Shut Up and Eat

My mother thought of food the way we all now do: as a means of self-definition.Illustration by Michael Gillette

I’ve lost my copy of the first recipe my mother wrote out for me, which was also the first thing I ever cooked. It was for spaghetti bolognese, “spag bol,” a British recipe that blends a meat ragù of a northern-Italian type with the dry pasta beloved in the south, and was sometimes said to be Britain’s national dish. What stands out in my memory is not so much the dish itself—I’ve both cooked and eaten it so often that I know it by heart—as the recipe’s length. It covered two closely written sides of lined foolscap, and began with detailed instructions on how to turn on and light a gas burner. I was a graduate student in English literature at Oxford at the time, but my mother clearly had a low estimation of my practical intelligence and coping skills.

She was right. I didn’t know what I was doing in the kitchen. For the most part, recipes are useful only when you already have a pretty good idea of how to cook. Sweating an onion, browning ground beef, adding wine and cooking off the alcohol, seasoning with salt—all things you need to do in making even a basic spag bol—are all simple once you know how. If you don’t know, well, there’s a reason it took my mother two full pages of foolscap.

That spag-bol recipe was a painstaking document, and one in which you could sense the edge of anxiety. This was true of all my mother’s dealings with cooking, though not with eating. Love-hate relationships with food are common these days, but that’s not what I’m talking about: as an eater, my mother had a pretty straightforward relationship with food. She knew what she liked, and ate it, and while she’d complain about putting on weight, she took a simple, reliable pleasure in eating and drinking. Cooking, though, was different. It was a serious business, and although my mother was very good at it, I’m not sure she derived much pleasure from it. There was too much at stake.

Cooking was a skill that my mother, Julia Gunnigan, acquired late and in unusual circumstances. She was born poor in the rural west of Ireland in 1920, the eldest of eight children, of whom seven were girls. She took the path that, in her time and place, was the most glamorous imaginable: she became a nun. Her order was a missionary group called the Presentation Sisters; after her ordination, she took the name Sister Eucharia. Sister Eucharia spent most of the next fifteen years in Madras (now Chennai), where the Presentation Sisters have a group of schools known as Church Park, and she rose to be the head of its teacher-training college. When she resigned, abruptly, in 1958, it was a big deal in the educational community of Madras—and an even bigger deal for my mother, who left wearing her nun’s habit, with no possessions apart from a plane ticket to London, a city she had never visited, and ten pounds in cash.

The contrast must have been overwhelming between the closed world of pre-Vatican II religious orders and the life that my mother found outside—first London, where she met my father, then marriage and motherhood in Hamburg, Calcutta, Borneo, Burma, Hong Kong, as my banker father moved from post to post. In her forties, she had to acquire a great many skills in order to cope with this wide new world, and one of them was cooking. That, in short, was why cooking was so fraught for her.

Her own mother, a farmer’s wife, had been a good cook, but the kind of good cook who has to feed a large family on next to no money. In the thirties and “hungry forties,” the family, like almost everyone else in rural Ireland, was often short of cash. During those tight stretches, the only store-bought products were tea and sugar; everything else came from the farm. Foraging, preserving, and eating seasonally, my County Mayo grandmother was right on trend for the Brooklyn food fashions of the two-thousand-tens. My mother wasn’t that kind of cook. She was reinventing herself as a well-off housewife, a thrower of drinks parties and dinner parties, who knew the names of fancy foreign dishes and how to make them. Cooking was part of a project of self-invention; it was part of being someone different from the person she had been.

The specifics of how my mother came to be interested in cooking are unusual. She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after running a convent school in Madras. At the same time, though, her story is typical: people have come to use food to express and to define their sense of who they are. If you live and cook the same way your grandmother did, you’ll probably never open a cookbook. Cookbooks, and everything they symbolize, are for people who don’t live the way their grandparents did.

Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mì boom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that’s defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn’t true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be.

By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that more or less the entire developed world was shopping and cooking and dining out in a way that was given over to self-definition and self-expression and identity-creation and trend-catching and hype and buzz and the new new thing, which sometimes had to do with newness (foams! gels! spherification!) and sometimes with new ways of being old (slow food! farm-to-table! country ham!). My mother was thinking about food like that from the start of the nineteen-sixties. I have spent a fair part of my working life writing about food, and have often been asked how and why I got interested in it. I was never able to give a full answer, because the pattern became apparent to me only years afterward. By now, it’s clear that my interest in food came from growing up with someone to whom food mattered the way that, to a great many people, it matters now.

Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious. The infinite range of choices and possible self-expressions means that there are so many ways to go wrong. You can make people ill, and you can make yourself look absurd. People feel judged by their food choices, and they are right to feel that, because they are.

I’ve worked as a restaurant critic twice, from 1992 to 1995 for the London Observer, and from 2012 to 2013 for the Guardian. In the gap between these two stints (during which I spent a few years writing a food column for British Esquire), several big things changed. The first was that the food got a lot better, pretty much everywhere. There is no downside to this: we’re cooking and eating much better than we used to, and that’s great. (The exception, oddly enough, is France, but that’s another story.) A second thing that happened was that I became better known in the restaurant world, thanks largely to my first novel, “The Debt to Pleasure,” which came out in 1996, hit some best-seller lists, and had a crazy narrator who was obsessed with food. It won a Julia Child Cookbook Award—now there’s a prize named for someone who understood the importance of food in the process of self-invention. I got to know some people in the industry, and one of my most prized possessions is a photograph—taken at a colloquium in Finland that I was chairing—of me sitting on a sofa next to David Chang, René Redzepi, Massimo Bottura, and Magnus Nilsson. I mention this to establish my credentials for what I’m about to say. I’m not an embittered outsider in the world of food; I’m not a puritan, of the sort who thinks that talking about food is like having sex with the light on. But I do think that something has gone wrong with food in our culture.

The first time I quit restaurant reviewing, in 1995, I remember thinking that the fascination with food was a bubble: we had reached Peak Food. I may never have been more wrong about anything. The contemporary fascination with food, with chefs, celebrity chefs, TV chefs, with every aspect of everything to do with ingredients and cooking and eating and what we feed ourselves and our children and where we eat out and how we define ourselves through food—all of these things had barely begun. The online ferment around food wasn’t even in its infancy.

If I had to put my feelings about what went wrong during the ensuing two decades into two words, they would be: too much. There’s just too much of everything. Too much hype, too much page space, too many programming hours, too many features and recipes and travel pieces and reviews and profiles and polemics, far, far, far too much online commentary and judgment and chatter. Chefs, who more than anyone benefit from the huge surge in attention, are, in my experience, mostly wary of it. I often joke that the Culinary Institute of America, alongside its courses in gastronomic history and kitchen skills, ought to have a special module called “Pretending Not to Hate Bloggers.” Chefs live on the receiving end of a constant fire hose of commentary and criticism, of ill-intentioned Yelping and TripAdvising, all of it—in their eyes—from people who know far less about their craft than they do.

Everyone’s a critic, they say, and that’s certainly true of the food world today. Of course, everyone has always been a critic, in the sense that customers have always made the most basic judgment of all: Do I want to come back to this joint? But there’s a contemporary development with respect to volume, in the dual sense of quantity and loudness. The volume of all this critical chatter is turned way up, and it’s harder than ever to ignore. Food is my favorite thing to talk about and to learn about, but an interest that is reasonable on a personal and an individual scale has grown out of all proportion in the wider culture. Imagine that you’re fascinated by model trains. You’re on fire with interest, you think about them all the time, they’re your consuming passion. But then, over about twenty years, the entire culture becomes obsessed with model trains. The model-train blogosphere grows exponentially. Model-train makers are plastered all over the covers of magazines, and stage train-building smackdowns on TV, and are treated as the new rock stars. Might you, in your private heart, think that maybe the whole model-train thing, still of tremendous interest to you, has somehow got a bit out of hand? That’s where I feel food is today.

The other thing that changed during those twenty years has to do with ethics. Not so long ago, food was food. (I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with people in the industry, debating some point backward and forward, that end with someone shrugging and saying, “It’s just food.”) That’s not true anymore. Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance. People feel pressure to shop and eat responsibly, healthfully, sustainably. At least, that’s the impression you get from what’s written and said about food culture—that it’s a form of surrogate politics. To some, it’s not even surrogate politics; it’s the real deal, politics at its most urgent and consequential. Alice Waters presents the case beautifully: “Eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word ‘political’—not just to mean having to do with voting in an election, but to mean ‘of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people’—from the family to the school, to the neighborhood, the nation, and the world. Every single choice we make about food matters, at every level. The right choice saves the world.”

Maybe these sentiments wouldn’t strike a chord in Ukraine or Liberia or the territories under the control of the Islamic State, but there’s a moving, warming, generous idea here—that by taking loving care when we purchase summer corn, heirloom tomatoes, organically fed and outdoor-reared chicken, we’re doing something that’s charged with political significance. With these choices, the thought is that we’re doing our humble little bit to save the world. We’re doing something that “matters at every level.”

I’m thrilled by this notion, and yet I find that I can’t submit to it. For a start, we can’t feed the whole world this way. Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities—which is a positive development, because, from an environmental point of view, density is good. At the same time, that world population, according to the United Nations, is heading for a total just below eleven billion by the century’s end. We can manage this, probably, but we can’t do so without industrial agriculture. This doesn’t negate the individual virtue of our consumer choices, but it does mean they take us only so far toward making a better world. If shopping and cooking really are the most consequential, most political acts in my life, perhaps what that means is that our sense of the political has shrunk too far—shrunk so much that it fits into our recycled-hemp shopping bags. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale. Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.”

Those thoughts run through my mind just about every time I shop—which is every day, pretty much, since I am indeed that person, the fresh and local and seasonal one. I don’t think my choices are going to change or save the world, but this is how I prefer to cook and eat. I cooked grouse last night, the super-funky wild game bird that’s in season in England only from August 12th to December 10th. Tonight, I’m making spag bol, for the zillionth time. Through the years, I’ve experimented with all sorts of variations, from the addition of chicken liver (which my wife likes, because that’s what her mother used to do) to the canonical ragù, using three kinds of meat (pork, veal, pancetta) and three kinds of liquid (wine, milk, tomato paste). The one I always come back to, though, is the simplest and best of all, my mother’s: onion, ground beef, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, wine, thyme, salt, a minimum of three hours’ cooking. My kids will love it; they always do. Cooking it will remind me of my mother; it always does. She didn’t think she was saving the world by cooking. But she did know that it was part of the process by which she saved herself. That goes for a lot of us. To me, that’s significance enough. ♦