What We Eat When We Eat Food: A (Discursive) Social Critique of Taste
Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist most famous for cutting cross sections in abandoned buildings, was also a rather imaginative dinner party host:
At one, recalled his widow, Jane Crawford, he cooked a lovely whole sea bass, but it emerged from the kitchen encased in a block of aspic nearly three feet long. He unmolded it, then gave the table a good kick, so that the aspic wobbled wildly and the bass seemed to fishtail upstream.
No surprise then, that among Matta-Clark’s artworks is a restaurant called, simply, Food — the very first restaurant in SoHo no less. Imagination was on the menu (above):
Artists were also invited weekly to serve as guest chefs, and the whole dinner was considered a performance art piece. One of the most fabled, costing $4, was Matta-Clark’s “bone dinner,” which featured oxtail soup, roasted marrow bones and frogs’ legs, among other bony entrees. After the plates were cleared, the bones were scrubbed and strung together so that diners could wear their leftovers home.
Opened in 1971, Food was ahead of its time. Any trendy restaurant in New York City today shares at least one of the following characteristics with Food: locally sourced and seasonal food, an open kitchen, offal such as tongue and bone marrow, exotic dishes (“raw mackarel with wasabi sauce” read the menu, at at time before “sushi” entered into the American lexicon).
The local/seasonal/organic food trend is most often traced to Alice Water and Chez Panisse (incidentally, also opened in 1971), but it speaks to how corrupted our food culture has become that such an idea could seem revolutionary. What did humans eat before the age of mass transport and chemical fertilizers? The irony is that trendy restaurants and their status-conscious customers now eat the same way as poor peasants in the developing world. The former for ideological reasons, the latter for practical.
A New Yorker piece by Fuschia Dunlop profiles a Chinese restaurant—yes, in China—that takes eating local and eating seasonal to the extreme.
In an age of industrialization, dire pollution, and frequent food scares, the Dragon Well Manor is committed to offering its guests a kind of prelapsarian Chinese cuisine. Dai assures them that everything he serves will be made from natural ingredients, untainted by pesticides or melamine, and with no added MSG. Each morning, his buyers drive out into the countryside to collect the best of the season’s produce. Often they make several trips in a day: a quick dash to a nearby farm to pick up freshly harvested vegetables; a longer journey to inspect a pig or collect a consignment of eggs; an evening excursion for freshwater fish, shrimp, and eels. At other times, they will drive into the mountains, hike for hours, and then stay overnight before returning to Hangzhou with, say, a batch of wild shiitake mushrooms.
Dai claims, and the article does not challenge this, that his restaurant is not especially expensive. His cheapest prix fixe menu is 300 yuan or, in 2008, about $45 per person. But division by exchange rate tells you nothing about purchasing power, and purchasing power parity adjusts that figure closer to $150 per person. At least the article admits that the restaurant has a devoted following “among Zhejiang’s public figures and wealthy businessmen.”
A recent New York Times headline: The Privileges of China’s Elite Include Purified Air. The article quotes a blogger as saying, “They don’t have to eat gutter oil or drink poisoned milk powder and now they’re protected from filthy air” (in reference to recent food scandals in China.)
When I think of good food in China, I think of the crazy cheap buns and grilled meat by the road — come to think of it, probably cooked with gutter oil — but Chinese imperial cuisine commands its own set of luxury ingredients: shark fin, bird’s nest. It’s interesting that Dai, at Dragon Well Manor, doesn’t do that:
He wanted to serve things that are rare in restaurants: “the nourishing soups given to nursing mothers, humble vegetables, cooling dishes to be eaten in the heat of summer.”
One of the most interesting passages in the New Yorker piece is when Fuschia Dunlop eats a meal with the peasants who grow the restaurant’s food.
I complimented our hosts and asked if this was the kind of food they normally ate. They assured me that it was, and Dai hooted with laughter. “What complete rubbish!” he said. “I know perfectly well you wouldn’t eat sweet-potato stalks and pumpkin leaves by choice! You’re only serving them to humor me.” He turned to me. “As far as they are concerned, this is just the stuff they feed to their animals! They are just too polite to say so—they don’t want to admit that they are serving pig food to their honored foreign guest.” He turned to Bao and his wife and asked, “Isn’t that true?”
The couple smiled with embarrassment and admitted that this was so. Everyone laughed. And later that afternoon, when we arrived at our next stop, to inspect a pig due for slaughter later in the week, the lady of the house was sitting on the kitchen floor, chopping up sweet-potato stalks for the doomed animal’s dinner
Food, in our modern world of plenty, is not at all about our stomachs or tastes or even noses. Bones can be a delicacy or art in one context and peasant food in another; pumpkin leaves can be a regional specialty or pig food. To the primitive human, food has an inherent caloric value; to the modern human, food has constructed social value.
