Anti-earnestness and obscenity rules

Our ambivalence about food may be due in part to the influence of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. Excessive zeal on any subject is embarrassing, and getting all earnest and emotional about something as trivial as food is, well, frankly rather silly.

But it seems to me that our uneasiness about food and foodieness involves something more than this. There is a hint here of a more general discomfort about sensual pleasures. Flaunting one’s passion for good food, and talking openly about the pleasure of eating it, is not embarrassing just because it is over-earnest but also because it is somehow a bit obscene.

It has been said that the English have a puritanical streak, but I’m not sure this is quite accurate. Sex, for example, is not regarded as sinful, but as private and personal and therefore a bit embarrassing. Jokes about sex, even quite explicit ones, are acceptable; earnest or fervent talk about the same intimate physical details is obscene. The sensual pleasures of eating, it seems to me, are in the same category – not exactly a taboo subject, but one that should only be talked about in a light-hearted, unserious, jokey manner.

Foodies (or foreigners) who dwell too lyrically, too erotically, on the delights of a perfectly executed, voluptuously creamy sauce bearnaise, will make us squirm, blush and look away. To avoid offending, all they need do is lighten up a bit, laugh at themselves, not take the whole thing quite so seriously. Without such ironic detachment, foodie-talk becomes a form of ‘gastro-porn’ (the term normally refers to lavishly illustrated foodie magazines and cookbooks, with detailed, mouth-watering descriptions of each luscious dish – but can equally be applied to over-enthusiastic foodie conversation).

Tv-dinner rules

Although the idea that we are becoming a nation of discerning gastronomes is, I’m afraid, over-optimistic foodie propaganda – well, a gross exaggeration, anyway – interest in food and cooking has certainly increased in recent years. There is usually at least one food-related programme on every television channel, every day. Admittedly, some of the game-show-style programmes, in which chefs compete to cook a three-course meal in 20 minutes from five ingredients, are more entertainment than cookery – and my foreign informants found this approach to food either amusingly daft or shockingly irreverent. But there are plenty of genuinely informative cookery shows as well.

Whether this actually translates into much real cooking in English homes is a matter for some debate. It is probably true to say that many English people avidly watch the celebrity TV chefs preparing elaborate dishes from fresh, exotic ingredients, while their own plastic-packaged supermarket ready-meals circle sweatily for three minutes in the microwave. (I’ve often done exactly this myself.)

But there are exceptions – people who are genuinely inspired by these programmes, and rush out to buy the TV chefs’ cookbooks and try their recipes. And I’m not just talking about a middle-class, trendy-foodie elite. Delia Smith’s cookbooks are always at the top of the popular bestseller lists, and shopkeepers are frequently caught out by the ‘Delia Effect’, whereby any product she recommends on her evening television show – from the humble egg to a particular make of saucepan – will sell out in shops across the country the next day. A small but significant number of my working-class friends and informants have become much more enthusiastic and adventurous cooks as a result of watching television cookery programmes. A bus driver told me he was a ‘big fan’ of Gary Rhodes. ‘I love his recipes,’ he said. ‘I’d never even tried to cook fish before – not real fish, proper fresh fish. Now I can go to the fishmonger and get, oh, red snapper or whatever and make a really beautiful meal. I did roasted sea bass last weekend. It’s very pricey, is sea bass, but it’s worth it. Beautiful, it was.’

Like most other English born-again food-lovers, however, he only does this sort of ‘proper cooking’ once a week, on Saturday nights. There are still very few households in England where fresh ingredients, pricey or otherwise, are painstakingly prepared and carefully cooked on a daily basis. The shelves of the more up-market supermarkets may be full of exotic vegetables, herbs and spices, but the majority of shoppers still have no idea what these ingredients are or how to cook them. I spent some time hanging around the fruit and veg sections in supermarkets, staring at things like pak choi, wild mushrooms and lemongrass, and randomly asking fellow shoppers if they knew what one was supposed to do with them. Most did not, and neither, for that matter, did the supermarket staff.