‘We’ve come a long way’: Is food culture really culture at all?

Dear Gerry,

First things first. I am not here to celebrate an imagined idyllic past before ghastly foreign food edged out honest-to-goodness Irish cooking. I still remember being served spaghetti bolognese with mashed potato and two veg in Longford during the miserable 1970s. Restaurant food was of, um, variable quality and the stuff you got in hotels was little better than the stuff you got in prisons (I’m betting). Good luck finding endive outside Ballsbridge.

We have better choices in restaurants and shops. “Real coffee” – that’s to say, not instant – is no longer seen as an exotic luxury. Fair enough. But what does drive me bonkers is the now ubiquitous treatment of food as therapy, art and expression of self. Television thrives on shows depicting people we’ll never meet going to places we’ll never visit to cook food we’ll never eat. The top end of the restaurant market has, as its flagships, fantastically pretentious enterprises that make a virtue of empty flamboyance. Instagram is taken up with people photographing their food in order to ... well, what? Demonstrate their own culinary ability or boast about the implied fatness of their wallets? Eat your dinner and shut up. Nobody is interested in what’s been drizzled on your polenta.

The treatment of “food trucks” as the apex of contemporary culture adds further irritation. I don’t deny it is some sort of achievement to serve a decent fish taco from a camper van, but nobody here is redefining contemporary opera or perfecting cold fusion. Thank you, travel magazine. There are many good reasons to visit Bratislava. But eating a sandwich in a car park is not top of my list.

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Then there is the preposterous language of contemporary menus. Every dish has an origin attached to its host of faffy, randomly drawn adjectives. It’s not just salmon; it’s “line-caught Bawheenie salmon”. Every fish is from somewhere. Sticking a location before it doesn’t make it any more delicious. Please, please don’t tell me what the cow ate before you killed it. Maybe I do miss Longford-raised spaghetti bolognese with hand-mashed turnip and carrot.

Yours, Donald.

Hello Donald,

That’s quite the amuse bouche you’ve served up. Your midlands spag bol reminds of the old adage that the Italians may have invented lasagne, but it took the English to understand that it’s best served with chips.

Being of similar vintage (and let’s face it, not all wines improve with age) I have also acquired some food baggage. For brevity, I will add to your laments a trio of my own, the first of which is desserts served in trios. Like contemporary art, dinner out too often comes with a side of impeccably sourced hyperbole. Secondi, the faux heroism of wildly successful shows like Netflix’s The Chef’s Table elicits an antagonism in me matched only by your own impassioned response to televised André Rieu concerts from Maastricht. Before you ask, I cannot vouch for the food trucks in either Maastricht or Bratislava.

For thirds, the very voguish “plant based”. Last time I checked, the beasts of the field are all herbivores. Barring a free-range chicken lucky enough to score the occasional worm, surely all animal protein consumed by us apex predators is plant based. Fish, they’re another story. The oceans really are the law of the jungle. The crux of the ruminant question is that converting plants into burgers for human consumption is a spectacularly inefficient way to turn photosynthesis into food; and painful though it will be, we will have to wean ourselves off it.

Where we part company is in your rejection of food’s creative, therapeutic and expressive agency. Why can’t it be these things, and more besides. Why can’t it be an aperture through which to read the world, much like the camera lens. And isn’t it especially potent when the two come together, whether it’s Eat Drink Man Woman or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover?

Best, Gerry.

Dear Gerry,

As sharper-eyed readers may have noted, the film I had in mind when writing my first dispatch was Charlie Kaufman’s heroically miserable Anomalisa. I felt for the lonely protagonist as, ordering room service in the Platonic ideal of a mid-market early noughties hotel, he asks for “the Bibb lettuce salad. And the salmon”. The person on the other line clarifies: “A Bibb lettuce, Gorgonzola, prosciutto, and walnut salad with honey raspberry vinaigrette dressing and the wild-caught Copper River Alaskan salmon almandine.” There is no escape from the propaganda. You mention Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. It certainly wasn’t the director’s intention, but the nauseating descent into forced cannibalism at the close neatly sums my own feelings about the excesses of high cuisine. There is no more precise cook than the version of Dr Lecter played by Mads Mikkelsen in the excellent TV series, Hannibal. You may recall he is also a complete psychopath.

I exaggerate. Relatively few high-end chefs are complicit in the cooking of human flesh. I also grudgingly accept that food and its preparation does, for some people, have a therapeutic effect. I’m always hearing that kneading bread helps work through tension – though, to me, it sounds about as much fun as cleaning the lavatory or taking out the bins. This article over here tells me that a nation expresses its identity through the variety of its cuisine. This was bad news for us when we were known best for orange cheese and over-cooked vegetables. The ongoing efforts to define our national cuisine by the “quality of the ingredients” is simply adorable.

If I’m honest, a lot of my reservations spring from a very Northern Irish suspicion of pretentiousness. Obviously, nice food is nice and horrid food is horrid. But turning our appreciation of comestibles into a philosophical investigation is not proper. Like “talking about your feelings”, this is perfectly fine for Americans and Europeans. It is just not the way of the North Atlantic. Proust could turn the eating of a bun into a consideration of lost time. Joyce was more at home with fried kidneys that smelled of wee. Sensible fellow.

Yours grumpily, Donald

Dear Donald,

I’ll raise your Charlie Kaufmann with that desolate scene in Sideways when Paul Giamatti finally cracks open his precious pinot noir, paired with a miserable looking Wendyburger. Food, the final solace when all others have deserted you. I’m with you on Hannibal, surely the greatest TV chef of the age, though I’d wager he has no cards for effete Madeleines in his Rolodex of meticulous recipes and hapless victims. I can certainly see kidneys in there, along with brains and other viscera. Hannibal’s gastronomy is more Joycean than Proustian, a PhD waiting to happen.

Speaking of the North, do you remember the genteel Jenny Bristow cooking on UTV, keeping calm and carrying on back in the turbulent 90s. Chilli and garlic by all means, but just a wee bit. An inoffensive fusion one might even call Presbyterranean cooking. We’ve come a long way since then, but ideas of Ireland being bereft of culinary significance refuse to die. In the culture that is food, the ingredients are everything, and there are aspects of our terroir that elicit wonder when discerning French or Italian palettes ingest them, and I don’t just mean the butter.

Wherever humans have shared food, they have ascribed meaning and created ritual, and why would Ireland be any different? Our ancient Brehon Laws included elaborate instruction on hospitality and the distribution of beverages and choice cuts based on nuanced social hierarchies. Loath as I am to broach the subject, it’s hard not to conclude that the Famine traumatised our feelings toward food, and we have yet to make our postcolonial peace with it, unlike other potent aspects of our identity, such as our music, language and games. Tables, bowls, cast iron pots, drinking vessels, precious objects of our material culture are held in our museum collections. If these food artefacts are deemed worthy of “philosophical investigation”, then so too is the perishable stuff we put in them. Prowling the cultural savannah in search of the tastiest morsels as you do, Donald, I think you might be missing a trick here.

This has been excellent company, but I believe The Irish Times needs the table back by nine. If you’re minded to get your snout further in the trough, I’m starting up some classes in the new year, and we can continue our discourse over a nice sourdough boule you’ve kneaded yourself. I think you’ll find it quite relaxing.

Finally lest I forget, endive. A tad bitter, definitely our kind of vegetable, but I doubt you’ll find any in Ballsbridge. For all its opulence, it has many of the characteristics of a food desert. If you’re desperate to get hold of some, the good news is there are hard-grafting, poorly remunerated co-ops, growers and market traders out in all weathers in more modest locations, keeping the wheels of Irish food culture moving ever forward. I’m pretty sure they can hook you up.

Fondly, Gerry.