nevermind the bricolage

from food porn to food deserts

Someone recommended that I see the film, One Hundred Foot Journey, a film set in an idyllic village in France that revolves around two restaurants--you guessed it-one hundred feet and a million miles from each other. It's a sweet film, nothing that profound, a light-hearted exploration of cultural difference, racism, bigotry, traditions and the benefit of learning from each other. An Indian family of cooks moves across the street from a Michelin-starred bastion of French culinary tradition-sparks fly and food is the medium.

As I watched the camera linger over eggs, the sheen of the yolk captured in a transcendental light and watched over and over as characters argued about, tasted, waxed lyrical about mushrooms, the five sauces of French cooking and the delight of Indian spices--I realized that I was watching a 90-minute food porn film! Now, I'm ok with food porn, although I must confess, much of it is lost on me, not sure if it is my lifelong fish-allergy or what, but when it comes to food it is probably the least adventurous part of my life-caution always prevails with me when it comes to food-I'm happy eating a very narrow set of foods, so food porn is watchable and enjoyable, but I am not that turned on by it and hardly a full-on particiapnt and not even much of a voyeur. I have a friend with whom I occasionally go to restaurants on her 'hot-list' and I love her reaction to the food she tastes as much, if not more than the reaction of my own taste buds.

But the film got me thinking about this love affair we are having with food. It's been building for years and in the past decade has poked above the surface of the culture and gone mainstream. it's not just the Food Channel, Cooking Channel, celebrity chef culture, there are magazines, there is a food-truck craze that shows little sign of abating, and so many other avenues down which our culture celebrates, no revels orgiastically, in food. One Hundred Foot Journey is at least the second film this summer that trades in food--Chef, Jon Favreau's homage to food truck eating opened the summer.

I have no issue at all with it, and in fact, I enjoy going to eat with people because it tends to mean that one is with people for whom you care and who care for you in return, and the occasion is usually a really enjoyable one, because food brings us together. I am just wondering what the current giddiness with food reflects about us and about culture at present.

There is no doubt in my mind that foodie-culture is connected to other shifts in our culture that are moving us more and more away from the modern world of utility and convenience. Food isn't just fuel, it is something to take delight in-it's about community, connecting with ourselves and others, connecting with the earth and with the material world in general. Cooking at home has become the new 'going-out,' building a list of go-to restaurants has become de-rigeur for many.

Slow-food movements, the increasing expansion of health food and organics into middle America (and middle-Britain for that matter), farmers markets, all these things point to a new relationship with food in our culture. And it is globally fuelled-food comes from anywhere and everywhere and the rules are broken almost everytime you go to a restaurant-in the 21st century, anything goes-old school, new school, in-between school, no school.

The other side of the equation is the counter to all this. We hear talk of food deserts, of large portions of our cities where there is little access to good food--processed and fast food remain the main diet of many poor and disadvantaged people, particulalry in the inner-city and un-gentrified parts of the urban landscape.

As always, a complicated picture, on the one hand you have a large section of the public enjoying food and exploring new eating and diet horizons in a manner that is mind-boggling, and on the other, people struggling to get access to affordable and healthy food. Food is always about access and economics-it's not that there isn't enough food to go around, it is that food, like everything exists within an economic horizon of profit and loss and it goes where the money is.

So what to make of it? Well, a couple of thoughts. Firstly, I think our new found devotion to food has something to do with a desire for a home, a sense of home anyway, that we have never had. I mean 'home' in the sense of a time in which everything felt ordered, organized and laid-out for us, in a way that we simply cannot experience in our digitally interconnected, globally shaped pluralized world. I think our time is longing, yearning even, for a rootedness and an anchoring--think about our retro-fascination for instance, and that food is a galvanizing place--all this cooking, eating, preparing, it reeks of home.

Secondly, I think it is about re-ordering the new world we find ourselves in by thinking about things that we haven't thought about for years. And food is central in that. Again, think about the 50s and 60s--processed food-tv dinners-fast-food culture-food on the run-colouring, additives, chemicals, dyes, living with little sense of where food came from, what it might represent beyond fuel for our working lives (work being another element of our world that we are reviewing). Now we are starting to think about food, enjoy it, savour it, prepare it, celebrate and take time with it.

As the modern worlds loses its grip on our lives, we are, as I just mentioned, taking the time to re-think many things and this is indicative of a huge cultural shift that we are all experiencing and we come toward the middle of the second decade of the 21st century we are beginning to re-frame our lives, our worlds, with new perspectives and ideas, letting go of ways that shaped us for much of the 20th century and finally finding our way into the 21st.

on happiness v.2

After this morning's post on happiness I came across another article which addresses consumer culture and happiness. Mcdonald's has launched a new character tied to their programme to market 'healthier' yogurt side snacks to the Happy Meal part of their menu. Not surprisingly, the character is named Happy, makes sense, but it's a pretty strange little creature to say the least.

 

Happy Thanksgiving

America comes to the table today, and then launches into a shopping frenzy. Black Friday is generally the biggest shopping day of the year, people have been queuing up outside some stores for days just to get bargains--madness, the last thing I'll be doing tomorrow is going anywhere near a shopping mall.

It's funny how celebrations that weren't part of ones formative years don;t resonate, at least not for me, I find Thanksgiving a bit peculiar, a sort of practice run for Christmas dinner really.

gravy boat: the national

Just to get the salivary glands and taste buds working properly for tomorrow, here's The National with an animated song on Bob's Burgers.

on food and sustainability

 

Over the summer we had some conversations related to food issues--industrial food production versus sustainability, food deserts, food anxieties etc. we had conversations with local farmer's market organizers, urban farmers and gardeners, food advocates who work with parents and children on eating habits and diet. The conversations were shaped by a viewing of the documentary, Food Inc. which will change the way we think about food consumption and production if we let it. I was surprised at some of the resistance to the conversation, of course, it came from those who assumed a certain posture without even bothering to listen or engage, but I was also very surprised at the readiness of a larger group of people to really wrestle with the issues that face us surrounding food.

The video at the top of the post was sponsored by Chipotle, as part of an on-going project to talk about what the company regards as part of their corporate responsibility with regard to sustainable foods. On their website the premise of the animation is given,

"In a dystopian fantasy world, all food production is controlled by fictional industrial giant Crow Foods. Scarecrows have been displaced from their traditional role of protecting food, and are now servants to the crows and their evil plans to dominate the food system. Dreaming of something better, a lone scarecrow sets out to provide an alternative to the unsustainable processed food from the factory."

Their is also an app-game associated to the whole thing. Of course, this is essentially advertising, but it's well done, and in my mind, good advertising and good products are vital--it's not going to go away so how companies handle these issues and address growing social concerns on issues related to the products they offer is important, and let's face it, ultimately good for their business.

The cover of a song from the Willy Wonka soundtrack by Fiona Apple, who is an avowed vegan, adds a subtle beauty to the little film if you ask me.

For the Foodies: Unicorn pie

A medieval cookbook was recently re-discovered. Included in the 14th century book are recipes for hedgehogs, codswallop and for preparing unicorns. It is believed that the book was compiled by a cook named Geoffrey Fule, who worked in the kitchens of Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England (1328-1369). I'm sure it was very tasty.

cheese on toast-a winner!!

That inimitable institution known as The British Cheese Board, recently ran a competition in conjunction with a group of scientists to find the perfect recipe for cheese on toast. Now, this may not appeal as much to American readers, who rely heavily on their own grilled cheese sandwiches, but cheese on toast, along with beans on toast, is part of the Great British Food habit of yesteryear, but still holds the national taste in a small way.

The winning recipe, entered by the delightfully named, Steve Tickle, involves, Wensleydale cheese, bacon, spring onions, a teaspoon of Colmans English Mustard and white bread. You can add another grated cheese to the finished item--a mature cheddar, or my favourite named cheese--Sussex Charmer.

going bananas

We've doing a lot of talking around issues of food of late--food deserts, insecurities, processed versus local--much of the content of the more recent conversations about food that seem to gathering cultural cache and speed. This is an interesting blog from Nautilus magazine about bananas and their journey to the supermarket--eye-opening, as most conversations about food sources and processing tend to be.

food glorious food

We've just finished up a three week discussion about food. It began with a viewing of Food Inc., a documentary about processed food and industrial farming etc. It is challenging to watch at times, discomforting to say the least, but it is also eye-opening and demonstrates how ignorant most of us are about where our food comes from, how it is produced and the economic effects it has on certain segments of the population.

What has been interesting is the defensiveness about eating habits that emerged almost overnight--some people talking about the 'food-police' and being deprived of American food,' (most of them not actually in attendance, which is usually how it goes with churches in my experience) when nobody had actually made any statements at all about what any of us were or were not eating. Obviously, the film challenges us to consider what we eat, but the documentary does more to awaken our understanding of where food comes from and how multi-national corporate farming and food production companies threaten the livelihood of small farmers and impact everything from minimum wage to diet.

We also had a slew of speakers who covered the spectrum of food issues--Whole Foods representatives, farmers market organizers, slow food proponents, urban gardeners--in three weeks we covered an impossibly long list of issues--organic foods, food deserts, food insecurity, school food, home-grown versus processed-sugar content-vegan, vegetarian, meat all via a fantastic group of people who did nothing but demonstrate a desire to support better eating habits, a new economic model for food production and consumption in general.

There seems to be a growing interest in not only better eating habits but a more locally sourced approach to food consumption and a shift away from a diet of processed food which virutally everyone agrees is a serious problem. But like religion and sex, discussions about food get sticky--we all have guilty pleasures, secret desires, and a sometime beligerent defensiveness about our own habits with regard to food. The goal of the conversations was awareness rather than conversion but when favourite foods are noted as problematic, well you get the picture.

Food is so central to life and we take it all so much for granted. I think it is becoming another of those demarcation lines between religious groups--there are increasing numbers of people who would rather think about their faith through the lens of lived life--food, population, environment--than through abstract dogma, people for whom theology that is political, i.e. about public life, appeals much more than thinking about religion in a vaccuum. I am not saying that these things are mutually exclusive or that there are not people on both sides who would happily consume a diet of abstract religious ideas, but there is something brewing that hints at different approaches to living life and practising faith.

if everything is porn is nothing porn?

Part of our conversation last week in the theology/youth culture class inevitably turned to the issue of identity, sexuality and physicality. The undercurrent of most theological discussions undertaken at seminary seem to wend their way toward talk about sex--largely because I think it is a topic so widely sloganized but seldom addressed and, let's face it, it's a big area of human existence that warrants more than a cursory good/bad comment about this or that act. Anyway, we had wade through the usual distractors in the conversation, namely,  the party-line church responses to sexual activity, then the hot-button social agendas of  trafficking and slavery and then of course to  pornography (that sounds callous I realize and I dont intend it to be, and distractors might be too harsh of a word, perhaps starting points would be better--but the simple fact is, that the larger conversation around human sexuality in many of the christian environs I find myself in tend to focus on these issues and they have to be worked through in order to get down to the real issues people really want to discuss, which are much more subjective, personal and intimate.

We actually didn't spend too much time wading in the deep waters of socio-sexuality's darker threads, perhaps it is the benefit of an intensive or perhaps it was a particularly sharp and engaged group of people--probably a bit of both. And we held this conversation in the larger frame of identity construction in the 21st century and the effect of youth cultural dynamics upon it, so we didn't belabour too many of those expected topics. But after class was over and I had a bit more time to think things over, it occurred to me that everything is pornography today--we speak about food-porn, interior-design porn, fashion-porn, porn-violence--what we mean, I think, is an overdose of imagery related to a particular topic, the stylizing of things for maximum effect and titillation--be it the representation of food, particular fashion styles, people having sex, a Tarantino movie (interestingly, the film-maker, Nicolas Winding Refn-Drive/Only God Forgives refers to himself as a pornographer in a recent Guardian interview)  or the perfect design and layout of an interior room.

The question is: if everything is porn, is anything porn? Does that mean we live in a world where everything thing is viewed through a pornographic lens, and if so, what do we do about that? I realize that these 'other pornographies' are perhaps more nuanced versions of the 'real thing' but that raises the question of what the 'real thing' is when it comes to porn, whether or not pornography is the portrayal of the sexual act itself or the particular way it is styled and represented? I imagine that a collective 'duh!" is being expressed by many who have done much more focused thinking on the topic of pornography. So I'll answer my own thought and say that I think pornography is the stylization and fetishization of sex and the removal of the real with regard to sexual activity. But if the removal of the real is the essence of pornography and everything is now porn, is nothing then real? Aaaah!! The great existential questions of life. I blame Jeff Koons. Not really, but I do think that Jeff Koons was one of the artists of the late 20th century who applied this equation to his work, particularly in his sculptures and images involving himself and his Italian porn-star wife. These works, one of which is featured at the top of this post, featured him and his wife in varying stages and positions of intimacy, in graphic detail. Koons said that they were not porn, or intended to be seen as such, they were simply images of a couple in love--but many did--perhaps because we are capable of turning anything into porn--especially images of people engaging in sexual or congress, copulation, fornication, shagging or fucking. etc., or perhaps because they are pornographic, but that determination would be up to the viewer I think. "the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction"--this is one of three main definitions offered on pornography in the dictionary--the first two refer to erotic depiction--but again, these days anything can be eroticized and nurtured for maximum arousal--think of the way the advertising industry presents food--they even have a magazine for food stylists!

So the depicting of food in a sensational manner qualifies as porn, as do most things in our visually-driven world, and , in a culture built upon desire/false desire, it's hard not to feel bombarded. But the real issue might just be that our focus on pornography is mis-directed--perhaps we should worry more about food porn and all the other mainstream depictions than the stuff we usually get bent out of shape about. Or maybe nothing is porn anymore because something is generally defined as much by what it is not as by what it is, and if everything is porn, which it seems to be...

I find it interesting that Koons wraps himself and his wife in the embrace of a snake--echoes of the Garden of Eden, and he did in fact proclaim that they were the new Adam and Eve--media man and woman. So welcome to the new Eden, where it seems everything is naked and unashamed.

A few years back Rick Poynor, wrote a book called Designing Pornotopia, in which he argued that we were in the process of creating an environment where our "dreams of sex are allowed to permeate areas of life they would never have been permitted to until recently." It's worth a read. The term pornotopia is drawn from the work of Stephen Marcus who defined it as, "that vision which regards all of human experience as a series of exclusively sexual events or conveniences." I guess all of this leads me to the conclusion that a conversation about sex is no longer about the genital interactions of particualr humans as much as it is about life in virutally every experience and expression--I feel a new class coming on!!

(p.s. take the time to check out some of the links)