Foodie-ism is the kind of bizarre seizure of enthusiasm that can only happen once civilization hits a dead end. Everything sucks, but at least our food is photogenic, “has something to say” and, as a bonus, tastes good.
The foodie — a close cousin of the hipster — craves and fetishizes the “authentic” in cuisine and has purported to find it while attending food raves, ogling over food presentation and stuffing their faces with the most expensive and exotic dishes they can find. They insist food can be art, and they allege to possess a critical eye (or palate) toward the art they consume — but really it’s all just adulation toward their great god, Food.
It is too bad because this grotesque and gluttonous foodie-ism is easily confused with foodism, which may turn out to be the most important ideological movement of our time. In the past, ideologies have viewed the world through political, economical, cultural or religious lenses — ideologies of the mind and the self. Foodism, on the other hand, examines the world as it really is, populated by bodies, which require energy to run (though, even that distinction between the body and the mind is faulty).
“We can’t so easily separate the mind and the body, as much as a couple of thousand years of Western philosophy would have us believe,” said Jennifer Burns Levin, an adjunct instructor of literature at the Clark Honors College and head of a research interest group in food studies. She also blogs about food in Eugene at Culinaria Eugenius.
According to her, foodists are “transform(ing) society at a grass roots level” through education — and, apparently, they are succeeding: “In documenting and supporting markets for better food and cooking and farming skills, we’re changing American foodways,” she said. By understanding and critiquing what and how we eat, we are better able to know who we are.
Our knowledge is clouded by frivolous, foolish foodies, however, whose approach to what we eat isn’t ideological, but pornographic. They are to foodism what the “radical chic” was to the leftism of the 1960s: an appropriated, commodified, safe version of the real thing. As Levin notes, foodies exemplify “neoliberal privilege and obnoxious righteousness.”
Looking around, it isn’t hard to come away with the impression we live in a gastrocracy, a society governed by food. The issues most perilous — over-population, over-consumption and scarcity — are issues of resources, especially those that nourish and energize us.
Forget peak oil. We need to worry about peak food. Our gastrocratic society is evident in other, less alarming ways. Cooking shows seem to be everywhere on television, and books about food dominate the bestsellers’ lists. The writers of these books — Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Mark Bittman, along with chefs such as Alice Waters — are the prominent social and moral voices of the modern day. They, and the foodist movement in general, stand testament to the idea that the way to society’s heart is through its stomach.