September 4, 2002

NEXT BUSINESS: The New Yorker's food issue (Aug. 19 and 26, 2002). Something about it put me off right away, something more than the special-issue phenomenon, which seems to be spreading like the plague through general-interest publications. Maybe it was the writers' boastfulness about their own home cooking (Adam Gopnik and Jane Kramer are notable offenders here; then there's John Seabrook, with his obsessing about white apricots), but of course that is just New York, a city where everything becomes a ruthless competition and whose inhabitants, for reasons of climate and sprawl, are more likely than San Franciscans to see food as a product of human activity, human invention and intervention, than of the earth. They make food; we grow it.

It might have been the lack of attention paid to the ethics of food: of the growing market acceptance of organic foods, for instance, or the realities of animal husbandry and meat production, or what the environmental cost of growing coffee actually is. I simply hated Bill Buford's piece (yet another rip-off of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential) about wild-and-crazy chef Mario Batali and his restaurant, Babbo, which a friend of mine ate at recently and found mediocre. A certain sort of chef, with a certain, carefully cultivated aura of glamorous piracy, has become a media darling; yet all the swooning accounts of these wondrous creatures are the same: the late nights filled with swaggering and swearing, the panicked, overheated kitchens, the faint but pervasive – and stifling – odor of criminality. Enough already!

I did like Elizabeth Kolbert's piece on New York's overworked food inspectors, "Everyone Lies," for its calmness and its patiently rendered layerings of Dickensian detail: rats, bugs, spoilage, sewage, and everything else we all know is likely to be found behind the scenes even at higher-end restaurants and don't let ourselves think about lest we stop going out to eat altogether.

The issue can be summed up in one word, and that word is fetish ("an object, principle, etc., irrationally reverenced, esp. in an obsessive manner" – OED). Yes, food is important; it is central. But it's an everyday importance and centrality; it's a ripe peach, a slice of tomato with a pinch of sea salt, a lightly grilled ahi steak. It's the occasion for connection, not connection itself. And it certainly isn't Jane Kramer "waiting for permission to dig a charcoal pit in Central Park for the baby lamb that I will then smother in mint and cumin, cover with earth, and bask to such tenderness that you could scoop it out and eat it with your fingers." Did someone call a food inspector?