The Chef In The Food Part 2

Revisiting the Ancient Dilemma: What to Eat?

For millennia, ever since the onset of culture, man has had no problem in thinking of what to eat for dinner. The menu was pretty fixed given the things available in a certain season and region. It was considered a mark of culture not having to think about what to eat for dinner. It signaled prosperity. For only, the very poor or the very deficient had to think about what to eat. The prosperous always had the familiar fare on their plates.

Moreover, it was considered that thinking about what to eat and what not to eat is also the mark of the uncivilized man. For a cultural society has already tried most of the permutations and combinations in a given region and time and thus the question of what to eat has already been settled. A cultural man who has the experience and benefit of a great culture behind him does not have to think about what to eat. The influential tradition that guides him also informs him about food. Michael Pollan describes this very well in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The human omnivore has, in addition to his sense and memory, the incalculable advantage of a culture, which stores the experience and accumulated wisdom of countless human tasters before us. I don’t need to experiment with the mushroom now called, rather helpfully, the “death cap”… Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma 4)

Pollan calls the predicament of a modern diner with the ‘omnivore’s dilemma’ because biologically man is one of the few creatures who can digest a wide variety of foods. Most of mammals cannot eat just anything even if everything was available for they won’t be able to digest it. Man, unlike most mammals can digest a wide variety of foods and with the agency of cooking, just about anything.

That is why while evolving on the plains of Africa, he faced the question of ‘what to eat’. The onset of culture settled this question for him by fixing what to eat and what not to eat in a given time and place. Modern America in the 1920s once again set the clock to the prehistoric hunter-gatherer times as far as ‘what to eat’ question is considered.

When the women were encouraged to stop cooking in the 1920s in America and restaurants opened for the common public and for pleasure eating and not just for necessary eating. Michael Pollan attests to the fact that feminists were employed to campaign for abandoning cooking at home, as it encouraged the food and restaurant industry. (Cooked 131) For the first time after the onset of culture, the man had once again put his mind to the dilemma of what to eat for dinner: Mexican or Chinese? Organic or Regular? Vegan or Lacto-Vegetarian? Pollan again:

“One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.)” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma 4-5)

The ‘Chef’ in the Food

Just like all Art in the West, the Food also went the way of the strange and the individual, as the rest of the Art forms did. Food started deteriorating as soon as the Chef entered the Food.

The chefs were ever encouraged to do something ‘new’ in order to stand out, in order to create ‘signature dishes’ which no one else could and which they could patent and prevent others from making. Very soon, this search for the ‘new’ turned into a search for something ‘strange’.

As a result, most of the dishes that the Masterchefs and the Michelin Star Chefs create are so strange they are only as useful in a home kitchen as the fashion show clothes are useful in a daily wardrobe. Most of these chefs pride themselves on creating dishes which are ‘pieces of art’. And this has come to mean how difficult the dish is to prepare. It was not that earlier all dishes were easy to make. But difficulty existed in a dish because it was necessary because the said ingredient had to process to a degree to be edible or palatable.

In the new world of experimental food, the difficulty is introduced for difficulty’s sake, so that the chefs are admired for their troubles, and other chefs can’t easily copy the dish by looking at it. Ingredients are processed so much so that they are no longer recognizable. Finished products are used as ingredients. Technical and commercial machinery is used to give food a certain ‘look’.

Blowtorches, gelatin, and nitrogen capsules are now regular ingredients and processes of cooking. Nitrogen cooking is a thing now. People make ice cream in one minute with nitrogen. Instant mousse is available. A new word is introduced, ‘plating’. Food has become what it looks rather than what it means for the body. As one contestant at a Masterchef competition says: “You eat with your eyes!”

The chefs, in order to stand out, create ever new and ever strange dishes, in order to create ‘signature dishes’ named on them and patented in their name.

As a consequence, food has become more of an intellectual idea. And like every intellectual idea, it is given to deterioration. People, who go to the restaurant and pay exorbitant prices for some dishes, are actually eating an ‘idea’, and not a dish.

They pay money for how it ‘looks’. Taste is important too, but after a while, all the important taste buds of the modern man has already been excited, he just does not feel excited about taste and taste only. He has to be excited about how the food ‘looks’ too. The modern man is coming nearer and nearer to ‘eating an idea’ and idea alone.

In a traditional society, healthy food was very easy to make because the goal was to approximate the norm and not to deviate from it. It is entirely possible to settle on healthy and tasty food if you don’t have to worry about throwing up ‘new dishes’ all the time.

In modern society, healthy food is increasingly hard to make as the goal is to deviate from the norm and not to approximate to it. In traditional cooking, even one foreign ingredient can throw the entire health balance of a dish completely awry. That is why, in modern cooking where the premium is on the ‘new’ and the ‘novel’, it is increasingly hard to whip out dishes which are both ‘novel’ and ‘healthy’.

This further pushes the food into becoming an ‘art’. It means that innovation is more in ‘how it looks’ than ‘how it tastes’. And we know that healthy had long gone down the drain.

The Chef has arrived in the Food. And the Food is consequently dead as the ‘food and medicine’ whole. It is now an ‘idea’, an ‘art form’, and like all other modern art forms, it is strange and strange only and that is its defining virtue and quality.

References

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. The Penguin Press, 2013.

Authored by Pankaj Saxena. Published by IndicaToday.