Hey you, your hedonism is showing: please stop topping everything with caviar and truffle

The second life of Pi, and a reflexion about the state of the world and how I am reducing social media usage

The Age of the Conspicuous Consumers

There’s one category that I find highly fascinating.

It’s the former fashion models turned into gastronomic experts. The former foodies who ate pink pancakes and who at some point discovered fine dining. The crazy rich Asians that spend their lives jumping from Michelin star to Michelin star across the globe. The old glories that cannot shut up ever about any of their (starred, only) gastronomical experiences. The elderly guys who went from wealth management to hoarding bottles, from the boardroom to the dining room.

In this, Instagram is my favourite zoo, so much so that I have created a very believable fake social media person that I use to follow up on all these specimens. They are the other side of gastronomy, the one I have literally zero interest in, but for study purposes I also observe, from time to time, delighting myself with their outlook on life and its meaning.

On one hand the gastronomic ladies, always so thin, almost minuscule, always so voracious - but just for Michelin stars and the allure of it, it seems. Anything expensive, unique, luxurious, special, and outrageously flashy. I ask myself if they do REALLY eat all that food and drink all that wine (without purging, of course), I wonder if they too are using the big loser app to cut their calories and what secret app in their phones leads to the chat with ana friends.

You know, you know.

If our assumption is true, we can say that starting in 2010, fashion has gone out of fashion and instead, foodism has come into the spotlight.

Hence the avalanche of gals who could be doing fashion or becoming models, but decided to do food instead. How you catch them, is easy.

They are always around the (food) star system and their events, and more often than not, they have nothing meaningful to say - besides a well-taken picture of a plate, of them eating said plate (or pretending to eat), pictures with (famous) chefs and SEO crafted few words.

If it is true that, as Rivista Studio puts it (translation is mine):

But it was all true: supermodels were not models like the others and their experience marked everything that would come later. The most interesting aspect of The Super Models is precisely the exceptional nature of their journey, the perfect astral conjuncture that allowed them to be the right women at the right time: on the covers, in music videos, and in the final releases of memorable fashion shows. They created a method, a pattern, and a curriculum that we still strive to replicate today, but in the absence of all the other variables.

If it is true that, as Rivista Studio says (translation is mine):

There is not a new Naomi, a new Cindy, a new Christy, a new Linda: there will always be them. We forgive them dramatic surgeries, unlikely film careers, philanthropy a lot and even excesses of anger, as long as this is the last documentary.

THEN it makes all sense that former (mediocre) fashion models or wannabe fashion influencers shift their interests into a niche that, up to that moment, was basically a male-dominated area, with few women - mainly plump like Nigella Lawson, steely like Martha Stewart, or elderly like many (too many) cookbook writers, incarnations of the ideal cooking grandma that all our cultures have.

They brought thin and female into the equation, in a way opening up a certain side of gastronomy: the glamour one.

Far, far away from the kitchen heat, but somehow close, very close to (starred) chefs.

But they must be thin, size zero, and show none of the food and drinks on their bodies. If they do, they will be looked at malignantly.

On the other hand, ageing males who once were powerful, respected businessmen and at some point started becoming gourmands (not gourmets), and as they formerly hoarded stocks in the market, now they hoard plates, bottles, ANYTHING to fill the voracious void they must feel, as life slowly or quickly starts to accelerate towards the inevitable - and their strenuous push against death.

As modern Pharaos, buried below a tower of expensive bottles, and expensive dinners, to find meaning in the end of a life that, they discovered, boiled down to no meaning at all.

Some of them become so gargantiously large in size that they remind of Creosote, the Monty Python exploding guy. Others are thin, yellow in complexion, basically walking zombies, dried from the inside out.

Sorry, folks.

The “Anni, amori e bicchieri di vino non si contano mai” was a lie all along.

The banes of our age

Caviar, and truffle.

Of course.

The more affluent you are - or want others to think you are - the more your Instagram will be filled with pictures of things topped with caviar, truffle or even both.

It was as if all of a sudden you’d lost your sense of smell, taste, and decency altogether.

In a crescendo of ridiculous, coming from a (now) humble brioche with some expensive seafood and caviar and/or expensive meat and truffle, and any combination in between we are now seeing custard tarts topped with caviar, croissant smothered in carabineiro and slathered with caviar.

For the love of what is dearest in gastronomy, just stop.

You are all being ridiculous, and very much so.

If you are familiar with Mr Creosotus we just mentioned (before the explosion, but after the projectile-vomiting in and around the bucket and the cleaning lady), you are familiar with what these horrendous dishes cause me: stomach revolt.

And it is not my social injustice thermometer that dictates my mood here, I bodily feel an ick by most of these concoctions, especially when they are in a sequence, especially when they are the only things people seem to be caring for.

Hyperbolically, please keep your fucking caviar and truffle grater very far away from me. I have got no patience for “pimping a plate” by nonsensically adding truffle or caviar to it.

Just have caviar with butter and bread, or pasta, or something simple - ditto for truffle. Or just put caviar and truffle where it makes sense.

Overcomplicating makes you all look like a frantic Marie Antoinette kind of person. And not (just) because the rest of the world is drowning in war, famine, and natural disasters.

This ridiculousness transcends current events. As the Marie Antoinette one did.

Hundreds of years later, we are still laughing at her, and bottom down, we do not feel very sorry for her chopped head, right?

My 2023 top 3 (I did not eat them, but I see some of YOU eating them):

• Toasted brioche, wagyu A12, caviar: shame on you person who created it, and shame on you person who ate it. At this point, you could have licked a pat of butter for what your tastebuds, annihilated by all the fat, could understand. And no, the horseradish mayo cannot help in this case. Fat, fat, fat. Salt. Sweet. A bit of umami. Boring.

• Croissant, carabineiro, mayonnaise, coriander: I do not know what circle of hell this…thing comes from, but I feel sorry for the sacrifice this poor crustacean did, the sacrifice of the poor baker waking up so early to bake a croissant, and the effort a chicken made to lay the egg for the mayo, and so on. All, to end in something that looked like vomit.

• Bun, Toro tartare, caviar, white Alba truffle: please never read again shivering when Trimalchio tells the story of a cow containing a donkey containing a goat and so on. This thing is wrong, bad, and terrible on all the levels imaginable. One can eat it only to say “I am rich, but I lack taste in every possible sense”.

Out of category, because I’m still in shock for it is (we mentioned it before) a pastel de nata topped with caviar.

Why, would you ask? I don’t have answers, I say. This plate made me question the existence of an intelligent design altogether.

It’s a plate screaming “Please tourists come here and spend your money eating something you can put on Instagram”. It’s like a pink pancake - for rich people.

In Italian, we say “il troppo stroppia”, which means that when it is too much, it IS just too much.

The Meaning of Life

Maybe we shouldn’t be Opinionated About Dining (OAD, in short). Maybe we should humble down and go back to learning.

Maybe we should hold back and walk off the beaten path to (re)discover forgotten culinary traditions, places, routes as

Carreteras secundarias

teaches us.

There is a whole gastronomy world out there, where people eat their food with a meaning. And I do not mean the healthy people, those obsessed with functional food (what is it even) or protein intakes.

I mean people who look for the history, the significance, the meaningfulness of food, eating habits, and eating places.

This is what captivates my interest, and this is what is driving me away from Instagram.

Or listicles, lists, galas, and even newspapers.

The more I delve into gastronomy, the less relevant I find all that ecosystem and the more I find solace in reading the works of those who Know. And lo and behold, none of them wastes their time on listcles and galas.

In the last couple of months, also, I have reduced drastically my investment in Instagram.

Of course, I browse it from time to time.

I have a carefully selected list of people I like to follow, and Instagram is a quick and easy way to do so. I also have a fake profile I use for research, so there is that too.

But I made the conscious decision to remove from that platform all the content that, starting from 2016, I had accumulated.

Posts, pictures, musings, reels, videos. Almost 5000 of them: gone.

Well, archived: I intend to revisit it and repurpose a lot of it for my writings. You see, recently I started getting increasingly annoyed with them. I really do not like videos, and as my phone is always on mute, I do not get to enjoy any audio content anyway.

All these videos are overstimulating - for me.

And I yearn for words.

Words, always words.

With it, Twitter (now X) is gone too. It has become a place that is way too wild for my taste.

Slowly, I started finding a lot more time to write. I want to invest a consistent chunk of energy and time in these writing projects and for this, I needed to silence the social media FOMO - the one that pushed me to post updates and stories.

Instead, I made the Notes section the new home for this content, which will be republished if I feel so on Instagram, in a complete reversal of the world.

Let’s see how this goes.

Meanwhile, life is ironic in itself. A giant white truffle has landed in our kitchen, and we are planning to have it with pasta tonight for dinner.