The gastronomic critic is dead, the gastronomic journalist is moribund, and I fear that the gastronomer isn't feeling so well either...

Long live gastronomy critic! And journalists and reporters!

In the land of imagination, where pumpkins grow on trees, we have widespread gastronomic interest that fuels knowledge and gastronomic critics that are able and willing to write compelling pieces. We would also have floral headpieces for felines. Room decoration at Alegria Hotel in Lisbon. Picture taken during the Vinhos de Identidade wine event, spring 2022.

When was the last time you read about gastronomy in an articulate, deep, meaningful and critical way?

I know.

The fact is, there is almost no gastronomer anymore.

There is an (over)abundance of foodies, and also of increasingly poorly paid journalists and amateurs who try to make a living with gastronomy - instead of perhaps finding a genomic cure for a disease, or devoting themselves to building helpful businesses and doing social work.

Alas, all these people survive to live also thanks to free food, invitations, samples, organized dinners and lunches that very generously an abundance of communication agencies make available to them.

Unfortunately.

Of an unkempt mane of a journalist, just slightly off her prime time, a wise person very close to me one day wondered “She is always around, out and about eating and staying at fancy hotels, full expenses paid. But they pay her so little in salary she is going around asking for some paid gig. I wonder how she can afford to buy panties”.

Albeit a bit shocked by his manifest interest in her panties situation, I can imagine the scruffy journalist having a couple of drawers at an old aunt’s house somewhere.

Living out of a suitcase, hopping from one hotel to one event and another hotel and dinner and so on, ad infinity and ad repetition: didn’t they say it was the ultimate dream of any digital nomad?

It is true, we collectively killed quality journalism and quality criticism because we have no desire whatsoever of paying our shrinking disposable money to read or see what someone is saying when there is an abundance of free content to be consumed in a constant stream of unconsciousness.

---

You see, many of the articles we read in a magazine or newspaper or blog or whatever have not been paid for by said media outlet and are frequently, and on the contrary, some kind of a gift. In exchange for exposure and something to write about - of course, and a nibble or a tipple. Or a press release, beautifully crafted that almost allows for a simple copy-paste. Roberta Abate in her piece this week explains it very well and from the inside out.

When was the last time you read a well-rounded, founded and grounded gastronomic criticism, opinion, tale, or article?

Something intelligent and witty.

Something with teeth and humour, that intertwined art, gastronomy, a pointy pencil and some insightful information about the restaurant?

In the last years everyone is just boringly speaking about chefs, glorifying these individuals to the point of ridiculous - individuals that are instead part of a team, and this dynamic is what makes the magic.

What matters is however something else altogether. A snapshot, a tale, or a critique of the restaurant as a commercial, sociological, psychological, and especially, a gastronomic ecosystem.

Or did you think that the journalists and “critics” were hitting all those restaurants and not being able to put out on paper a reasoned and reasonable critique or a piece, that was different from the press release they received in the invitation?

Most of them are not stupid at all. But most of them are just journalists. “Il giornalismo è appunto giornalismo, non può prescindere dalla notiziabilità e dalle fonti” says Abate and I agree, journalism is about reporting and we should not ask them to become gastronomic critics. Journalists should not be primarily critical thinkers. They should excel in their ability to report, not transform reality. They should be able to keep track of phenomena, not research deeper connections.

Their role is fundamental. But so is that of the critics and the gastronomers.

And just as a movie director that doesn’t create art is a simple cameraman, the same happens with writers: not all words are worthy. Especially when writing about a complex cultural, social, economic, scientific and philosophic context that is gastronomy.

Besides skills, there is a need to be able of using words in that witty, caustic, intelligent way that, for instance, for example, Jay Rayner uses in his Guardian column.

Because writing is both an art, as we said just before, and an acquired skill. Learning can only do so much in something that has to do with natural talent, more than training.

And no, I haven’t forgotten (nor forgiven) the one who, as a journalist posted in Portugal for an international outlet targeting mainly affluent, white, old folks, wanted to push the wealthy readers into poor Alentejo smack in the wake of 2020 pandemic outbreak, as a sort of escape from the city à la Decameron, completely oblivious of the social situation of a poor and elderly-populated countryside with a lack of health structure.

Like a contemporary Marie Antoinette, this journalist sealed their fate with me as a reader that day. I still think of that article as one of the pinnacles of imbecility.

So we need journalists as reporters and gastronomers as reality shapers.

But where are the journalists that can unveil the secret to the success of a place that has been designed by professional restaurant creators for big investment groups, while purporting themselves as homely projects that just got lucky (to gain two Michelin Stars upon opening)? Who writes this story, that can teach other aspiring chefs to look beyond the façade, and that not all that glitters is gold?

We do have it in fashion and beauty, where is the debunking of myths in gastronomy? It is very hard to find well-researched and well-rounded pieces that have meaning, reportages and deeper articles that would give back to journalism its glamour.

I do not have answers: only so so many questions.

---

Education

When I chose to focus my study on gastronomy I was acutely aware of the fact that I was selecting a way of reasoning. A philosophy of thought, if we want to categorise it. The Head of the master I follow is an incredibly talented scholar who writes - but first and foremost is a thinker, a learner, and a scholar - and she surrounds herself with equally interesting minds. All classes are designed to make us students start to develop an independent mind, far away from mainstream media and the needs of this industry.

I consciously chose not to study Gastronomic Sciences - I decided to study Gastronomic Arts: narrative, eloquence, rhetoric, philosophy, communication, semiotics and poetry. I chose not to delve into Gastronomic Communication only: with a pinch more of classical studies we would get that media is only a means to achieve an objective, an ancillary function that cannot be made the subject of our contextual understanding of reality.

I am interested in way more than the mechanics of food, the business of food, and the scientific implications of food. This does not mean that science and nutrition, and communication are taken out of the curriculum, though. But adding semiotics, philosophy, sociology and history to the mix is what spices up this subject, elevating it from the daily drag of “the new restaurant opening” trope.

Moreover, being part of a close-knit group composed of international individuals with their projects was the cherry on top. If I would not have this chance, I might have had to try and hope for the best. But it is hard, as demonstrated by one local writer.

One of them for instance is so verbose and boring that can transform a piece of gastronomic art into a piece of indigestible writing. And the worse thing is, he was made to believe that he is good. As a writer and as a gastronomist.

Peers can be a bad influence if they are of low quality.

Someone should tell him that different purposes for writing require different styles, and perhaps writing for gastronomy should not resemble writing an insurance complaint, for instance.

Experience

The only point so far where I disagree with my Head Professor is this one.

I do think that to be able to understand gastronomy profoundly, one has to be having consciously eaten around sufficiently. And I think I still have a very, very long way to go in this area.

However, this is not even nearly enough to shape a gastronomic mind. And on this, my professor and I agree. Having eaten around is no guarantee for brilliant minds, only proof of a rather high acquisitive power.

An Instagram guy for example claims to have been to an uncountable number of restaurants, including quite an astronomic number of Michelin stars. The poor sod, however, cannot piece two sentences together, and whatever he writes in terms of “critics” is…simply not a critic.

It’s on the level of “I like you like” kind of stuff.

Sometimes I wonder how a person can reach adulthood and display such a limited array of cognitive functions, but yet again in the golden days of Instagram, he straight up bought followers to become relevant and an “authority” among foodies.

Cringe, right?

After this and other social media disasters, he had left the internet in disgrace after being outed vehemently and criticized, but somehow recently he came back, probably driven by the contemporary need for validation, and for basking into the warmth of likes and comments of followers.

Self-worth

As a person and as a professional, I am not on sale.

No amount of anything could make me write good of something I profoundly believe it is not. And no amount of people can convince me that something is marvellous when it’s trite. Because I have not put myself up for sale, I am above these issues. I can say whatever I think it is needed to be said, I can keep quiet, or I can highlight things.

But the moments someone enters the circus of posting-in-exchange-of-an-invitation, even a speculative one, the magic is broken. Forever.

You put a price tag on your words and judgement and boy those price tags are low.

We all saw them, first accepting a gift from a company, almost timidly, and now being completely plastered in #pub so much so that you start wondering whether they’ll have another kid just to be able to keep surfing on the baby-food and baby-friendly wave, once their spawn will be able to walk around and manoeuvre a set of cutlery.

---

There are, of course, a couple of reputable gastronomers around - but the sad reality is that mostly they are ageing, or they are way too busy with their projects to waste time or are professionally engaged otherwise.

As a result, they do not write, share, or compel others to discuss gastronomy. And in some cases, they belong to those generations of non-digital natives that find it hard to live on and offline in parallel.

There are a few that are very much worth reading though, and sooner or later I’ll talk about them too.

I have very big hopes for all the Barbarian Gastronomists that are popping up at this moment. People that are pushing boundaries, to put it as

Reflexiones de un gastrónomo angustiado

author Albert Molins¹.

I did translate into English part of his article for you (and I already ask sorry to Albert for not being able to render in English his prose, which I had already translated my way into Italian earlier on), because I feel that it is compelling that this idea transcends the Iberian peninsula. Barbarian Gastronomists of the world should unite:

“I speak of generation and not of a group because they do not constitute a unit, but they should. They know each other and I know that some of them have friendship ties, but they have enough things in common to become and become a group as such, like so many others in the history of intellectual, artistic and literary production. Our Bloomsbury gastro group, our young barbarians.

Beyond the abundance of talent they have, their gaze is what defines and unites them. That thing that is so important and so difficult when you are dedicated to writing and communicating, no matter what. And theirs is tremendously engaged, social, political, historical, cultural and passionate. Contemporary. And above all, cultured.

In any case, we are dealing with a group of authors who have never sat at the tables of El Bulli, nor do they frequent the halls of the most revered restaurants of the moment every season, because their gastronomic vision goes far beyond, and they are on another path. If we would sneak into their homes and open their pantries we would see that the products in their pantry come from many other gastronomic cultures and if we search through the books in their libraries, we will find much more than the sanctum sanctorum del Cunqueiro, Pardo Bazán, Luján and others.

They don't eat caviar and they don't brag about it because they can't afford it, nor are they interested in doing so. They don't sit in the three Michelin stars - this will certainly interest them, but once again the precariousness is already known - because basically, they prefer to poke their noses into other realities, even though they know that it will cost them much more to sell their texts. They are heroic, no doubt.

Children of their time, read far more authors from across the Atlantic than any other generation of food authors. More MFK Fisher and less Curnonsky. In general, they read far more and more than any other generation of food authors. And you can see it. It's so obvious. Many of them have gone through The Food Studies, so credit and recognition to Yanet Acosta”

I am here left with the same question that Chiara Cavalleris states and Abate reports: “Se il giornalismo gastronomico non può permettersi di pagare il ristorante stellato allora non bisogna parlare di ristoranti stellati, mi sembra logico”.

We are perhaps at a turning point here, where starred and high-end restaurants literally sweep and buy their presence on media (social, traditional and post-traditional) creating a saturation of fake (a concept that I would love to explore with my Master’ Director one day), and at the same time a transnational generation of barbarians starts to ignore said places, because if they cannot be afforded, they start to become irrelevant.

Let’s discuss this further.

1. I have to thank Albert for writing this piece, which has been giving me a lot to think about, and even more, for silently not complaining about me translating it into any language I needed to, to make my point. Go read his writing, it is just brilliant. He is one of those writers that does not hold back when there is something to be hammered, and I like this kind of bravery at a time when people sell reviews for a penny. And if you can, go buy him a coffee, he dearly needs to put up with the barbarians pestering him left and right (and not-so-secretly planning to invade his house in a sort of gastronomic retreat).