“What does finesse translate to? It translates into giving a shit.”
– Anthony Bourdain
To say that folks are interested in fine food and fine dining feels like an understatement. Given the contemporary circulation of books and magazines, television series, and movies about food, it would be more accurate to describe it as an obsession, or at the least a sense of love-struck. I am reminded of a cartoon from the New Yorker, depicting a couple clothed in togas. They are dining in a restaurant setting as if from the time of the Roman empire. Behind them is a circus, complete with a juggling monkey and a whole roasted bull. The subtitle reads, “When I eat out, I like to order something I would never make at home.” Tongue-in-cheek aside, it makes me wonder what folks are actually making at home?
All the commotion surrounding fine food and fine dining has propelled chefs into celebrities, glamorizing their profession into something like a dream job. But in the PBS television series, The Mind of a Chef, chef Gabrielle Hamilton set it straight on the record, “The mind of a chef is not only occupied with food. If it were only food, it would be a dream job.” She went on to set another record, “You make money in the restaurant by saving food versus generating it.” In the episode, Garbage, she elaborated upon how the garbage cans equated to money, highlighting the food waste challenges that we face today. It’s not only from farms and grocery stores, food at home is being thrown away by the tons. When you start to look in the garbage of what people throw away, it is all about convenience. They don’t pay attention, and they don’t care. The details don’t matter.
Our obsession with convenience has also helped propel the act of home cooking into something like a hobby rather than a necessity. In writing An Everlasting Meal – Cooking with Economy and Grace, Tamar Adler took inspiration from M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, a book written in 1942 during wartime shortages, to show that cooking is the path to better eating. In the first chapter, How to Boil Water, she elaborated upon how simply boiling vegetables and meat in salted water can be the foundation for a meal, and how elements from a previous meal can feed into the next and the next to become an everlasting meal. In How to Find Fortune, How to Be Tender, and How to Weather a Storm, she wrote of cooking as a philosophy of living. In cooking gracefully and honestly may we hope to live our life with the same approach.
Our fascination for chefs and fine dining is yet another manifestation of our cultural obsession with expertise. Perhaps the word itself evokes a sense of superiority. Yet Robert Capon wrote in The Supper of the Lamb, “There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.” Because in order to cultivate good tastes, it is not enough to consume what the world has to offer. One must also do. It is in doing that we may learn to appreciate what truly matters.
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