Mean Cuisine

Washington Monthly, July, 2001 by Greg Critser

Gone is the Joy of Cooking. Todays celebrity chefs are serving up a menu of global doom and politically twisted snobbery.

LAST YEAR, ALICE WATERS, THE ORIGINATOR of California cuisine and the reigning moral conscience of American cooking, sat down and wrote a letter to the president of the United States that she hoped would, in time, completely change the way Americans view the food they eat. In the letter, Waters took the president up on a pledge he had made to her at a recent fundraising dinner--namely, that he would consider planting an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn.

It was the kind of "consideration" that any good politician proffers while eating a million-dollar bowl of organic pecan ice cream, the kind that Bill Clinton was particularly good at proffering. When Waters told the president that she would even "send the seeds" and then "come and plant them," the gastronomically kvelling chief executive had responded: "You do that, Alice!"

But a few months later, after a follow-up letter failed to evoke the same spirited commitment, Waters cued up a lobbying campaign, drafting a cadre of like-minded friends--among them California Senator Barbara Boxer and the homemaking entrepreneur Martha Stewart--to write similar letters. Again, no luck. The president wrote back, but now he was saying such things as "an informal kitchen garden would not be in keeping with the formal gardens of the White House," and promising, as a sop, to put "a vegetable garden" on the roof of the executive residence. Well, that wasn't what they had discussed. Waters sent off another letter.

What Waters wanted was a "national monument" to organic agriculture--Olympic-sized compost heaps, espaliered pear trees, edible topiaries--a Versailles of the American Georgic! "I meant it!" she assured me a few months later, when we met for an interview at Berkeley's Acme Bakery. "This is important stuff for me and for the country! Because I have a vision that, if things don't change, my grandkids won't even know what a real apple tastes like! So [the White House garden] was important."

Perhaps. But in the early 21st century, one might imagine that world peace, global warming, or even the price of gasoline might also compete for a commander-in-chief's limited attention. More to the point: If one were to contemplate seriously a monument to American agriculture, it would certainly not be organic agriculture, which provides a negligible portion of the nation's everyday vittles (and which would wreak its own environmental havoc on vast swaths of virgin land if prescribed for the world's hungry). No, the proper monument to American farming would more likely be a manicured stand of Monsanto sugar beets, arranged around a statue of a modern farmer perched inside his air conditioned tractor--Georgius Mechanicus, if you will.

Yet, as Alice and I talked, I came to realize the true significance of her letter: In 21st-century America, chefs preach. And preach and preach and preach and preach...

Chefs have always preached. But historically they did it to other chefs. Writing about the excesses of nouvelle cuisine in the 1983 edition of French Provincial Cooking, the noted cook and author Elizabeth David warned her fellows of"a certain coldness and ungenerosity of spirit, an indifference to the customer" In his 1825 The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the grandfather of modern culinary writing, cautioned against burdening the customer with the concerns of the chef.

Later on, when chefs did preach to the diner, theirs was a message of middle-class joy. To Julia Child and Betty Crocker, for example, great food was that which the average consumer could buy at the supermarket, take home, and cook.

But today's chefs, particularly today's celebrity chefs, cleave to a different hortatory, one directed not at each other but almost entirely at the diner, the ultimate vessel of their commerce. And a big and politically influential commerce that is. Once confined to a few postwar technocrats like Child and Crocker, today, dozens of celebrity chefs compete to hawk their wares on QVC and the Food Network. Their expensive cookbooks, inevitably given away during pledge drives, tutor the viewers of public broadcasting. Touring the country giving cooking demos in upmarket suburban malls, they are nothing less than modern pashas in toques.

But they aren't just peddling a better risotto or personalized nonstick skillets. Today's celebrity chefs have assumed a graver mission: to school the country--or at least its aspiring elites--on the politics of food. Gone is Betty Crocker's vibrant optimism. Today's activist chefs are dour. From their menus to their multimedia bully pulpits, more and more of America's big chefs routinely preach not a joyful gospel of God's great abundance, but rather a message of doom and scarcity, as if the 20th century and the agricultural revolution had never happened.

In their worldview, food is no longer something to be enjoyed; it is something to be feared and understood through a complicated set of new rules that acknowledge the global implications of every plate of pate. Though most Americans just want to have fun and tuck into a good meal, spending upwards of $128 billion on high-end dining every year, the uptown chefs just can't lighten up. Instead, they increasingly serve up a message of humorless moral suasion that increasingly ends up on the plates of policymakers around the world.