Culinary Life vs Covid Life: Comparisons

 

Think back to the start of the pandemic. I know you don't want to. It's not over, and the people who say otherwise have money to make on the backs of the dead.

But when the lockdown orders came, I was happy. Unemployment, though a pittance, would keep me from being homeless for a while. I spent the time exercising, writing, reading, doing recipe dev work, and a little remote consulting, while being very, very careful about where and when I shopped for groceries. (Sidenote: How do you know it's shaping up to be bad? When the local Mexican market is out of dried beans.)

Weeks passed, slowly and steadily. I kept a diary for most of the first year, and much of the less personal notes were centered around how other people were reacting to the physical realities of the situation. "Cabin fever" was running rampant, and even in my social circles I would often see things like "Not being able to go out, see people, and do things is wreaking havoc on my mental health.", and all too often that left me seething.

Those most likely to say such things were (and remain) those least inconvenienced by such necessities. Often able to work remotely and so sustain their income, financially comfortable enough to get food and groceries delivered, or even live independently. The social side of their lifestyles, though, had been cut down to a size quite familiar to me, and to a great many others in my field.

The food business doesn't pay well, despite what seems like far too many working hours. Nights, weekends, holidays, they're all spoken for, and the effort leaves many too worn to do anything else even when times allow. What does that all too often mean? No socializing. No parties. No restaurants or nights at the bar. No favorite hangouts, movies, or events. Naught but sitting at home, contact with others only through radio, phone, or screen.

Sound familiar? So... restricted by plague? Or by poverty? Not much of a difference between, really.

Now in the grip of COVID, the rest of the world learned, or were reminded, of what it feels like to have no means, no access to many of the joys and pleasures of life. What did a great many of them do? They crumbled. 

Those of us who deal with such handicaps as a part of our normal lives have had a very hard time finding sympathy- plenty of us were and still are working, risking our health and safety to better ensure the comfort and ease of those with the ways and means to stay secluded.

They really ought to work harder to be worthy of our sacrifices.

On the Nonsense of NOMA

    There have been entirely too many recent pieces in food media from people being very loud about "Oh, NOMA's closing and I tooootally don't care because I'd never have gotten to go anyway". Well, yes. But do we care about you? No. Does the world of food? With an approach like that, it certainly shouldn't. Sheesh.

    I'd never have gotten to go either, of course. Factually speaking, I'm dirt-poor, speak about five words of Danish, and am utterly bereft of any connections that might open the appropriate doors, so the notion was essentially impossible. NOMA, to the world at large, has always been more of a nebulous notion than a physical place, and it's no different to me in that respect. Professionally speaking, my perspective is different. Should I ever decide I want to taste NOMA for myself, replicating its food is certainly not beyond my level of skill. But that's neither here nor there.

    Look. NOMA was a restaurant that combined a handful of interesting ideas to create a painstakingly fabricated bit of performance art, where food is conceptually rustic, but buttressed by factually elegant, uncompromising simplicity. It's very French in the level of detail, and extremely Chinese in its execution. The former in reducing things to their fundamental essence, and the latter in concocting or amplifying an ingredient's natural flavor via things that aren't actually that ingredient. It made a lot of solid PR for the world of haute cuisine, and the many people behind it have left their mark all over the world in the manner of Adria, Bocuse, or Escoffier. 

    But really, the rationale behind its closing is more important than anything else: The world of fine dining requires logistics and precision at every level, from planetwide to personal, and it's far too much of an unsustainable resource hog when the rest of the world is even more visibly steeped in staggering inequality. 

    I say 'visibly' because unpaid labor is the backbone of essentially every famous or expensive restaurant, and fixing that requires pervasive operational and philosophical change. Said change isn't complicated, exactly, but it must be looked at from both ends of the spectrum. Ideally, the high end would stop isolating itself, removing its often severe and expensive requirements of product, labor, and methodology, while the low end would stop entirely so the supply chains can catch a break long enough to restructure around not having to constantly produce and move superfluous product of inferior quality.

    NOMA and its ilk are concepts that have expensive uses; they yield tangible long-term benefits to the knowledge bases of food science, agriculture, horticulture, history, even art and design.  But to ameliorate the damage done to the public's psyche vis-a-vis the disparity of quality in industry, said disparity must first be aggressively narrowed from the bottom up and the top down alike.

    The food world at large will always be far better served by serving better. But like many before it, NOMA never quite served enough. 

They will be remembered and referenced. But they will not be missed.

Perhaps that should mean more.