The opposite of caviar & oysters is not discount store-bought puff pastry
Is the new gastronomic taboo disagreeing with the race towards the bottom?
This past week in Italy, everyone suddenly started talking about gastronomy.
It happened that social media cook and mega-influencer Benedetta Rossi claimed she became a victim of a storm of negative comments and insults on her pages, where commenters manifested their discontent mainly triggered by the fact that influencer Benedetta, in her recipes, invites users to make use pr pre-packaged and store-bought puff pastry and other cheap alternatives.
It all started when gastronomy-oriented Dissapore published a post with Benedetta’s 10 worst recipes of all time. It was a witty, clever and astonishing article, that to the rest of us provoked giggles.
But not to influencer Benedetta.
I admit that before this event, I had no clue about who this Benedetta was. I thought it was another Benedetta altogether, a famous TV cook and the sister of a famous TV presenter who I recall giving demonstrations of simple recipes live. Her recipes were easy to grasp and to handle, and not very different from the chicken à la Canalis which I always thought was the reason for her breakup with Clooney.
Anyways.
It was not that Benedetta, but an entirely different one, that after this incident went crying live on social media, which attracted the usual crowd of Schadenfreude mixed with upset followers, and the bane of the Internet (haters).
From a superficial analysis though it seems that the hate storm was directed towards her followers, not her. Regardless: this incident caused an avalanche of comments. An online fight ensued: on one side the supporters of Benedetta, on the other every gastronomer, cook, and cuisine-oriented person, together with nutritionists and such.
Even Times Uk picked up on her story. Forgetting perhaps she is not a humble lady taking some snaps from her kitchen. Her activities are headed by a company where she is CEO, with a turnover of over three million euros.
Everyone who pointed out anything but the sanctity of the mission to feed poor people with discount food was defined, by the followers of influencer Benedetta, as horrible classist snobs because they collectively refused to understand the class fight Benedetta was embarked into, pushing poor people to eat crap, and instead were pushing insane ideas like guaranteeing fair, affordable, healthy, clean and just food for all.
I know. These classist snobs.
Wanting to bring good food available for everyone. These horrible, horrible people. Why don’t they let poor people in peace, letting them eat Benedetta’s branded canned tuna and Benedetta’s branded Air Fryer-produced concoctions?
The self-defined non-cook celebrity claims to be presenting her followers with simple, everyday recipes with, she says, an eye for the budget. She assured her followers that she doesn’t know how to cook, nor she wants to teach anyone how to eat. Yet, she built a business out of it.
Her detractors chastised her for an inconsiderate use of low-quality ingredients. They argue that eating badly should not be encouraged nor condoned, and that has nothing to do with money, but with habits.
Her defenders romped up in arms, wielding her as a banner against poverty and as an example for left-winged politics in defence of the poor, saying that gastro snobs have no place to exist.
They say that it is rightful and fine to normalise eating bad quality food and making use of low-quality ingredients. The only thing that counts is budget, and average.
Collectively, we are in a pickle here.
Her detractors seem preachers in the desert, arguing that the starting point is all wrong: feeding poor people crap because they are poor is wrong, and I agree with them.
I stand by the poor.
Everybody has the right and the need to eat delicious, nutritionally valid, and sustainable food. But everyone has also the duty to educate themselves about what goes into their mouths to fuel the machine.
I stand against ignorance and stupidity, tho.
I vehemently think that having access to sustainably produced food for an affordable price is a basic human and environmental right.
As Luciano Pignataro says on his blog, “In reality, Benedetta Rossi is an expression of no poor popular gastronomic culture, but of the consumer model that the food industry has managed to create in the space of a single generation. It is no coincidence that today the richest and most cultured are looking for what the poor ate: organic vegetables, little meat, and local products. It is the citizens who have become consumers who are committed to feeding on crap. If we really ate as the poor have eaten for centuries, our health would benefit greatly.”
Here we are listening to a discourse that tells poor people that it is wonderful and cheaper (in terms of time and money) to buy store-bought pastry to make a savoury pie. Wrong on so many levels. As they write intelligently, this is gastronomic populism at its worst.
Is it really keeping an eye on the budget to send readers to buy a store-bought pastry, instead of teaching them one of the many variations on dough that can happen when one mixes those truly inexpensive pantry staples that are fat, flour, and water or milk?
Even the cheapest store-bought pastry is more expensive than whisking a dough ball (beware, I am not talking of puff pastry here) on the counter. Someone pointed out that I was riding up so very high on my horse of privilege not counting the time needed to make a ball of pastry dough.
I beg to differ.
It takes me way less time to whip up a pastry and roll it out than to head to the supermarket. And I live smack in the middle of a European capital, one of those places where you have at least 10 supermarkets within walking distance, and I have a dexterity of a clumsy clown with pastries in general.
And I say this as a big buyer of premade soup, that I splurge on instead of making it from scratch at home. But I am aware of what I am doing, and I am not lying to someone searching for a light in the tunnel of everyday meals. And I am not sponsoring the soups on social media for commercial gain…
Also, a puff-pastry savoury pie is not, really, an everyday meal. It also should not be. It is a heavy dish, and it is a complex one.
Why “teaching” followers to:
Settle for low-quality ultra-processed food?
Load them with unhealthy fats and useless calories?
Complicate their lives with puff pastry and complex preparations?
We really do not need to be Cedric Grolet to make puff pastry. Heck, even starred restaurants in some cases opt for external suppliers of complex preparations. But of course, they do not buy the shittiest version of this dough. And we know why? Because their customers and themselves have tuned their taste on something else.
But it was when I saw a post that preached in praise of “normalizing normal food” I started to think that we have a deeper problem.
People are actually enjoying low-quality store-bought puff pastry and other low-quality food.
They eat shit because they came to like it.
Years and years of eating low-quality ingredients into badly made preparations have flattened their taste into a spectrum of mediocrity, and there is no return from there.
People rightfully say that they don’t have time or even the skills to prepare puff pastry.
Neither do I.
But you know what? I haven’t eaten puff pastry at all in a long, long while. Because I do not need to. It is not water, a basic necessity. It is a frivolity.
Is this extreme?
No.
I don’t eat tomatoes in winter. I don’t eat bananas if they’re not from one of the European Macaronesian Islands. Why? Because they taste different, and they taste better. Because they don’t have a transatlantic carbon footprint, and they are locally sourced (I live in Portugal) from farmers.
I don’t need to eat puff pastry.
To make a savoury pie I can use any other dough.
But I do need to eat good puff pastry when the occasion arises. For instance, I wouldn’t say no to Cedric Grolet offering a croissant.
And this brings us to the last part of this rambling.
What do gastronomers eat at home?
We were at a winery lunch the other day, together with a lot of people. The couple before us asked: so what do you eat at home?
Well, soup.
And a salad with canned tuna or rotisserie chicken. A simple pasta with passata made by my mum. Some toast with ham and cheese or tuna melt. So so snob indeed.
Because you come back to the comfort of the home to enjoy some very simple vegetables and preparations.
Surely not a pie with store-bought puff pastry of the lowest quality - that had the power to bring even more followers to the astute non-chef that doesn’t (her words) to teach how to cook and doesn’t know how to do.
So what is she even doing online, discussing food?
Ah yes, followers. Forgot that part.
But there is more.
Benedetta is no saint and is an influencer after all.
She launched her own branded AirFryer and is known to be the face of some discount products, including canned tuna.
She opened a restaurant in Rome.
In this paradoxical reality, she basically makes money telling people to eat shit, but she secretly banks on these bad habits she pushes, and banks on her unawareness of cuisine, nutrition and gastronomy….yet pushing recipes to feed people.
She also pushes environmentally unfriendly solutions that are anachronistically complex such as single-use plastic sac-á-poche, more in tune with a professional cuisine where reusable materials are hard to implement than a humble home where recycling, repairing, and reusing should be the three magical R to live by. Not to talk about the environmental impact, but I still take planes to travel to restaurants abroad so I will skip this.
This means once again that gastronomy is such a neglected topic, and has become so disconnected from the act of feeding oneself, that situations like this can thrive even in a gastronomically rich country like Italy, playing on the same fears and leverages of populism.
Is the new gastronomic taboo disagreeing with the race towards the bottom?
Italy is a country that created and developed the concept of Slow Food, food that is healthy, produced fairly, and available to all.
And yet now it seems that it is taboo, to try to change the system that pushes the poor to feed on low-quality ingredients and heavily processed food. It is frowned upon, to try to change the food system and allow more people to access nutritious food.
I will fight forever for a world where eating fair, nutritious and healthy food is a basic human and environmental right. I do it every day because I can, and I do it also for those who cannot. I am not alone in this, hopefully.
This is true solidarity, true consciousness, and this is infinitely better than sponsoring an AirFryer and claiming sanctity from the height of being a mega-influencer. And I am not alone in this either, thankfully.
Groigne qui groigne.