Gastro-circus: the insane worship of the golden idol, and the unsustainable irrelevance of celebrating fine dining
The pointless glorification of chefs on golden pedestals has to stop, for the survival of gastronomy, when half of the world is burning, drowning, and suffering from hunger and famine.
If you’ve ever read the Bible, you must have bumped into Aaron and Moses hiking through the Sinai peninsula and, desperate to get home, started carving golden idols and worshipping them.
Their story is very relatable.
As we wander in this metaphorical desert, we have become guilty of idol-worshipping, similar to the biblical and very sinful worship of the golden idol around Mount Sinai, that provoked god into shipping clear written laws to be respected.
Our idols in gastronomy are the chefs.
Put on a pedestal by journalists and enthusiastic foodies alike. It is perhaps time for Moses to come down and whack everyone on their heads with some Tables of the Law. Only that in case the commandments are more gastronomy-specific.
The genesis
How did we come to this point?
We are all guilty.
As it is way easier to write about a person than about phenomena, the shortcut for many writers has been to focus on the individual and their doings.
Writing about an immaterial phenomenon like gastronomic philosophy is hard, way harder than describing a human and their actions.
However, with time we collectively lost focus of the whole systemic ecosystem to hyper-focus on “the 50Best” approach. I’m not here to condemn their points system and friend-favouritism: here the discourse is way more general.
We speak about the detail and cannot see the big picture.
I encourage you to reclaim back the holistic outlook, the systemic philosophical approach, and the sociological analysis of gastronomy.
Let’s just stop talking about this or that restaurant, plate, or chef.
We only care about that in the five minutes we take from the moment a plate is served to the moment it’s wiped clean.
What matters is the context.
How could we be tricked into forgetting it, to just see a tiny detail of a much broader reality?
Why and why have we been socialized to be stupid, narrow-minded and nearsighted?
Idolization as narrative idleness
It is so easy to write about someone.
People are relatable, reachable, and tangible.
Chefs and cooks necessarily tune in with the customers and they tune in with their creations - the plates. They are a medium through which gastronomy manifests in an obvious, understandable way.
Remember that intellectual and emotional intelligence is a grayscale continuum rather than a graded scale. Just because someone can combine flavours and spices on a plate does not make them the bearer of the Philosopher’s Stone.
Always remember that chefs are people too.
Humans, with flaws and sparks of greatness.
Like yourself.
The commandments
Thou shall not be an imbecile writing for imbeciles. Enrich your vocabulary and try to avoid at all costs useless superlatives (“marvellous”) and empty shells "(“dining experience”, “concept”) and articulate your writing.
Thou shall tell stories that matter. Focus on what matters the most, on what makes the difference, on what will cause ripples in the fabric of reality.
Thou shall stop going behind new openings like a night butterfly with a lamp. Go after stories, not advertisements.
Thou shall write in a compelling, curious, interesting way. Thou shall make more use of the vocabulary.
Thou shall always be educating the reader. Do not dumb down concepts or issues for them. Push your reader to read, to explore, to turn on their brain.
Thou shall write about the system, not the person. Transform your written page into a sounding board for ideas.
Thou shall write about the phenomena, not the event. Master the science and art of sociology and philosophy of change.
Thou shall never stop educating yourself. The school didn’t end with your graduation. Take formal, informal, and on-the-job education. Learn how to debone a duck, and you’ll become a better gastronomic writer.
Thou shall find mentors and tutors, but thou shall also be a mentor and a tutor. Help and ask for help.
Thou shall not avoid writing salty, acidic, bitter criticism. Not all are worth sweet words. And do not forget about the umami of writing.
Or, well, you could simply carry on as usual, copying the same press release over and over again, talking about the “new openings”.
Your choice.
The world as we know it
It is urgent that we start to talk gastronomically of gastronomy: taking in philosophy and all arts and sciences, creating a complete and complex narrative against a phenomenon that is so deeply human, that is in complete contradiction with the idolisation of people.
But when I observe the gastronomy circus that is 50Best, a “competition” where “experts” elect the “best restaurant” in the world, all I can see is a bunch of journalists, writers, chefs, and communication agencies congratulating themselves in a blindingly white-euro-caucasian fashion.
If you do not know, in this and a million other events, a bunch of Westernised, capitalistic “gastronomers” elect the best restaurant according to their taste.
At 50Best for instance, they seem to be feeling very avant-garde because they have recently discovered Latin America and Asia (but just their civilised parts, or better, the ones that can invest money in the circus). Oh, and an African chef managed to sneak in there (or was in Michelin?) if I’m not mistaken. Yes. A white dude from SA.
The irony.
Are you seeing what I am seeing?
Are we still really stuck in the paradigm that fine dining is a mostly white, colonialist, capitalist thing? I thought we had opened the concept of fine dining to eating lichens and waffles in the Nordics.
The proof something is wrong is (the lack of) Africa.
A whole continent that gets ignored: the only “relevant” happenings for this capitalistic, westernised, and above all colonialist kermesses are westernised, high-end, capitalistic-catering and colonialism-perpetrating establishments.
East and West Africa are still unchartered territories. I find it fascinating that the only media outlet I could find, that spoke widely of these cuisines and the lack of presence in fine dining, was a Chinese one.
Gastronomy is also politics, and in this case, international.
Is fine dining dying, or are we in search of a new paradigm?
The death of fine dining as an aspirational tool for fashion models to reinvent themselves, rich kids of Instagram, old white dudes with disposable income, and the affluent society that worships rich, capitalistic and high life is paved with black-tie events like these galas.
All around these events, and especially, OUTSIDE said events, are the places where the gastronomic sciences and arts are heading.
Not noticing this issue is proof of the influence and power that the handful of powerful media moguls that are controlling this and the other posh gastronomic events still have.
Same as in haute couture, fine dining is nowadays an experimental laboratory to push the frontiers of gastronomy.
This is crystal clear.
Once upon a time, fine dining was more akin to a classic banquet with a series of identifiable courses, more like a traditional festive Western lunch or dinner.
But a lot has changed since then and now you have virtually anything, from a plethora of amuse-bouche to start, to a classical sequence of plates, to mini-portions or any other thing that works for the chef and their concept.
You can have a table in the kitchen, you can have or have not tablecloths: you see, anything goes.
Well, almost anything.
As long as it is not too threatening for the old, white, affluent (mainly) Western dudes that are still running the show.
As long as it does not stray from the confidence-inspiring discourse about products sustainability (but without speaking of real issues, such as climate-driven agricultural change and the connected migrations, nor speaking about fraud fishing and piracy, oil drilling in marine ecosystems), or welfare in the kitchen (but without speaking too loud about abuse, burnout, equal pay, fair pay not only for the Chef but as well for the runners and the dishwashers).
As long as the cuisines talked about in this high-end society are in line with these values.
As long as it is not “too ethnic” and that eating with the hands is just a quirky moment at the beginning of a meal, to be wiped out with white cotton expensive cloths imbibed in scented water.
Without thinking one split second at the impact of that cotton on those who cannot afford drinkable water, for instance.
And you know what?
I am tired of NOT hearing any of the parallel conversations above.
This is why I will not discuss not follow here or anywhere any Michelin kermesse, or any 50best or any of this bullshit where a black tie is required as a masquerade that avoids looking too much at the mirror, in fear of seeing the need to decolonize and de- many other things their discourse.
I see the people (journalists and communicators) sitting there, snapping pictures, slurping caviar (some white dude served it on a waffle for breakfast and if you’d ever read the chronicles of the last days of the Zars you’d have a chilling feeling down your spine).
And I think: is this the best thing for yourself and the world you could do today?
With the power you have of communicating and sharing, the real best you do is bathe yourself in the warmth of the light of affluence, and that is it.
Dress in some formal attire of bad sartorial quality, ignore that at a gala you should have an updo, put on some ugly heels that make you walk like a T-Rex or some polished shoes, and pretend you’re not on the sinking Titanic.
How can you?
We are way past the stage where “social issues” and “environmental issues” were something to be discussed in an appropriate forum. These issues are part of every day, all day.
Unless you are in the 1% (hi, Elon?).
But…is it really the 1% that you want to serve, or do you want to contribute to redistributing that 1% into the 99%?
The fact that in Belgium there are dozens of fine dining restaurants and in the former Belgian Congo there isn’t even one has something to do with the fact that the narrative is still driven by former colonialists, without blinking an eye.
Just imagine one high-end restaurant serving food on a hand-shaped plate in that country.
Food, and gastronomy, are also political.
And more important, gastronomy is not only restaurants.
Not at all.
I tell you what.
I haven’t seen any of the communicators or journalists talk about anything meaningful. How cheap you are to be bought, a bit of sparkle and brushing shoulders with the affluent managed to gain your silence.
And in the same week when a ship sinks in its water with its load of desperate aboard, celebrating fine dining without even questioning whether the system is adequate for the time we live is…hypocrite?
Oh, wow.
I’ll remember next time some gastro-journalist will write a moping article about some “long lost tradition crushed by modernity” or some lie about how they are interested in writing about sustainability and whatnot.
Bullshit, that’s what it is.
They’ve sold themselves out very very cheap.
At turns hilarious (particularly enjoyed the photo captions 😆) and thought-provoking, this brilliant post called to mind something else I'd recently read about the potential environmental benefit of switching to a vegan diet: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/vegan-diet-cuts-environmental-damage-climate-heating-emissions-study
I see chefs who open vegan restaurants talking about this but I don't know how common this discussion is in the food world outside of that context.