While I was reviewing restaurants, a favourite online burn was to call me “food snob”. Ya don’t say — it’s pretty much the job description. And, I’ve come to realise with the objectivity of distance, not always a bad thing.
There are food snobs and food snobs — those, like me, who believe that the idea of buying, cooking and eating the best-quality food you can afford isn’t elitist or classist. That organic isn’t just a poncey word. That restaurants should source carefully and sustainably. Look at Italy, where good food is seen as a birthright, where cabbies sit in the same restaurants as CEOs, and where, during the season in my favourite Sicilian town, wee old ladies line their doorsteps with boxes of tomatoes, to dry and concentrate into even greater sweetness under a powerful sun.
Then there are food snobs who are more like food bores, those plate sniffers who used to infest the blogosphere, deriding anyone who couldn’t tell the sex of their lobster — before online restaurant criticism became, uh, democratised. Recently, I was early to dinner in a super-cool east London Italian restaurant, earwigging the couple on the next table, clearly a first date. The bloke mansplained the menu — “Guinea fowl? I wouldn’t. Not the best time of year for it” (he was wrong) — before droning on about orange wine. Were I in his companion’s shoes, that first date would have been the last: knowing about stuff isn’t a substitute for a personality.
There’s also no need to be so in-your-bubble that real life doesn’t intrude. The lives of social media’s viral trad wives and muscly farm boys plucking spears of asparagus from their own land and grinding their own wheat for their own loaves are beyond most of us. (Also: yawn.) And a pox on the sanctimonious, Reform-erati 30p Lees of this world, who urge struggling people to subsist on legumes and the odd drumstick that should also be boiled for stock, meanwhile hanging out in claret-stained private clubs.
But if everybody expects and demands better, we could move as a food culture away from horsemeat-in-lasagne scandals. (I don’t mind horsemeat. If you eat meat, you eat meat. But it should be fessed up.) Dismiss it as utopian nonsense, sure, but when the bellwether likes of M&S and Heinz are launching prepared foods with no additives — M&S with a “minimal ingredients” range and Heinz with “natural meal pouches” — no, honestly, quite nice! — you could be forgiven for hoping it’s a start.
As an accredited snob, I suppose I should judge other people’s eating habits. But I judge what I eat: this week, cheap white bread, an uninspiring Pret salad that turned out to weigh in at more than 700 calories, greasy-spoon sausages (yum) and an item called a sushidog.
I love burgers, though I draw the line at McDonald’s — not because of preciousness, but because I think they taste bogging. And sweet and sour chicken, sausage rolls — even if not pink-slurry Greggs (oops, judgy). Eat what you want, but be aware of downsides.
Fine, I do judge some stuff, often in the US and mostly to do with surfeits of sugar, hormone-pimped meat and excess/waste. It wasn’t at all surprising to hear that their food safety agencies were hit with massive cuts, because a significant number of consumers just don’t care. Same here, in fairness, but we don’t tend to practise quite the same excess. I’m entertained by the number of ragebait posts on socials from Americans declaring they’ve come to London and can’t find anything decent to eat. Portions too small, babez?
Since the cuts, the US has endured a tidal wave of “explosive diarrhoea” thanks to iceberg lettuce. (In late August the Trump administration announced it was ending cyclospora research in the middle of the largest ever cyclospora outbreak. Neat!) At the time of writing, there were warnings attached to granola, jalapeños, yoghurt, ready-to-eat deli cold cuts and salads, eggs, tofu and, with the FDA’s highest risk level, blueberries. My favourite: chocolate eyeballs, just in time for Halloween. And, to cut prices, the import of uninspected beef from Argentina, a country whose meat China rejected over banned antibiotics. Altogether, that’s quite a chunk of the American diet. On which, there’s a special place at Satan’s table for Trump’s overdone steak and ketchup. But let him fill his boots. Do, please.
I type this snobbily with my microwaveable baked potatoes in the freezer and a late-night Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives habit. Fire ahead with the burns and call me a snob. I’ll own it, happily.
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