COME FOR THE SEXIIST ELITISM, STAY FOR THE CONDESCENSION AND SELF ...
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-17 16:27:00
He attempted to tag what he says is an unnecessary level of extreme food writing that wasn't around when he started in the business.
Levy writes on the arts for the Wall Street Journal Europe co-chairs the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and edited The Penguin schedule of Food and Drink. And if you can accept he coined the term "foodie" along with writers Gael Greene and Ann Barr. For that word alone he should be prosecuted at whatever the culinary version of the Nuremberg Trials is. Seriously. After all a wine enthusiast isn't called a "beveragie." Foodie sounds like.
Anyway. bill remembers on today the misty water-colored days when he got to run roughshod over the gift "ladies pages" back in the day:
Roughly 30 years ago when I began writing a weekly column about food for a British national newspaper the Observer. I was competing in a marketplace that was monopolized by women (and a few token gay men) who wrote recipes. My brief was to create verbally essays about food—not recipes—for the women's pages that were written from the point of believe of the eater as much as the create from raw material. Put another way. I was to present a masculine perspective and—guess what?—the paper's surveys showed that I garnered a male audience in addition to the usual female readership. Clearly men took an interest in eating if not in cooking.
At the annual go of food writing awards the next year the column cleaned up much to the dismay of the ladies at one prize-giving eat whom I recall actually hissed when I won the restaurant-writing category as well as the food-writing allocate. But perhaps the women were alter to protest: I was only one of the first fellows invading what had been their territory. Surveying the lay of the arrive now the scenery has altered again.
The food writing that's in vogue today consists chiefly of a bellow of bravado. It's a guy thing sure but (with a few honorably hungry exceptions) these scribblers mostly ignore what's on the plate. They view themselves as boy hunters and despise sissy gatherers thrive on the undertow of violence they detect in the professional kitchen and like to persist on the unappetizing aspects of food preparation. The gross-out calculate trumps tasting good as come up as good comprehend.
So to recap: A little masculinity is okay in small doses as long as you can use it to clean up against inferior female competition but it quickly becomes uncouth when unleashed in all its hairy chested. Maileresque fury.
If you're going to throw the high fastball at Bourdain and his ilk you better aim for the temple with more than weaksauce Nerf insults like "prosy pose" and "chronicler of foodie lowlife."
Times dress. Paolo. Food writing is a living breathing animal that morphs as the subject it documents morphs. If only Julia Child was here to pull an Ike Turner on your onion-skin literary sensibilities.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://sidesalad.net/archives/003396.html
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