I'm not proud of it: "It is what it is," as the meaningless saying goes. Truth be told, I used to be addicted to food. I used to be obsessed with it. Then along came the masses and ruined it for me.
When everybody started blogging about and photographing the food served to them in restaurants and sharing their daily ingestions on Facebook, Twitter, etc., I lost my appetite. My special interest had stopped being special and was now not only ubiquitous, but run of the mill. Qu'elle horreur.
When I first moved away from home at the age of 21, it was exciting to comb cookbooks and expand my culinary world. My future husband also liked to cook and we reveled in lavishing money and effort on dinner parties that were nowhere near as fabulous as we pretended. I wrote about food whenever I could for newspapers and magazines, edited the odd cookbook and piled on the pounds gobbling whatever seemed new, especially if it was served to me for free by restaurants eager for ink. I interviewed chefs like TV's Anthony Bourdain.
But like a cheese soufflé served cold and late, my passion ran out of steam. The foodie world's relentless quest for new taste sensations began to seem tired and self-defeating, never mind decadent.
I also blame tasting menus and options that didn't just push the envelope, but threw gasoline on it and set it on fire. In my gig as a food writer, I dined gloriously on dark chocolate terrine with a core of salted foie gras, raw sea urchin served in its prickly shell, bone marrow croquettes, ox tongue tortellini, lobster poutine with avocado frites, and a strawberry, merlot and lavender jam that once captivated the otherwise largely incorruptible Pope John Paul II. Lovely. Thank-you.
Fond memories of these dishes shall marble my thighs forever. But it was all too much. I've pushed my chair back from the table and emitted a fragrant, extended belch. Now I'm headed back to the movies.
I'm not the only one who's weary of foodies' constant striving to put a cherry on top of whatever was the last remarkable thing they ate. Cultural commentator David Rakoff made good fun of their religious zeal in his book Don't Get Too Comfortable. There, he pilloried a particular "Temple of Food" in California and the equally earnest zeal of its customers and staff. Wrote Rakoff in disgust: "I overheard one bartender say to the other, 'I think I'm going to stay in this weekend and roast garlic.'"
Enough, already, with the slobbering over ingredients, the gassing on about wines, the status-seeking home cooks on a perpetual quest to awe their guests through their attentive way with a dinner party menu.
("I harvested these zucchini blossoms myself and sang all summer to the bees who made this honey. The goat cheese comes from Gertie next door.")
I have nothing against good food; I enjoy it as much as anybody does. I still copy edit a food magazine and even write the odd flowery epistle. I'm just sick of endlessly talking, reading, and hearing about the stuff. Food needs to go back to being a delicious, nutritious backdrop, not the focus of every gathering.
We all like to diss the English and their stuffy, dispassionate ways, but there's something delightful about meals like the ones you see on BBC series, where everybody gamely tucks in but doesn't exhaustively examine, or even mention, the provenance of each dish. Can't we revert to taking good food for granted? Puh-leez?
You can see how refreshing this approach is in 2010's funny movie The Trip. In it, a London-based freelance writer (Steve Coogan) has taken on an assignment to write about some excellent restaurants in northern England, mainly to impress his food-nut girlfriend. When it turns out she can't ride along with him, he invites a happily married buddy (Welsh actor Rob Brydon).
We see these two 40somethings dine in swank eateries where inspired chefs have created masterful dishes that would make genuine food critics swoon. These works of art incorporate all kinds of fantastic local bits and bobs, as the waiters explain to our heroes. But, like a couple of callow schoolboys, the two main characters are too busy competing over their impressions of movie stars to pay any attention to the plated beauties presented for their delectation.
The film is beyond charming, for many reasons. For me, primary amongst them is the fact that the story is about the relationships between the characters, as every meal with family or friends should be, not the warm interplay of nettle foam, blackcurrent jus and escallops of . . . zzz.
