Dialogue: Bitchiness and hubris in food fad phoniness

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Okay, this is the season of goodwill and good cheer and all that glutinous stuff but more than anything else it's the season of eating and drinking, or, as P.G. Wodehouse so frequently put it, of sluicing and browsing.

On Boxing Day I was cast like a lost whale on the beach, suffering from the excesses of the previous 48 hours. I reflected that eating and avarice are the only two debaucheries most people - and even the seriously religious - can enjoy free from the heavy moral censure attracted by drinking too much or by breaking sexual taboos, both much more attractive alternatives. This despite the possibility that gluttony and material greed may cause the downfall of the modern consumer society.

Avarice - in one of the most dramatic moral about-turns in history - has suddenly become a virtue, a trait we should all admire as offering us droppings from the table.

Gourmandising has not yet achieved that kind of turnaround. Only the public health Nazis attack errant eaters and they are distrusted because they are forced into subtle misinformation in the face of the blatant misinformation from the food industry and its marketers.

The other day I read what was described as an American proverb: "More die of food than of famine". That proverb could have come from one of only very few countries, all of them in the New World where the race, after years of abundance, is between the spread of the multitude of illnesses that come with obesity and medical science's ability to find cures, or at least controls.

Older civilisations carry a weight of knowledge that for most of their time on Earth peoplekind has suffered much more from lacking reliable supplies of food than from having too much. Hence, the favourite way to celebrate anything if you could muster up the nosh was, in earlier times, to feast. And I'm all for that - occasionally.

But nothing in my lifetime has changed so dramatically as the social attitude towards food and drink. For a long time this brought interest, intelligence and conviviality to those of us who could afford it. As always, however, such a flourishing social trend has attracted an elitism that has, in turn, attracted the phonies.

New Zealanders can be classified into two basic categories: (1) Those who believe, as French playwright Moliere put it, that "One should eat to live rather than live to eat" ; and who thus subscribe to the Russian proverb that "It's not the horse that draws the cart but the oats". (2) Those who believe that cooking and wine-making involve an art form so elevated that to understand and appreciate the nuances of flavour and bouquet elevates one to the highest level of civilised culture.

We - the easily led who think truth is never so clear-cut - tend to gather in groups in between the two categories, leaning more towards one or the other. As the years have gone by food and its preparation have become such an overwhelming preoccupation, obscuring so many other issues, that I've pitched my palate in the camp of category 1.

Another incentive to move away from category 2 is the increasing bitchiness and phoney hubris displayed by so many cooks and winemakers and their acolytes. The history of food over centuries is littered with pretentious idiots and absurd food and cooking theories they have espoused and inflicted on others. It has grown worse.

The contemporary middle-class aspiration to be epicurean has spread, I'm told, to sardines. There are among us those who, moving on from olive oil and coffee, want to know all there is to know about the catching and processing of sardines.

They are developing such an arcane appreciation of their various flavours, the places and seasons in which they are caught, and the nature of the fluids with which they are embalmed in their tiny tins, that they will soon be mercilessly patronising those still dipping their bread in extra virgin, or spreading their fingers round vast bowls of latte.

The sardine connoisseurs, though they may know nothing else, will be able to order with confidence the right brand from the right country and you'd better bone up on the subject or you will, by implication, be made to feel an uncultured slob.

Happily, there is an underground of Kiwi blokes who, alone at the shops, sneak a pie and even a mince savoury and a sausage roll and wolf them down from plain brown paper bags, hovering in doorways or slumped down in cars. Some are becoming brazen enough to stuff salad sandwiches from lunch boxes into city litter bins before indulging the venal sin of the meat pie.

One day soon they may come together in open rebellion and form a New Zealand Trad Food and Booze Society to encourage pie-eating, ale-drinking and the cooking of meat and three veg. (Actually it was four veg or more at our place if you included root vegetables.) I will join.