Over at Slate, Paul Levy, multi-award winning former food columnist for the Observer has published a piece about why he has decided to opt out of what he describes as a now overly macho food-writing movement. He mourns the fact that the sort of allusions to Dickens or the Bible that he used to trade in would no longer be acceptable in a piece of food writing, and criticises a vogue for a boisterous, male prose which encourages writers to reach for language from the more scatological end of the dictionary.
Obviously Paul is family. Not only does he have an illustrious history with the Observer, he is also a contributor to this blog. Still, I must take issue. I'm not about to defend all food writing by those of us with testicles. As ever, in all journalistic disciplines there are good writers and there are bad writers. But I for one think the drift towards high-octane, testosterone boosted prose is generally a good thing.
For far too long food writing on both sides of the Atlantic was the preserve of those who apply to it solely the language of sensuality; who see in every dish the inspiration for a prose poem that links food to love. It was also for too long a defiantly middle-class preserve, where high minded women like Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson flourished, and rightly so. They did enormously important work waking up the British public to the joys of eating. Paul has spent much of his journalistic life continuing that work.
But as a restaurant critic I have always been struck by the yawning chasm that exists between the pretty things on the plate that I am served to eat and the ugly business required to get them there. For a start there is the slaughtering of animals, which is never beautiful and should never be portrayed as such (the rearing of animals is often an ugly process in the food industry too). Then there is the life of the restaurant kitchen. They are brutal, raucous, sometimes violent places. They are noisy. They are intimidating. They are never sensual. And they are rarely middle-class.
If the new breed of writers has started to reach for a vocabulary that better communicates the dichotomy between what we eat and how it gets there then all to the good. The fact is that eating is literally a visceral pleasure. There is a great Woody Allen joke which sums it up for me. Asked once if sex is dirty, he replied 'Only if it's done properly'. I feel exactly the same way about food. When I described chocolate covered balls of peanut butter on a stick as 'filth' in this recent review I think we all knew what I meant. And when I cut up rough on Suka in this review, alluding to the Rape of the Sabine women, I feel I was making a point, not violating some non-existent code.
I'm terribly bored of self-indulgent writers who instead of communicating the febrile joys of appetite, try to make like Keats and pen something more akin to An ode to a Grecian Urn. This is dinner we're talking about, not a walk through the daisies, and it demands a language which reflects that.
