The question you should ask is not whether fine dining is dying
The question is why we should care more for a gala where foodies snap pics eating pancake caviars, than of sustainability, ecology, climate change, gastronomy hunger-related migrations, and provinces.
At some point last year during my master's, I had a sudden realization.
This may sound snobbish and probably it is.
I decided that writing articles and listicles and, in general, bothering myself with the restaurant business was not for me.
Suddenly, I had thrown out of the window the possibility of becoming a gastronomic journalist, or - as Chiara Buzzi intelligently defines herself someone who
talks about food, writes about restaurants
Because that is what she, and all the others, are paid for.
Because the only pay a journalist can hope for is in exchange for writing about chefs and restaurants, everything else does not matter.
Is this a well-paid job?
Of course not.
But selling a piece about a restaurant is still doable (for some).
The whole rest of gastronomy (which in percentage is the most significant part), is not sellable and nobody would buy it.
Snap.
As I kept delving into my cognitive journey and strengthening the realisation that I wanted to do something else than writing about restaurants, I started becoming very annoyed towards gastronomic reading in newspapers and online.
So out of boredom, I started reading these articles again but with an anthropological and semiotic outlook.
What was the meta-context that these articles are telling me?
Besides the identifiable communication agency-branded content, there is a specific semiotic that is defining our time, in restaurant and gastronomic writing.
There are very few exceptions.
But in many, too many cases, the idolization of the chef, and their current location (placed on a pedestal both by media and the public) has cast writers into an ancillary, subservient position.
With notable exceptions, the narrative is dull and trite, and the excessive focus on the experience (using exactly this word, and no other, mind you) and the actors of its experience leave the food, and especially its context, aside.
As in Goya’s aquatint, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters or The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstrous), also in gastronomic writing the obsessive focus on quick, palatable facts and the astonishing lack of contextual relevance generates articles that float in a vacuum, with no whatsoever link with gastronomy or any other sciences and arts.
Nobody (really) reads these articles. In most cases, people check the “vibe” of the place, jot down the data (address, cost, opening hours) and move on.
Nobody has mental space available for more than one “like” to one “reel” or whatever visual impulse is given to our brain, in a desperate attempt to de-literate us by making us avoid reading texts (with their, of course, sub-text…)
Nobody cares, and they are as fleeting as the bytes used to display them.
These articles, sadly, do not add anything to the gastronomic context, they just occupy space like saturated fats in our innards.
And yet, at a recent ceremony of some very coveted award, it was all about taking selfies with the chefs and what I felt in seeing those vapid Instagram posts and stories was a sort of third-person embarrassment. With the world - literally - on fire, these people bothered themselves with putting caviar on a croissant. I felt that usual guillotine shiver I feel every time history seems to come alive and become a story.
And so for example, we read of a famous and starred restaurant around Porto in northern Portugal, where the most important thing is the architecture of the restaurant.
The text has 8 paragraphs, 5 of which deal one way or another with the Siza Viera architecture of the restaurant, and its architectural relevance for architecture and design.
Did I say architecture?
One (one!) meagre paragraph touches upon the food, and another speaks of the other projects of this Chef.
What I, as a reader, extrapolate from this article is that this restaurant is to be avoided if I am looking to eat a reasonable meal, because even the journalist - who went there not out of their own will but paid to do so - could not find enough compelling gastronomical reasons to write about it, and chose instead to focus on its architecture. Alas, as a gastronomer, I don’t eat bricks or lick walls.
Analysing another recent article about this same restaurant, the situation is even worse.
This is just a bunch of dry paragraphs explaining, like a demented accountant, the price lists of this restaurant.
From this article, I get not only that whoever wrote it might have never even set foot in it, but also that I, in turn, have no incentives to set foot there myself.
There is a worrying lack of gastronomers in the true sense of this concept, who can extrapolate the immediacy of a plate or a preparation and connect it with the wealth of social, cultural and general context that is given.
Food is too important to be left in the writing hands of the uneducated.
Food is paramount.
The importance of food in gastronomy
We live out of food: it shapes our bodies and through our habits, we shape the world: We created the world as it is because we stopped grazing and collecting and we became settlers shepherds and harvesters.
We will shape the future of food because we will create laboratory meat and edible particles.
Or not.
It’s all in our hands.
Leaving its narrative into a dichotomy between street food against fine dining, chefs against customers, and food against wine is a simplification we cannot afford.
We need to take one step back and start connecting the food on the plate with the context. We need to start kicking out the personalities (the chefs, sommeliers, and “foodies” and whatnot) and start writing consistently, insisting on the contextualization of contemporary cuisine.
Gastronomy can simply be hedonism, sure.
But even hedonism has a wider significance in the construction of the narrative describing our contemporaneity.
The hard task for us writers is to poke holes into this fabric, make connections, display them, and widen our understanding of reality.
Eating
Eating is a human act, in contrast to feeding.
As any human specificity, it is and has been the object of infinite discussions.
Discussions, led by people, with other people.
This act of talking about food is sometimes mistaken as community building. But it’s not because someone gathers people around a table that creates a gastronomic community.
On the contrary.
In most cases, these initiatives born out of the desire to “grow out” of Instagram and social media, and “get real” (like for example the Italian Tavolata, and Forketters) end up with the bane of our times: social individualism.
They end up promoting just the promoter, and the guests in the end participate not to have a collective endeavour but to be able to post on their channels some information to funnel likes to fuel, in turn, their ego.
As humans with a smartphone (from now: social sapiens) we behave in a very different way than, let’s say, humans without a smartphone.
Have you ever noticed?
If we are given a camera that is not connected to social media with one click, the likelihood that we will isolate ourselves and take pictures of our little reality is lower, in favour of using the picture device for capturing the social aspect of the gathering.
No more pictures of individual plates and selfies, but group pictures and less focus on the plates.
After all, not all people are interested in food from a gastronomic, aesthetic, or business point of view. The large majority of people simply eat, and foodism is now a fashion to follow, a bit like twenty years ago was to be following fashion.
So why a blog about gastronomy?
Because of independence from the need to sell something.
In a heavily commercialized sector writing-for-money bears its limitations. You cannot criticize a system without exiting it somewhat. Criticizing from within is only a partial exercise.
Whilst criticizing chefs and restaurateurs is still somewhat accepted, criticizing the system (composed of lucrative businesses and wannabe lucrative businesses) is not.
But alas, as this is not a traditional media, I say whatever the fuck I want here.