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Bourdain, Deen spat prompts bigger discussion of culinary elitism
Frank Bruni, the former New York Times restaurant critic, tapped a nerve today with an article in response to a recent spat between television hosts Anthony Bourdain and Paula Deen.
Last week, Bourdain picked a fight with Deen when he called her “the worst, most dangerous person in America” because she’s “telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.”
Deen fought back, saying “You know, not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine.” As a multi-millionaire, she’s clearly not talking about herself, but she has a point. She’s defending her massive fan base, who, as a whole, flock to her and her fellow Food Network stars because of their “we’re common folk just like you” personas.
Bruni saw a bigger picture. In his op-ed piece, he uses their back-and-forth to talk about the deep dividing lines in our modern culinary culture that are based on class. Bourdain, he claims, represent “the self-appointed sophisticates,” while Deen and her fellow self-made millionaires Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee are the “supposed rubes.”
He compares the divide to the political one that continues to split our country.
And her retort exposes class tensions in the food world that sadly mirror those in society at large. You can almost imagine Bourdain and Deen as political candidates, a blue-state paternalist squaring off against a red-state populist over correct living versus liberty in all its artery-clogging, self-destructive glory.
Bruni makes a strong point when he writes about how hypocritical we’ve become about food.
When Deen fries a chicken, many of us balk. When the Manhattan chefs David Chang or Andrew Carmellini do, we grovel for reservations and swoon over the homey exhilaration of it all. Her strips of bacon, skirting pancakes, represent heedless gluttony. Chang’s dominoes of pork belly, swaddled in an Asian bun, signify high art.
The Village Voice responded with a post saying that although they agree with Bruni’s observations about how hypocritical our food society has become, he has missed the mark by using Bourdain and Deen as his targets. They then go on to question Bruni himself because of how he handled the Bush campaign way back when he was a political reporter.
But now we’re really getting off topic.
Instead of making this about Bourdain or Deen, who are clearly very wealthy celebrities who carefully craft every aspect of their public identities, we should be thinking about the people they have come to represent. The lower-to-middle class, trying-to-make-it-work working parents who can’t afford to eat out more than a few times a year, much less travel abroad and eat the street food Bourdain extols, and the middle-to-upper class, who have the dispensable income and time to if not eat at Momofuku, know who the hell David Chang actually is.
I think about this divide a lot in my job, and I’ve learned that it’s not exactly as black and white as this argument seems. It’s not farmers’ markets versus grocery stores or fast food versus high-end restaurants. It’s not paleo versus Engine 2 or Deen’s fried chicken versus Chang’s pork belly.
We all fall, whether or not we admit it to our Facebook friends, somewhere in the middle, often dabbling in both the “high” and “low” aspects of food culture, even if it’s just a secret affection for Red Hots. It’s my job to cover all of it and not take one side or the other.
Just as there’s a need to nudge people who only eat antibiotic-filled chicken to check out all that the farmers’ markets have to offer, there’s a need for the people who’ve eaten at every top 10 restaurant in Austin to have an unexpected chat with an Austinite of different means while picking out out-of-season greens beans in the produce section of a regular old grocery store.
I think Bruni’s right to call into question the culinary elite, who have gained so much power in recent years that they’ve forgotten that the vast, vast majority of eaters aren’t even using the same vocabulary when they talk about food. It’s not fair to sit on a perch, especially one at 20,000 feet en route to your next exotic food vacation for your hit television show, and tell millions of people they are fat, stupid and wrong.
Bruni says it best:
Besides, treating Deen, Lee & Co. with anything that smacks of moralizing and snobbery isn’t likely to move them or their audience toward healthier eating. It’s apt to cook up resentment. And we’ve got enough ill will and polarization in our politics. Let’s not set a place for them at the table.
UPDATE: So many problems, so few solutions, right? Jane Black writes this nice piece on The Atlantic about what the Food Network could be doing to help with the obesity crisis. (Hint: Stop glorifying 105-pound burgers.)
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment Categories: Food in the news
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By Jenna
August 25, 2011 1:57 PM | Link to this
The truth is that our nation is obese and continues to become fatter as each year passes. We need people like Deen and Bourdain to teach portion control, healthy alternatives, moderation, etc. Just because you’re not wealthy doesn’t mean you have to be unhealthy.
By Pam Picard
August 25, 2011 2:31 PM | Link to this
Wouldn’t it be nice if Frank Bruni could observe this difference of opinion as simply that without making it about a culture war? Whatever happened to “each to his own taste” and “live and let live.” Oh yeah. It’s in France. :-))
By Anon
August 25, 2011 2:48 PM | Link to this
And then there’s the fact that Bourdain smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish. He’s eaten more pesticides and toxins than anyone could imagine in his travels. Add to the fact that butter is actually a healthy fat and improves inflammatory states in the body (the myth about it raising cholesterol is just that). I agree wholeheartedly with the statement that Fine Dining can fry up bacon wrapped ice cream and it becomes a delicacy to accompany their Krispy Kreme donuts; while if a family does it, it’s unhealthy and stupid. Yes, we need to eat better, but it needs to start with removing pesticides, stopping the radiation and genetic modification of foods, and eating locally when things are truly ripened and ready to eat.
By Maria
August 25, 2011 6:24 PM | Link to this
Both this article and Bruni’s op-ed miss the point entirely and add fuel to the “class war” fire. The point of Paula Deen’s show isn’t to provide sensible solutions to customers on a budget, and Bourdain breathlessly hurls pornographic adjectives at simple, low-brow food all the time. Neither article calls into question the widely accepted untruth that people with a limited grocery budget have no option but to prepare and eat enormous, wildly unhealthy meals. Where did that idea come from?
By karen
August 26, 2011 11:02 AM | Link to this
Very eloquently to the point. Excellent article and you are so very right. It’s so much more about day to day realism. I’d love to take a peek in Deen and Bourdain’s refrigerator. I bet they wouldn’t be so vastly different. When the clever phrases and the finger pointing are removed from the picture, all that is staring back at us is a jar of mustard.
By Woody Williams
August 26, 2011 11:10 AM | Link to this
Perhaps more a case of “throwing the first stone” rather than “each to his own.” Neither Bourdain (who I enjoy) nor Deen (who I enjoy) are without flaw. Who is? Not Bruni who’s obviously feeding more than the masses with inflamed rhetoric. The dividing lines in our culture are not grill marks.