Chef, Cook, Scullery Maid - Meat Loaf And The End Of Foodie Cuisine

Rene Redzepi, Danish chef known for foraging, articulation, and minimalist presentation, has a cult following of organicists, farm-to-table aficionados, and international high-flyers whose thousand dollar prix fixe five meal of sea grasses, cockles, and marsh weed is the Holy Grail of cuisine.  No master is more enlightened than Redzepi, no artist more attuned to the playing of sound and light in tidal pool sanctuaries, no prophet more inspired with perfection than he. 

'Articulation' is a term used by Redzepi to describe the unique confluence of presentation, character, and quality.  His plating is expressive of this union, the very essence of nourishment for eye, body, and soul. 

While most food critics have been more than generous in their praise of Redzepi's genius, his reshaping of the culinary experience, the chef/artist of the new age of environmental sentience and the integrity of all life, others have seen it as a marvelously constructed, ingeniously marketed, and brilliantly engaging scam. 

While travelers who have come from as far away as Perth and Christchurch have looked at the sprays of sea baling, marsh filaments, and mollusk cairns, Harvey Fieldstone of Food & Cuisine, a Bay Area publication channeling Snopes, the Fact Check online service, was offering a clear and unflinching look at the high-end restaurants and celebrity chefs of Milan, New York, and San Francisco. 

Nothing has been a more pretentious, self-referential, manipulative, rabbit-in-a-hat chicanery than this arrogant nonsense of Rene Redzepi.  Plates not minimalist but minimum, hundreds of dollars for bits and pieces of tidal refuse arranged in kindergarten swirls and dots, and happy rainbows.  Anyone taken in by this vaudevillian charade to be fleeced by Rene, watching the looks of stunned amazement at his creations from behind the arras, deserves to lose his stake.  The great P.T. Barnum observed that a sucker was born every minute, and Redzepi is certainly his offspring.  

 

Redzepi, used to adulatory, celebratory reviews which required to comment, felt he must answer critic Fieldstone's unfair, ignorant, and villainous attack, and did so in a venomous, hateful rejoinder.  It was like the good old days of the New York Review of Books where critics and authors went after each other with sharpened swords, and the popular press picked up on what Redzepi thought would be a private affair. 

Food Goes Bitch headlined the New York Post, quoting the Fieldstone review and Redzepi screed in full.  Journalist Tom Packard wrote:

Have you thought that food, food critics, and tony, must-go restaurants were only for the rich and well-to-do?  You've got another thing coming, Dear Reader, this is a food fight extraordinaire, a mud-wrestling extravaganza of pure delight.  The Redzepi scam has finally been outed, and those of us happy enough with a dinner out at Waffle House or Cracker Barrel can have a barrel of laughs over this bitchy pas de deux. 

Packard continued with a series of articles on Redzepi and the foodie craze.  With photos of Redzepi's creations - 'clots of seaweed that tangle fishing lines and clumps of swamp grass smelling of low tide' - his readers howled. 'Where's the meat?'

The scrap between Fieldstone and Redzepi with the Post as interlocutor started a brushfire and then a firestorm.  Americans had always known that this pretentious, coastal, Legoland architectural, organic, locavore, environment-friendly movement was total bullshit, a Baroque funhouse of absurd eating; and now they realized that they were in the majority. 

Of course foodies immediately rushed to the defense of Redzepi and the many Michelin-starred and Nouvelle Cuisine, Alice Waters-like establishments featured in the New York Times. If they did not support Redzepi and his world-renowned culinary colleagues and justify the thousands of dollars they had spent on minimalist, leave-the-table-hungry meals, they would be outed and laughed at for the gullible, credulous fools they were. 

A letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

The criticism of Rene Redzepi and his colleagues is nothing less than populist envy.  Those 'ordinary Americans' chowing down at Olive Garden and Wendy's would love to sit at an elegantly presented meal of class and sophistication; but the precision, acute perception, and the inspiration of the forager, innovator, the genius might be lost on them

 
This one letter sparked a sideshow of reader response. There were the gourmets who dug in their heels, continued to cook sous vide, shopped organic for the most carefully sourced, grown, picked, and purveyed food, and who proposed artistic, forward wine pairings.  On the other side were the champions of traditional American food - simple food, comfort food, the steady-as-she goes meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and corn. 

When the foodie craze hit its apogee, few were prepared for its disappearance.  Critics expected more of a gradual disappearance, a voluntary retraction of out-there food choices, a drop-off in Michelin starred reservations, poor circulation of Gourmet and Food & Wine, but somehow when the cat was out of the bag and the Emperor's new clothes came off, the whole thing just collapsed.  

It was as though people had been looking at some hyper-virtual rendition of food through a specially crafted lens to show off a kind of trapeze artistry, and when the lens was removed all they saw was scattered bits of unrelated hardware - nuts, bolts, screws, washers, and rings with no rhyme or reason for their assortment, arrangement, or construction.  

When they saw with the furze removed, their optics aligned, and their eyes clear enough to see what is and not what is intended to be, they saw nothing edible, nothing appetizing, nothing mouth-watering. 

The whole house of cards collapsed, and amidst the fallen architecture were only the scattered, foraged bits that should have stayed where they were.  The wild grasses on the plains, the reeds in the marshes, the seaweed rolling with the tide, and the barnacles attached to sea drift and boat bottoms. 

The taste of a rare Porterhouse came back.  After years of grazing in weeds, swamps, river banks, and forest beds, diners rediscovered what real food tasted like. 

Vicki Blevins looked at her spice rack, stove to ceiling crowded with as many spices as an itinerant Arab medicine man - banyan root powder, cactus flower seeds, hibiscus stamen, fermented Indonesian civet musk - all to be added to dishes of shaved eucalyptus bark-infused poitrine of crab soup and pave de squab in elderberry creme, her piece de resistance. 

Calling her gourmet was like calling Pavarotti just an Italian singer - nothing could do justice to her inventiveness, creativity, and confections with an environmentally sane menu. 

Now, after the Redzepi expose, she could no longer look at her one-of-a-kind assortment of spices and condiments with interest and anticipation of the next meal.  Now they were only swirls and whorls in a Tiepolo ceiling

That's all it took, that one random article, that unvarnished expose that ripped away all the absurd assumptions of food.  Redzepi was simply a seashore opportunist, picking, culling, sorting, and clipping what no sea animal wanted, all at the bottom of the food chain; and once so observed, foodies from Napa to Santa Barbara gave up on the organic, locally sourced, farm-to-table, farmers' market, high-priced circus and returned to basics. 

Back to supermarket screw-top wines and Walmart specials.  Food was a resource, a commodity, a necessity, and not some Barnum & Bailey freak show.  The purpose of eating was sustenance, an intake of nutrients, a palatable mix of essential ingredients, table ready fare. 

Dinner was not a vaudeville act, a Borscht Belt tummler's joke.  It was a part of staying alive, easily chewable, and reliably sustaining. 

'What's for dinner', Vicki's husband asked her; but dinner had already been prepared without fuss or fanfare, a meal that had been eaten by millions before her, food from the chicken coop, the barnyard, and the fields, sorted, cleaned, chopped and cooked, nothing fancy, nothing to report. 

'What happened?', he asked. The sablefish meuniere for another day?'

Vicki was sure he would come around to her new, epiphanic way of thinking.  He would see the light and the waste, fraud, and frivolous diversion of Redzepi and his claque of food groupies.  He too would see with a new clarity and would never more line up at the farmers' market in the cold for ramps or periwinkle puree.  He would go quietly to Sam's Club, Costco, and Walmart and come back with a market basket of familiars.  

Within a short time Michelin stopped giving out stars, Wine Spectator saw no purpose in reviewing Bulgarian blends, and Travel & Leisure gave up on the 'Restaurants: Our Choices of the Best Bargains in Greece'.  The whole industry reeled and sought new avenues for revenue; but once the genie is out of the bottle, or when fraud is exposed, recovery and redirecting is not easy, for it means starting from zero. 

Vicki never got tired of home cooking, the tried and true, the five basic food group meals with no fanfare.  Friends who still held on to the gourmet fantasy assumed that this was simply a passing faze, and soon enough she would return to reason if not delight; but she did not, and as far as anyone knew died with a pantry full of canned goods and a freezer chock-a-block with frozen dinners. 

Social critics have wondered about the demise of gourmet culture, but could never admit the obvious conclusion.  Americans had finally had enough of the fol-de-rol, the pretense, and the con; and once they realized the bill of goods which they had been sold was an airy, insubstantial lot, they gave up on it, trusted their own judgment, and tucked into what they knew best.