I 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.

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food”, wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903 in his play Man and Superman. I’ve seen this quote used extensively in food writing to spice up articles about this or that savory item. So I became curious about what Shaw might have had in mind.

In fact, Shaw put these words in the mouth of his character Tanner who was belaboring the absurd but unfortunately persistent idea that women sap the creative energy of men, especially artists.

TANNER: …Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.

OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so—and I don’t admit it for a moment—it is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.

TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal tiger, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.

TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as if it were a nicely underdone chop.

The point seems to be that just as the act of eating devours its object, a women’s love seeks to devour its object and is thus akin to the “love” a tiger has for its prey.

I don’t want to litigate the sexual politics of of the late 19th Century, but I wonder how many people who use this quote out of context know of its unseemly and ridiculous origin.

There is, however, a perfectly innocent rendering of the meaning of the quoted words if we ignore the context of their origin. There is a sense in which our love of food is the most sincere if we mean by “sincere” wholehearted. Food is an everyday pleasure, something we can enjoy without reservation. We can be all-in with the love of food because it provides us with the means of life, it enables our activity, but also provides us with uncomplicated enjoyment. It is love with no strings attached.

Or at least food used to be “sincere” it that sense. Since the birth of nutritionism and the emergence of the ethical, political, and sustainability issues surrounding food, it is increasingly difficult to eat without reservation. There is too often that second thought about health or ethical consequences that inhibits the degree to which our love of food can be wholehearted. Life has become complicated. There is nothing that  is good without reservation.

So perhaps we should bury Shaw’s quote once and for all.