the wine trade and questions about who is buying, who isn’t, and how wineries ought to respond to market conditions, it occurred to me that we can’t answer these questions unless we pay attention to the many things that wine is.

For many people, perhaps the majority of wine drinkers, wine is a commodity, an alcoholic beverage alongside other alcoholic beverages, that is affordable, pleasing to consume and will get you buzzed enough to relax. For others, the pleasant taste and alcohol is a stimulus to conviviality and good cheer, something you drink at parties to encourage a particular kind of social interaction. For these consumers, (call them “buzz babies”), much of what they are trying to accomplish can be achieved via other beverages. One might have a preference for wine over beer or vice versa but substitution is usually an option. And for this consumer price really matters. Alcohol is alcohol and as long as your threshold of drinkability is met, you’re not going to pay more.

But for others, wine is primarily an accompaniment for food. It enhances a meal and the meal feels incomplete without it. The effects of the alcohol matter as well but it’s the food enhancement that distinguishes a good experience from a mediocre one. This consumer (let’s call them “food freaks”) even when looking for an everyday, hassle free experience, will be more selective than the buzz babies. Particular meals will require particular wines. and not just any wine will do. And of course for some interested in food enhancement, choice of wine becomes a carefully managed puzzle to get the pairing just right. For food freaks, substitutability of one type of alcohol for another may not be possible. Although there are foods that go well with beer or spirits, and cocktails can sometimes be precisely calibrated to dishes, wine is widely acknowledged to be the superior food accompaniment. For food freaks, they may be willing to pay more for a bottle because they must be more selective, and a poor choice can have a negative impact on the food.

The next step up on the wine chain is the “casual connoisseur”. She enjoys the alcohol and food enhancement but also enjoys learning a bit about wine, will go to wineries regularly because she enjoys the winery experience, and may join a wine club. She is known to sip wine just to appreciate the flavors, aromas, and textures. There is no substitute for wine for the casual connoisseur, and although not into wine enough to spend big bucks she will splurge on occasion just to enjoy the experience.

The casual connoisseur however is also prone to suddenly falling head over heels for wine and transforming into the “compulsive connoisseur”. This person will study tomes devoted to obscure Italian wine regions, track down rare vintages for which she mortgages the house, and practices blind tasting with vials of synthesized aromas. Vacations are more accurately described as pilgrimages. (Most of you reading this blog will recognize the type). Price sensitivity is determined solely by the size of the bank account and the only substitute for a wine will be a better wine.

Then finally there is the status seeker who buys wine in order to display wealth or cultural capital. Price is not an obstacle but is the point of the purchase.

My point is that wine markets include a lot of diversity and on questions such as ability to raise prices, the profitability of direct-to-consumer sales, and strategies for increasing sales will depend on the category your customers occupy.

Yet operating behind the scenes for most of these wine consumers is a particular image of wine that subtly influences purchases. This image has at least three inter-related components.

1. Wine is a symbol of refinement. It is a beverage that aspires to elegance and requires the recognition of nuances in order to appreciate it. Wine is also typically consumed in contexts where there is an expectation of good behavior and respectful conduct.

2. Wine is  symbol of the sweet life of conviviality, good food, and good taste–a simple life of everyday pleasures where the benefits of community and romance are acknowledged and acted upon as a matter of routine.

3. Wine is an expression of place. Artisanal wines are rooted in the geography and culture of a particular people and are an expression of their sensibility.

When you sell wine you are selling the image of wine as well. Discussions of the future of the wine industry, prospects for growth, and strategies for overcoming obstacles have to take this image into consideration. Strategies that undermine this image are unlikely to be successful.

For more on the philosophy of wine visit my Monday Column archives at Three Quarks Daily

Wine and Politics Are Drinking Buddies

10 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Art and Wine, Contemporary Food Culture, Wine Culture

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wine and politics A tweet over the holidays unearthed some residual controversy over wine writer Jon Bonné’s article from last summer on the occasion of Anthony Bourdain’s death. Essentially, Jon Bonné’s point was that wine writing is in danger of becoming “fanboy literature”, ignoring the seamy side of the wine industry, and we need more Bourdain-type journalists who expose the truth.

Amber Lebeau at Spitbucket has a nice summary of the recent tweetstorm controversy which pitted Bonné against one Maureen Downey who was insisting wine and politics should seldom mix.

My initial reaction when the piece on Bourdain was published was supportive but conflicted. There should be more investigation of the political dimensions of wine but I hesitated over Bonne’s claim that we should judge the “moral condition” of the winemakers whose product we consume, if only because in most cases I know little about a winemaker’s “moral condition”.

But the original article implicitly raises a general question that is nicely framed by Amber—”are wine and politics strange bedfellows or drinking buddies?”

It’s important to emphasize that it’s beyond ridiculous to assert that wine writers shouldn’t write about political issues germane to the wine industry. That includes diversity in the wine business, the status of immigration and the treatment of immigrant labor, labor abuses including sexual harassment, climate change, the use of chemicals in the vineyard, and the closeting of great wines available only to the super rich. It goes without saying that writers who discuss politically –charged issues should be competent and well informed.

But I want to focus on the contrary argument alluded to in Bonné’s original article

It is an industry that, because it’s viewed by outsiders as a nice little escapist haven from the real world, has a nearly pathological aversion to its less-than-perfect side.

Many of the tweets, as well as Amber’s post, expressed a desire for wine to be that safe haven that Bonne dismisses as escapist.

Is wine a safe space, an arena of aesthetic pleasure and conviviality which will be inevitably compromised by the conflicts and tensions of politics?

There is no doubt that the wine industry is selling romance. Wine is a symbol of the sweet life, a life of ease, pleasure and conviviality. I don’t think we can fault the industry for selling that because wine quite naturally lends itself to that image. (It is more than that as well, but I will leave that discussion for another day.)Thus, it isn’t surprising that many people see wine as a safe space, a place where the tribulations of the world can be suspended if only for a moment, and we can put aside differences and rejoice in the pleasures of life.

But that portrayal of wine is inherently political.

The enjoyment of wine (and food when enjoyment is the point of consumption) puts our lives outside the time frame of our obsession with the hamster wheel of production and consumption that drives the frantic pace of modern life. Wine prescribes a different use of our time—the time to savor the tissue of moment to moment satisfactions that sustain life’s meaning. With its emphasis on conviviality and good cheer, the wine life puts out of joint the authoritarian production paradigm that pits one person against another in a competitive space with a strict hierarchy in which sharing goes in one direction, toward the top of the organization. By contrast, wine and food occupy the space of hospitality where there is a hierarchy, the carer and the cared for, but relations of reciprocity and interchange are at its essence

The enjoyment of wine is not merely of the sensory properties of wine but the idealized meaning of a way of life. The mythology, the romance, is precisely the point.

But there is a political point to this that cannot be wished away in our zeal to preserve inner peace.

As French philosopher Jacques Rancière writes: “Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.” And  Rancière thinks aesthetic objects, such as art but I would guess also wine, play a crucial role in politics so defined. Art defines ways of being together or being apart and changes our assumptions about who or what belongs in the same space. (Think of paintings or films that put people or objects in a shared space quite different from their juxtaposition in ordinary life.)

Rancière calls this the “partition of the sensible”. Aesthetic practice takes part in the “partition of the sensible” insofar as it suspends the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframes the network of relationships we engage in by situating them in a different space and time, and by revising our perceptions of what is common and what is singular.

Wine defines a common stage, a particular way of being together outside the time and space of the production paradigm. But as such it then cannot turn around and ignore questions about who gets to be on the stage and what their relationships are. Or to put the point differently, the romance of wine precludes judgments like “I don’t have time for you” or “my pleasure depends on your pain”.

If wine is about pleasure and hospitality, we can’t forget about the hospitality side of the equation—the question of whose pleasure and how it is being served is just part of the territory.

Thanksgiving Past and Present

21 Wednesday Nov 2018

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thanksgivingI remember my Dad telling me, when I turned up my nose at some canned peas, “Don’t worry about what it tastes like. It’s just fuel”. (My Dad also drank Old Moxie and claimed to like it, which tells you something about his palate).This was New England in the 1950’s, when TV dinners promised a hip future of standardized, sanitized consumption, and wine was just a cheap beverage consumed by the bedraggled, lost souls snoozing under the pier on the river.

Of course food was not always merely fuel, even for “practical” folk like my father. Thanksgiving was an occasion for much praising of Aunt Emma’s mince meat pie, a dubious concoction of venison, dried fruits and baking spices, served after a desiccated turkey, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, and green bean casserole baked with cream of mushroom soup. It was all enthusiastically consumed with much gratitude and good cheer. Food symbolized sharing, family continuity, and cohesiveness, but none of this had much to do with flavor. Only those magical moments—the pure joy of an ice cream cone after pitching hay in summer heat or a warming soup after digging out from under a blizzard—were akin to pleasures of the palate, but they were more a matter of biological readjustment than a response to flavor. In mid-20th Century United States, the connoisseur was an eccentric, flavor a minority taste.

Times have changed. Today, conversations about food and wine multiply on the Internet like radioactive rabbits. Food magazines explain how to entice every molecule of flavor from the freshest ingredients available and trumpet the virtues of exotic ingredients that would have made our parents cringe. And tonight all across the country home cooks will be hoping their kale, cornbread, hazelnut, and chorizo stuffing will pass muster.

I wish everyone a Thanksgiving full of sharing, gratitude, celebration—and lots and lots of flavor.

When a Chef Becomes an Artist

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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imageJust as Van Gogh revealed the secrets of the landscapes near Arles in his paintings of Southern France, culinary artists reveal hidden dimensions of ingredients and dishes, dimensions that previous cooks overlooked that create a new way for that dish or ingredient to be. The idea is not merely to create a fantastic concoction or to add a new flavor note to a dish. It is to capture the essence of something that has hitherto gone unnoticed and to impress upon the diner that there is something here to be explored and understood. Unlike craftwork, art works reveal some new treasure that solicits our attention and demands the kind of studied focus we give to the visual arts or music. A chef who has mastered the craft of cooking will prepare food that squeezes every bit of flavor from her ingredients. The chef who is an artist will challenge a diner and provoke a revelation that will be arresting, illuminating—and ultimately pleasurable.

salmon-and-rhubarb-editWorks of culinary art, it should go without saying, must be pleasurable as well as revelatory. Pleasure is the seducer that makes knowing the secret worth our efforts. But the chef’s intense focus on giving pleasure is not peculiar to the edible arts. Music or painting that is flat and inexpressive will fail as art as surely as a watery, under-seasoned bisque. We would not be discussing Van Gogh today were it not for his voluptuous brush work and color palette.

Thus genuine culinary art creates something in addition to pleasure—a revelation that not only tastes good but is arresting and illuminating.

Even relatively simple dishes can be revelatory such as Rod Butters’ Grilled & Smoked Pacific Salmon with rhubarb broth, and rhubarb jam from Raudz in Kelowna BC that revealed rhubarb’s affinity for smoke, or Chef Massimiliano Alajmo’s Risotto with Saffron and Sorbet of licorice and rosemary from Le Calandre near Padua, Italy  that brought out the licorice note in the saffron.

saffron-risotto-with-licorice editFor more on the philosophy of food and wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

Le Calandre and the Challenge of Fine Dining

08 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Restaurant Reviews, Travel

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crudo-w-trufflesedit2For me, the biggest challenge in fully appreciating tasting menus is the pace, even in dining rooms where the wait staff and kitchen are sensitive about the timing of the meal. It is difficult to taste each dish carefully, to understand how all the ingredients interact, to reflect on the emotional expression of the dish and how it exemplifies the chef’s style, and to write all that down for future reference all in the few minutes in which the dish is in front of you (and still hot if it’s a cooked dish). Add to that an appreciation of how the wine pairings are working while carrying on conversation with dinner companions and leaving time for pure enjoyment– it feels like a hectic day at work instead of a consummate aesthetic experience. This is why restaurant reviews are usually just lists of ingredients with an adjective or two.  Perhaps each dish should come with an information card with detailed accounts of the chef’s intention as an entrée into the meaning of the dish.

Le Calandre is a 3-star Michelin restaurant just outside of Padua, Italy, on some lists among the top 40 restaurants in the world. I was fortunate to get reservations there last summer and was, as usual, faced with this dilemma about how to fully appreciate the meal. This time I was rescued by a mighty tome written by Chef Massimiliano Alajmo available for purchase at the restaurant. It included not just recipes but conceptualizations of many of the dishes we were served that evening, along with a dialogue that goes into some detail about how he thinks about his compositions. Of course, I didn’t spend the evening reading a book. The meal was delicious and interesting, and thanks to photos, a few notes and a subsequent reading of the book I’m still “tasting” the meal.

The most telling quote from the book is this. Speaking of his signature dish, cuttlefish in black cappuccino (see below), he writes:

It was clear from the beginning that coffee wasn’t the motive. The motive as an attempt to enter into contact, or even better to communicate with the intimate part of the ingredient because nobility is intrinsic in all true and genuine elements. In them we have two components: the essential and formal parts. The essential is interior and animated. The formal is exterior and obvious, and is passive in comparison. In other words, the ingredient is the way we view it but an in-depth study is the way we communicate with it. We elevate each element through understanding with comprehensive examination not limited to the exterior….Above all, to penetrate an ingredient means to go beyond the sensorial level (sight, touch, taste…) unleashing a metaphorical charge. The symbols bound to the elements also stimulate us to search within ourselves. This is how one grows, and learns, for example, not to be limited by the palate’s simple pleasures because more profound and superior gratifications exist.

al-aimo-editedThere is a lot going on in this paragraph but I think it’s essentially right. To understand anything, including ingredients in a dish, we must understand the underlying forces at work, some of which are barely perceptible and some of which can only be accessed via feeling states. It’s the chef’s job to uncover them and make them perceptible. Some of these themes are exemplified in the tasting menu below.

Italian food is noted for its simplicity. Although these recipes are not simple to prepare, they leave an impression of simplicity on the diner. The emphasis is on trying to pull out just a few intensely bright flavors in each dish. As far as I could tell there were few if any molecular techniques employed.

Here are the courses with a few comments:

Al aimo

This is a dish of red tomato tartar, green tomato tartar, fava bean tartar, fava bean, green bean and basil salad, ricotta sauce and Sardinian flatbread. The dish exemplifies the concept of weaving with the three tartars exemplifying overlapping yet distinctive flavors. The colors also represent Italy’s tri-color flag, itself a weaving of the separate regions that formed the nation of Italy in the 19th Century.

Cuttlefish in black cappuccino cuttlefish-cappucinoedit

This dish consists of small cubes of squid and drops of squid ink in a potato cream served in layers in a vertical glass cup. A play on tiramasu and cappuccino, it comes with instructions to plunge the spoon straight down so the fusion of the layers occurs in the mouth. A simple, comforting, enveloping dish that exemplifies layering. Indeed the layers persist in the mouth even as the ingredients are fused.

Sicilian raw shrimp with tomato cream and basil

A variety of interpretations on fresh, especially the raw shrimp which was exceptionally fatty and vibrant. It came together with the wine, a St. Clair Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, which cut the fat of the shrimp. As with all the dishes that included cream, it was light almost weightless.

Crispy ricotta and buffalo mozzarella cannelloni with tomato sauce

The chef calls this an anomalous calzone which represents tactility. Crispy cylinders and creamy flavors, it’s clearly a dish meant to evoke childhood memories of pizza, all the senses working overtime. Of course the tomato sauce was glowing.

shrimpcanneloni

Smoked tagliolini with carbonara, dried fruit, and gelatin of meat broth

Very aromatic, the fresh pasta freshly smoked and paired with a unique, Sicilian dry Moscato with a distinct smoke note as well. Despite all the smoke, the dish was light and multi-dimensional, a very deft hand with an ingredient that can overpower.

saffron-risotto-with-licoriRisotto with saffron and sorbet of licorice and rosemary

The saffron and licorice represents the extreme parts of a plant, root and flower, a dialogue between opposites. This dish is often served with licorice powder but in this case the licorice sorbet was brilliant, a thrilling contrast between hot and cold. Saffron and fennel, with its anise aromas, are a classic flavor pairing. This dish takes that concept in a new direction.

Beef tartare with black truffle, egg, cream, and star anise aroma [pictured above]

Velvety, hand chopped beef . Another dish of very fresh tasting fat with a wonderful fusion of truffle and anise aroma.

Roasted beet with burnt herbs.

The only dish that didn’t quite work for me. It was basically a well-roasted beet. Nice, attractively presented, but not intriguing.

Crisp, suckling pig  with olive sorbet, grean beans, and pea puree.

Once again the hot/cold contrast was a theme that amps up the intensity of the dish. Served with a bright, fresh, slightly bitter Amarone.suckling-pigedit

For dessert #1, an apparently empty dinner bowl was place in front of us. I just sat there waiting for the food to show up. But at the behest of the waiter, I finally flipped it over to reveal a creme brûlée in the bottom of the plate covered with a layer of gold leaf.

And finally a chocolate and hazelnut cannellone with hot chocolate foam finished the meal.

A delicious meal made more memorable by the chef’s attempt to put in words flavors too easily forgotten.

random-dineeditr

Of course I was accompanied in this culinary adventure by legal counsel. My accountant, however, had fallen ill and could not attend.

A Bad Argument for Why Food Cannot Be Art

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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line cookThere are some serious although mistaken arguments for why some food preparations cannot be works of art. Then there are some really bad arguments for the same conclusion. Here is a really bad one by John Mariani which I rediscovered while going through some notes.

Thus, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called haute cuisine. But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week. The replication of a series of stencils, even if originally designed by Raphael, does not constitute art, and I’m sure Andy Warhol was mumbling all the way to the bank when his work went from reproducing Brillo boxes to having assistants mimic his own work.

The claim that individual dishes are reproductions and thus cannot be original works is simple nonsense. Mariani apparently has never heard of a recipe. He is right about paintings.  Copies of paintings are indeed mere reproductions, not original works. A print of the Mona Lisa is not a work of art because painting is what we call in aesthetics  an autographic art—only the painter can directly cause the work to exist, and there can be only one legitimate instance of it.  Passing off a copy as an original is forgery.

But many arts are not autographic but are instead allographic. An allographic work has a master recording, score or some other form of notation from which individual works are derived. Thus, for allographic works, copies of an original are genuine instances of the original. My copy of Hamlet is a work of art even though it is a duplication of the original. The bookstore is not routinely guilty of selling forgeries. A streaming version of a Springsteen tune or live performances of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony are genuine instances of works of art despite the fact they are reproductions.

Cooking is similarly allographic. Individual dishes are instances of a recipe just as a performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is an instance of its score. So the fact that line cooks churn out 25 copies of a dish in no way shows that cooking is not an art–unless Mariani is prepared to claim Beethoven and Shakespeare are mere craftsmen.

For more on the philosophy of food and wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

The Hermeneutics of Mayo Haters

13 Monday Aug 2018

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shrimp-with-quite-tooIn an article entitled “How Millennials killed Mayonnaise, boomer Sandy Hingston wonders why, at her summertime family gatherings, few eat her formerly prized, mayo-slathered macaroni salad, Waldorf salad, or deviled eggs. In the face of generational change she notices what no longer appears on the condiment table:

I racked my brain for the source of this generational disconnect. And then, one holiday weekend, while surveying the condiments set out at a family burger bash, I found it. On offer were four different kinds of mustard, three ketchups (one made from, I kid you not, bananas), seven sorts of salsa, kimchi, wasabi, relishes of every ilk and hue …

What was missing, though, was the common foundation of all Mom’s picnic foods: mayonnaise. While I wasn’t watching, mayo’s day had come and gone. It’s too basic for contemporary tastes — pale and insipid and not nearly exotic enough for our era of globalization. Good ol’ mayo has become the Taylor Swift of condiments.

Well, I’m far from being a millennial but this comparison to Taylor Swift is unfair to Swift. Millennials may not have much income these days but they nevertheless have good taste.

Hingston can’t quite figure out why mayonnaise is no longer popular arguing that “mayonnaise isn’t bland; it’s artfully blended. It’s an evocation of the homogeneity of that old, dead American dream.”

That’s faint praise. After considering several implausible explanations for mayo’s demise, she settles on identity politics:

The only reason for this raging mayophobia is a generation’s gut-level renouncement of the Greatest Generation’s condiment of choice.

Ah no. The reason for the demise of mayonnaise is that it masks the flavor of anything you put it on, an effect made much worse when mayonnaise fans insist on shoveling gobs of it on even the most delicate of flavors. I had a fresh seafood sandwich the other day that could have been beef or liver, or beef liver for that matter, it had so much mayonnaise on it.

And as Hingston points out this was its purpose:

One of the reasons for mayonnaise’s early popularity, according to public health historian David Merritt Johns, was that it served to disguise flaws in the ingredients it coated — potatoes past their due date, flabby cabbage, tuna that was less than pristine. Young people like my daughter somehow seem to have extrapolated this masking function from condiment to culture; for them, mayo quite literally whitewashed America’s immigrants into eating dull food.

Yes they did and if mayo fans are now paying for it, well it’s a well-deserved comeuppance. They don’t call it the food revolution for nothin’.