THE obscure is now officially mainstream. Recently, I watched a video online in the New York Times’ Urban Eye about a 500-year-old Flemish hobby that I’d never heard of before. It’s called “finching” and involves getting your pet finch to sit in a dark, ventilated box and compete for singing honours against similarly sequestered finches. In the olden days, finchers would actually use a hot needle to sew shut the eyes of the little birds to eliminate distractions.
Enchanting, non? But this is the sort of bizarre information we are routinely fed these days. The stranger the endeavour, the more newspapers and magazines think we need to know about it. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of food. Actually, I’m surprised the Times’ video didn’t point out that after they finish singing, the finches make a delicious accompaniment to frites and cherry lambic.
Case in point: in April, I attended a writers’ conference in New York. At a session on food writing, the editor of Saveur talked about what that magazine was looking for in the way of stories, which turned out to be oblique angles on arcane topics.
Saveur, we were told, didn’t want articles on, say, a dozen great herb butters for grilled meats -- the sort of thing that I, as a reader, might find handy. Instead, it craved stories about unusual ingredients, like corn fungus (that’s huitlacoche or “corn truffle” to a food magazine editor), and, in particular, about some gnarled corn-fungus-gathering pioneer. I gathered that this monosyllabic elder would be imbued with mystical properties because of his astonishing fungus-harvesting abilities. If the old fungus gatherer or squid de-inker or ferret strangler were missing a few teeth for the photo, so much the better. Obviously, native costume would also be a plus.
I suppose this National Geographic approach to food articles is okay, in small doses. But there is way too much of it going on outside National Geographic. What ever happened to “news you can use”? In the hunt for the obscure, and the insistence on zeroing in on the most eccentric in-the-know individuals, magazines of every kind are alienating their readers.
Who needs another article on lark’s tongue curry and how some wizened monk heaps it on a flatbread he makes out of wood-smoke and karma? As a cook, I’d rather discover that Mario Batali’s enoteca, Otto, serves shards of blanched asparagus with chopped fresh mint and bits of pecorino, and it’s an unbeatable combination that you can make yourself.
Magazine editors are clearly desperate to distinguish their publications from the competition. It’s not enough for them to print a piece announcing that it’s salmon season, and here are some great things to do with salmon. Its yarn must be about a particular restaurant that gets all its salmon from a certain fisherman (gnarled -- natch) who only casts his net in one far-flung crystalline river. The chef of this superior boite will dreamily claim that this salmon has a flavour like no other. We readers are left wriggling and drooling at home, wondering why we are so pathetically undiscerning that we’ll buy salmon from any old shop, which gets it from any old fisherman, trolling any old sea.
The esoteric quality of such information has fostered a fresh kind of fear in people, especially those who define themselves as cutting edge -- by which I mean, of course, New Yorkers. The Times recently ran a piece called Dinner at the Foodies’: Purslane and Anxiety, on how difficult it is for the city’s gourmets to compete with each other in terms of the latest, greatest, freshest and most local. As a history professor at Vassar College explained, “'Entertaining and cooking have become an integral part of how certain people demonstrate their cultural cachet.'” He added, “‘people don’t want to be associated with the wrong kind of olive oil.’”
Snobbery, then, prevails; the true connoisseur must always be above the herd. As one Brooklyn foodie confided to the Times, “‘As soon as something becomes overpopularized, I don’t want to serve it anymore. I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to identify something I made as being from a book or a restaurant. I don’t want anyone to be able to say, oh, I see where he got this idea to put microgreens on top of his fish fillets.’”
Stop the foodie carousel, will you? I want to get off.
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