Category Archives: Contemporary Food Culture

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.

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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

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

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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

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture

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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’.

The Two Worlds of Chianti Classico

16 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Travel, Wine Culture

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a-tuscan-villageThe old school vs. new school trope gets a work out in Chianti.

Gardens-at-badia-a-ColtibuoAfter our brief flirtation with Florence, our tour headed south toward the Chianti Classico region of Gaiole with the first stop at Badia a Coltibuono (Abbey of the Good Harvest), an historic and highly regarded Chianti producer. This winery’s history reaches back to the 11th Century when Vallombrosan Monks founded the abbey and began planting vineyards. Records indicate they planted Sangiovese grapes and were among the first to plant olive trees in the region.

Fun fact: The monks drank about 4 liters of wine per person per day because their water was contaminated.

Over many centuries, the monks developed a flourishing wine business until 1810 when they were forced out by Napoleon and the winery put up for sale. In 1846, Coltibuono was bought by Guido Giuntini, a Florentine banker and great grandfather of Piero Stucchi-Prinetti, the present owner, whose children now run the winery. They own 64 hectares of organic vineyards with properties that include a bed and breakfast and restaurant, producing about 400,000 bottles per year.

The facility we toured is now used only for storage and hospitality–highlights include gorgeous gardens, a 16th Century cistern used to collect rain water, still in use today,cistern several very old frescoes (that were covered with plaster to protect them from Napoleon’s depredations), frescoes

botti-with-moldand some of the funkiest storage cellars you will ever see. The inches-thick black stuff on the walls and ceiling of their barrel room is mold that has been forming for centuries. Winery personnel claim the mold is essential for the aging process. It helps maintain the humidity in cellars without having to use expensive humidifiers, thus preventing excess evaporation which would increase alcohol levels and reduce volume.

Badia a Coltibuomo is a traditional Chianti producer using 90% Sangiovese and 10% Canaiolo, Ciliegiolo, and Colorino in their basic Classico wine, which is aged in large botti that hold 3000 bottles, and are as much as 50 yrs. old.

The wines stood up well to their reputation. Even the entry level Chianti Classico 2015 had some complexity showing earth, a bit of tarragon and savory balsamic notes. The Riserva level 2013, which spent 2 years in oak and 2 years in the bottle, with grapes harvested from 45-50 year old vines,  had a beautiful earthy/ floral nose and impressive structure, round and full with a long finish. The 2009 Riserva was even more impressive, very elegant yet still firm in structure, developing aromas of wet leaves, tobacco, coffee and dark chocolate. For a traditional flavor profile I highly recommend these wines which are affordable and available in the U.S.

After departing Badia a Coltibuono we headed into the hills for lunch at Ristorante Le Contrade. This restaurant is in the middle-of-nowhere with sweeping views of the countryside. The lunch was this inventive trio of hot and trio of cold dishes—the star of the show was the “cappuccino” of frothy parmesan cheese topped with truffle, with runner up the boned quail stuffed with foie gras and lentils.

cold-triowarm-trio

tolainiAfter lunch we headed to the southernmost part of Chianti Classico in the Castelnuovo Berardenga zone where Tolaini Winery is located. This is a much more modern approach to winemaking. After leaving his native Tuscany in 1956 to make enough money to start a winery, Pier Luigi Tolaini founded one of the largest trucking companies in North America. After 40 years in the transportation business he returned to pursue his true passion of making great wine. With his mechanical background, Pier created a state-of-the-art tractorgravity-flow production system with unique, two chamber fermentation tanks and his own custom tractors that fit between the rows of their tightly spaced vines.  The theory behind his viticulture is that hi-density planting, 7000-11000 plants per acre, will force the plants to compete driving the rootstocks deeper into soil seeking water and minerals. That high density planting makes this specialized tractor necessary in order to do the vineyard work.

His unique stainless steel tanks include a top fermenter that allows juice to drain into the tank below. The must is then pulled out of the top tank and pressed again. They also use a state-of-the-art optical sorter for their berry selection.

Just as their winemaking is innovative so is their wine line up. Their Al Passo is 80% Sangiovese and 15% Merlot, and although by current law they could sell it as Chianti, it’s sold as IGT Toscano to avoid Chianti’s somewhat tarnished reputation. And indeed this wine shows more plum and meat than standard Chianti. Their homage to Chianti Classico is in their Vigna Montebello Sette which bears the relatively new Gran Selezione designation. This is 100% Sangiovese aged for 30 months in large foudre casks. It’s rich, with dark fruit and earth, quite rustic with grippy tannins. It’s age worthy but needs time; it is sold in the U.S. for just over $30.

Picconero is their Bordeaux-style offering. A blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc, and produced only in the best vintages, it’s muscular and spicy with dark cherry, chocolate and a seam of minerality, a very successful rendition of Bordeaux in Italy. With 16 months in 100% new French oak, it sells for over $100 in the U.S. Finally, we tasted their Valdisanti, a Cabernet Sauvignon dominated blend with 20% Sangiovese and a bit of Cabernet Franc. The Cab influence is quite evident with cassis, sweet oak, and a very nice savory, herbal dimension. This spent 16 months in French barrique, 70% new, including 6 months on the lees.  It’s a good bargain for around $30.

These wines get good scores from the Wine Spectator and other critics and are clearly designed for the international market.

So we had an interesting juxtaposition of old school and new school Chianti. Which was my favorite? These are all quality wines but the Badia a Coltibuono Riserva is the one that sticks in my mind. It’s distinctly Chianti Classico but offering much more than your garden variety bottom-shelf Chianti at under $30.

Next stop, the village of Montepulciano.

This tour was planned and executed by Chris Gluck, owner of The Wine Vault and Bistro in San Diego.

Why Not Just Admit It? Flavor is About Pleasure, Not Survival

17 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Food History

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pleasureMost cuisines can be identified by the characteristic flavors they use to enhance their dishes: Chili peppers, tomato, and lime in Mexico; soy sauce, rice wine, and ginger root in China; tomato, garlic, and olive oil in Southern Italy, etc. As Elizabeth and Paul Rozin point out in their well-known essay ”Culinary Themes and Variations”, (reprinted here) these flavor principles persist through the history of a culture and, in fact, are more persistent than the staples employed in a cuisine, which undergo more change. And people will overcome considerable obstacles to make sure they have access to these flavors. (Think of the resources Europe devoted to the spice trade in the age of exploration.)

Apparently, flavor principles are really important to human beings.

Why are they so important? Why do human beings spice their food? Animals don’t, and the practice doesn’t seem to serve a nutritional function. The Rozins argue that, nevertheless, there must be an adaptationist story to tell. Their hypothesis is that flavor principles provide a kind of identification system for safe food. As omnivores, we have a natural interest in eating a wide variety of foods and we get bored when variety is unavailable. Yet, we live in a world with lots of toxic substances and have a justified fear of eating anything unfamiliar. Thus, we need an efficient way of identifying foods that are safe to eat. That is the role of flavor principles. They mark food with a distinctive and familiar flavor as safe to eat. And whether new foods can be accepted or not depends on whether they are prepared with that familiar flavor principle.

Furthermore, by introducing rich and subtle variations of these flavors and modifying their combination, we overcome the boredom of eating the same thing all the time. Hence the attention paid in Mexican cuisine to the subtle differences in varieties of chili peppers or in Indian and Southeast Asian cuisine to varieties of curry.

This explanation strikes me as wildly implausible. If people are familiar with a food why would they question its safety if it is not spiced. And if they are unfamiliar with a food, why does adding a flavor principle overcome their fear. Surely the spices are not making their food safe. The use of flavor principles to mark food as safe just seems irrational. Furthermore, as the Rozins point out but don’t explain in this essay, some cultures, specifically the Northern tier countries such as Germany, England, and Scandinavia don’t employ flavor principles. Their traditional foods are largely unspiced. Yet there is no evidence they are especially fearful of their food.

There is a much simpler explanation for why we flavor foods—it tastes good. The aesthetics of everyday life are important because the small things we do to make ordinary life enjoyable and interesting—spicing food, decorating homes, celebrating holidays, etc.—make life worth living. In the absence of adornment and decoration, life would be drudgery much of the time. Small things like adding flavor to food thus become enormously important for beings capable of doubting life’s meaning. (There is another adaptive explanation at work. We are hardwired to seek pleasure in our food persistently throughout the day since that encourages us to take in the calories we need to survive.)

What about the northern tier countries that lack flavor principles? Do they not care about everyday aesthetics? The simple explanation is that most spices were historically unavailable to them—they do not readily grow in cold climates. Thus, northern cultures focused their aesthetics, not on flavor principles, but on the various textures and ways of presenting animal fats. The Germans especially are adept at conspiring to get as many types of animal fats on the plate as possible.

What I find interesting about the Rozins’ explanation is that they seem to ignore the obvious explanation—that the persistence of pleasure is fundamental to everyday life.

Might there be some residual Calvinism loose among food anthropologists?

Hyperbole for Dinner?

16 Wednesday May 2018

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The-Greatest-Indian-Curries-Ever-Created-by-Meera-JoshiI guess the reasons are sort of obvious but isn’t it odd how food writers feel the need to exaggerate? Laura Miller really nails the phenomenon:

“Fried-Chicken Cutlets Can Solve Life’s Problems” and “This Instant Pot Thai Chicken Will Rock Your World,” I’ve been assured. Why is so much online food writing couched in ludicrous hyperbole? …

Above all, online food writers proclaim themselves obsessed. Among the things they’ve confessed to being obsessed with over the past couple of weeks: a one-skillet chickpea dish, a brand of salad scissors, and a serrated paring knife.

Of course, it’s all about trying to get attention in a world of too much information. “Tasty chicken” or “reliable soup” just isn’t clickbait.

No doubt, the democratization of information channels is also having its effect:

Never before have so many non-writers crashed the public conversation, then struggled to articulate exactly what they want to say, falling back again and again on overblown intensifiers like “amazing” and “incredible. Furthermore, behind all this gushing is almost certainly a corporate imperative to make dowdy-seeming recipe sites more appealing to people in their 20s, who are all presumed to communicate in this way.

Truth be told, unless you’re René Redzepi most recipes will be ordinary. As Miller points out, that’s the point of day-to-day cooking. Most food is made extraordinary by the occasion or the company.

The same exaggerated description marks the “superfoods” we’re all supposed to eat to add years to one’s life. Take a little-known type of produce from a little-known  culture, throw it in the juicer and you’ve got a magic elixir.

But having complained about hyperbolic recipe descriptions, let me take the other side of the argument.

Maybe the hyperbole just comes with the territory. Most home cooks who go to the trouble of creating recipes and writing them up are in the business of making the ordinary extraordinary. Isn’t that what all focused, creative home cooking is about? We’re not just trying to put something filling and nutritious on the table. We want to produce sparks of pleasure, transform the routine into a singular experience, regardless of how short-lived. The more life is filled with those singular experiences the better life is.

Perhaps the hyperbole is a bit of honesty, a bit of inflated language for an inflated moment, unnecessary to be sure, but no less real.

Texas Food Politics is like, well, Texas Politics

29 Thursday Mar 2018

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tex mexI’m not from Texas so I have no stake in this fight. But the recent article in Eater about bragging rights over the most important cuisine in Texas demonstrates how deeply silly food politics can be but also how it reflects deep seated cultural conflict. The story as told by Meghan McCarron is a meandering tale with a moral that is hard to discern. But it seems to go roughly like this. For many years chili was the state dish:

The official version of chili con carne can only be made by people from Texas. It’s literally the law: In 1977, the 65th Texas Legislature enshrined the stew of beef and chile peppers as the official state dish, but also an official version of the dish, declaring that “the only real ‘bowl of red’ is that prepared by Texans.

That’s the silly part. What is it about chili that someone from Minnesota just can’t grasp? But at any rate, chili was originally popularized by the chili queens of San Antonio—Tejanas or Mexican women who sold chili on the street to hungry working people. They are unmentioned in the state resolution.

But today there are powerful movements afoot to make smoked brisket the state dish pushing chili off the foodie radar and off menus as well. This seems to be true. I recently spent three weeks in Texas and had to search for a restaurant serving chili. It’s hard to find a neighborhood without a barbecue joint on every corner.

Why the move to elevate brisket? Despite the rootedness of barbecue in black culture, the brisket craze is the purview of white men. Racial and gender politics are at the heart of involved. Chili was made by women and moreover is part of the Tex-Mex cuisine that is also being marginalized despite the fact that it’s a cuisine that most Texans eat every day. McCarron argues that it’s really Tex-Mex cooking that is the heart of Texas foodways. Yet the old family restaurants are closing or struggling to make ends meet and no one is entering the market to pick up the pieces.

If Tex-Mex really is the comfort food that Texans adore, why are restaurants struggling? The answer is buried toward the end of the article but, plausibly, she argues it’s because people have the expectation that Tex-Mex food should be cheap. As labor, materials, land and building costs rise it’s impossible to take Tex-Mex cooking to the next level. Barbecue joints by contrast can get $20 a lb. for their meat.

She also insists that Tex-Mex has gotten a bad rap as being inauthentic.This is a pet peeve of mine. Tex-Mex, like Sonoran cuisine in Arizona or Cal-Mex in Southern California, is border food. The people who eat it have adopted their food habits to fit what’s available in their location on the border. They are real people with genuine food traditions of their own; it’s as authentic as any other cuisine.

That said there is no question that Tex-Mex needs an infusion of innovation. McCarron waxes poetic about “sizzling fajitas, cheese enchiladas, frozen margaritas, queso, breakfast tacos, Frito pie, barbacoa, puffy tacos”. OK. I love a good guisada as much as the next person. But there is an awful lot of been there, done that at Tex-Mex restaurants. How many plastic-cheese-drenched combination plates covered with iceberg lettuce and pallid, pithy tomatoes does one life need?

She’s apparently enthused about corporate cooptation:

While family-run Tex-Mex restaurants might vanish, the key delights and innovations of Tex-Mex are in no danger of disappearance: Fajitas are in every Applebee’s; queso is on the menu at every Chipotle (for now); chili and nachos grace every tailgate; and margaritas end the workweek across America. Tex-Mex is infinite and eternal.

This is part of the problem. The fact it has been colonized as the corporate version of Mexican food only reinforces the idea that Tex-Mex is cheap and enjoyed only by people who don’t like food. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be corporate drones.

What Tex-Mex suffers incessantly, in media, in casual conversation, in its relentless commodification to enrich corporations while family-run restaurants struggle to stay afloat, is a lack of love. Or, to get confrontational, a patronizing disrespect. It is stereotyped as cheap without even the backhanded compliment of fetishized authenticity.

If you want love you need some love handles. McCarron’s solution is probably the only viable one:

Though if the next dish to sweep across America might be brisket tacos, within Texas the larger trend is, as Dallas-based writer and editor José R. Ralat says, Tex-Mex becoming more Mexican. Newer arrivals have always influenced the cuisine, but Ralat sees that cycle accelerating as cooks and chefs cross back and forth across the border more often — as do ingredients.

New people with new ideas. That’s the solution to most problems. And getting the taco officially recognized as a state treasure would help. But her final paragraph doesn’t hold out much hope:

A state legislature dominated by a Republican party at war with itself, fixated on barring trans people from using public bathrooms and cracking down on cities seeking to protect immigrants, is not likely to enshrine the taco as the state’s official food. But doing so would both capture the 21st century zeitgest of the state, and fulfill one of Texas’s most cherished obsessions: pissing off California.

I’m Californian—we don’t get pissed about such things. It must be a Texas thing.