In the 1960s, when my husband and I first traveled inEngland as students, we would have starved without the Chinese. From Brighton toDurham, from Bath to Norwich, the only inexpensive restaurants open at night wereserving sweet-and-sour pork. Even Indian food was exotic and scarce--and pub foodwas inedible. A decade later, living in London on our first sabbatical fromacademe, we were alarmed to hear of a bread strike. But when we rushed to thelocal bakery with our hungry tots, it turned out that the stricken bread was onlythe sliced white loaf, for which desperate customers were queuing. Everythingelse--croissants, baguettes, rye, pita--was in plentiful but undesirable supply.Similarly, our greengrocer had never eaten a courgette or an artichoke, althoughhe was starting to sell them. As cheap package tours to Spain and France becameavailable, British food habits were revolutionized.
London has changed a lot. Paul Levy dates the moment of transformation to1972, when "Philippa Pullar, the author of Consuming Passions, a history of food and the British, took me to a restaurant in Lower Sloane Street in London." It was Le Gavroche, one of the restaurants that inaugurated the British worship of food and chefs. At its peak, Le Gavroche had three Michelin stars.
By the mid-1980s, the "foodie" appeared--satirized in Mike Leigh's movieLife Is Sweet, with the Regret Rien bistro and its ambitious menu of dishes such as "liver and lager." The nineties were the decade of the celebrity chef, with chirpy-Cockney lad Jamie Oliver selling more than one million cookbooks and gorgeous Nigella Lawson as the food goddess. Now, just across the road from our London flat in Exmouth Market are French, Italian, Cypriot, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Spanish-Moroccan, traditional English, Peruvian, and Thai restaurants, plus a Starbucks. Even on a country weekend, guests are served cheese soufflé along with the Sunday roast.
The academic world also has changed a lot, and the food evolution has beensemiotic as well as sustaining. Since the sixties, among both U.S. and U.K.scholars, food has signified sex, power, and art. In 1963, with the celebratedeating scene in the movie Tom Jones, food began to stand for erotic desires and possibilities. In her wonderful 1999 memoir My Kitchen Wars,cookbook writer Betty Fussell described her discovery of sensuality in French cooking while she was at Princeton University in the 1960s: "Every new food opened up new sexual analogues. To explore the interstices of escargots with the aid of fork and clamp, each shell in its place on the hot metal round, each dark tongue hidden deep within the whorls and only with difficulty teased out and eased into the pool of garlic-laden butter--what could be sexier than that?"
My husband and I ate escargots on our wedding day in 1963. But the academicworld was still largely priggish and pleasure denying, especially at the Quakercollege where we started out. I remember going to a dinner party where sixtidbits of pickled herring on toothpicks were reverently distributed to theguests as a first course. My Jewish family in Boston were not gourmets, but wehad waded in pickled herring. I had to get used to the idea that an interest infood was crass and anti-intellectual. But in 1964, when my husband and I moved toDavis, California, we were stunned and thrilled by the hedonism of the academiclifestyle, with professors owning stock in vineyards and hosting long,many-coursed dinner parties of elaborate dishes.
Alas, this golden age of plenty quickly degenerated into competitive cookingthat made social life a burden for faculty wives. Fussell recalls how "dinnerparties were important ammunition in the fierce competition among ourhusbands--and ourselves." In our concrete faculty housing at Princeton, we slavedover tians, confits, bombes glacées, and foods pureed, marinated,caramelized, glazed, steeped, tossed, and poached. Our insignia, as Fussellnotes, "was the copper bowl and wire whisk." Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher wereour idols.
But when we gained access to professions and careers, our competitive cookinghad to stop and the whisks were left to rust. Cooking became the artwork of greatchefs like Alice Waters, who launched Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, in1971. Meanwhile, the academic men and women who were whisking in the sixtiesbegan traveling and tasting in the eighties and nineties. Today, Julia Child'sbiographer Noel Riley Fitch and Bert Sonnenfeld, her husband (a bon vivant andprofessor of French at the University of Southern California), send happy e-mailsdescribing great restaurant meals--like Thanksgiving dinner at Lespinasse inManhattan: "medley of tiny vegetables with truffle oil, lobster tail tarragon,wild turkey with sweet potato puree, pecan tart with cinnamon ice cream."Cookbook writer Betty Rosbottom, married to a professor at Amherst College, leadssummer tours to the great restaurants and cooking schools of France and Italy.
I suppose it was inevitable that the next phase would be to makefood, cooking, and eating an academic discourse--a breakthrough that may havecome when Susan Leonardi, a professor of English at the University of Maryland,published an article on recipes in PMLA (Publications of the ModernLanguage Association of America). "Historically," says Darra Goldstein, the Williams College professor and cookbook writer who edits Gastronomica: TheJournal of Food and Culture, a new quarterly published by the University of California Press, "there's been a rift between academic inquiry and what the popular press was writing about food." (Indeed, says Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine and author of the best-selling memoir Comfort Me withApples, it used to be that "smart people didn't care about food.") But now, Goldstein thinks, food studies has become as chic and timely as women's studies or film studies: "Food is one of the best ways to understand a culture and the rituals around it; you can see a panorama of culture through the prism of food."
It seems both funny and obvious that the new field of food studies shouldpick up on other trendy academic fields, including deconstruction andpostcolonialism, just as these subfields themselves are going out of fashion.Marion Nestle, chair of New York University's Department of Nutrition and FoodStudies, explains: "We're trying to establish food studies as a completelylegitimate academic field of study, with very high standards that people willtake seriously." That food studies and women's studies are a natural match hasnot always been a popular opinion. "It was a forbidden subject in the earlieryears of women's history," says cookbook historian Barbara Haber. "Anything to dowith cooking and food was seen as retrograde and bad for business." Haber creditsscholars in multicultural studies for showing that food is a fast track to theheart of a culture.
Gastronomica is a glossy publication with beautiful and clever illustrations, such as the cover of the first issue, which features a striking image--a woman eating a man's hand--from Luis Bu"uel's 1930 film L'Aged'Or. Editor Goldstein writes: "We speak of intellectual hunger and food for thought, but we forget that these concepts were once the subject of serious inquiry--from Erasmus, who advised readers to digest material rather than merely memorize it, to Montaigne, who described education and digestion as parallel functions." She adds that Gastronomica "aims to renew this connection between sensual and intellectual nourishment by bringing together many diverse voices in the broadest possible discourse on the uses, abuses, and meanings of food." The first two issues of the journal contain articles on the quest for cinnamon, the chocolate and lard sculptures of Janine Antoni, the first French cooking school in New York, early cookbooks by black Americans, Sicilian cheese in Arab recipes, love of McDonald's, and turtle soup. There is a poem called "Ripe Peach" by Louise Gluck and a drawing by Mike Glier called "The Romaines of the Day."
Contributor Fabio Parasecoli applies terms from literary theory to foodhistory. Nouvelle cuisine, he writes, was like New Criticism. The new, creativechef must transform and re-invent classic recipes that constitute the canon.Among the new techniques is deconstruction. Even Nigella Lawson explains how to"break down pesto into component parts." Spanish chef Ferran Adria, who has beencompared to his fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí, gives Jacques Derrida andother philosophers and theorists the credit for inspiring him. "A deconstructeddish," he explains, "protects the 'spirit' of each product it employs andpreserves (even enhances) the intensity of its flavor. Still," he adds, "itpresents a totally transformed combination of textures."
Of course, in the restaurant, deconstruction can be a bit of a shock, as Adriaadmits: "When patrons are expecting the Curry Chicken they ordered from the menuand are served a curry ice-cream with apple jelly, coconut soup, chicken broth,and raw onion rings, they are usually taken aback." I bet. But perhaps for somethe pleasure of being in the avant-garde of creative cuisine will soothe thedisappointment. Adria's deconstructed soup, with its corn mousse, cauliflowermousse, tomato puree, peach granita, beet foam, almond ice cream, and basiljelly, is certainly entertaining to read about, if not to eat. The next phase,perhaps, will be virtual or conceptual cuisine, where the food is not onlydeconstructed but imaginary.
Patrons might also be surprised by Lisa Heldke's postcolonial take on eatingout. "When I went away to graduate school," writes Heldke, who teaches philosophyand women's studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, "I entered a world ofexperimental cooking and eating, a world heavily populated by academics andpeople with disposable incomes who like to travel. It's a world where entirecuisines go in and out of vogue in a calendar year." But gradually, Heldke becamedisenchanted: "For one thing, various experiences made me feel uncomfortableabout the easy acquisitiveness with which I approached a new kind of food, thetenacity with which I collected adventures. Was such collecting really just abenign recreation, like stamp collecting?"
Or was it not benign at all? "The unflattering name I chose for my activitieswas 'cultural food colonialism,' which made me your basic colonizer," shecontinues. "When I began to examine my culture-hopping in the kitchen and inrestaurants, I found echoes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europeanpainters and explorers, who set out in search of ever 'newer,' ever more 'remote'cultures which they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out of context, and useas the raw materials for their own efforts at creation and discovery."
Overall, I have the uneasy feeling that we are coming around full circle, toanother point where the simple pleasures of cooking and eating--or going out andeating--become sources of moral guilt, political incorrectness, and theoreticalanxiety, in addition to the familiar concerns about carbohydrates, proteins,sugars, and fats. Sensational exposés of the restaurant business likeAnthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential may also act as deterrents to enjoyable dining out; and the anti-genetic-modification, pro-organic-foods movement seems to be adding another layer of ideology to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Meanwhile, though, the guys who run Al's Café-Bar in Exmouth Market are thinking about expanding from the full English fry-up to German home-cooking. Deconstruction will have to wait. Apfel strudel comes first.
