In praise of ugly food

Let’s start with chicken and dumplings.

Few dishes are getting closer to what I imagine that the cafeteria rations in paradise will fortunately have the taste that the chicken and the perfectly executed dumplings. There again, maybe no other dish seems quite if, well, regurgityeither. Thus, during a recent symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi, when the world renown leader Sean Brock served a lot he had cooked – with his own mother – part of my comrades was in a visible tizzy on what had to do.

Throughout the event, we all published hundreds of images of each course on our Instagram accounts. The slice of golden stove corn bread, the sparkling bowl of butter beans and the Technicolor-Vert pickles were all objectively charming. But the chicken and the dumplings, it seems, was the kid Whiz who could not find an appointment. And while people flicked then dropped their cameras without taking suddenly, I found myself downright upset. I mean, it was a rare privilege: a head of list A and the woman who had roughly taught him to cook, putting their dish at home on a pedestal in front of some of the biggest names in the world of food. And we were avoiding because it was warm? Screw that, I thought. It is honest food, and it should be honestly represented. I stabilized my phone, I clicked and posted. The legend: “A little food is not pretty and does not need to be.”

As an editor of food, I found myself both bored and a little mystified as the value of the social media of our breakfasts, lunches and dinners is considered almost as important as their taste properties. Although the nose is never found – and either the taste buds – the eyes do it all the time.

I think of ugly food and ugly things in general, for a very long time now. I still remember having used my article as a high school directory publisher to make sure that Wallflower’s children were as well represented as the big poppies of our class. Of course, they were not the prettiest in the group, but I felt a certain solidarity with them. I knew we had a particular value that is clean to us. As a girl who thought that I would never be measured as charming (especially because so many people told me flat), I had always identified myself with ugly and neglected – the teddy bear with the wobbly eye, the troubled savings dress. I understood these things. I celebrated them.

The foods that I liked most were the utmost objectively: stews, sauces, stomachs, currys, goulas, purees, embers and sauces that have been long and low until they collapse and thickened. Maybe I knew that these foods, like all the villains of this world, had to work harder to get their due. It takes time and efforts to transbate the flour and fat in the cacao-dark red, a piece of rough muscle in sumptuous chest and raw leaves and gitres in soft and salted green. Time, it seems, may make certain foods have a taste for paradise and look like hell.

It is a good reminder that aesthetics is a bad predictor of goodness; That there are other qualities to consider – the most important of which, for me, is the olfactory. When we presented to him, let’s say, a muddy bowl of beef stew, I will sweep my nose low on and inspire, as Hawkeye pierces on his eggs in powder in the tent M * s * h mess. For him, it was probably preventive. For me, she is a tease of imminent pleasure. But before taking my first bite, I will take a photo with love and publish it on Instagram or Facebook, telling the dish in the same way that I did my stupid classmates in high school.

I know that it may seem stupid to use a visual support to capture the way we eat, but until Smelstagram and Snaptast technology appear, it is one of the best ways that we have to celebrate the neglected, while documenting our chow collo with the camera not so camera for future generations at the same time. Unless, of course, that we want them to think that we were a civilization entirely fueled by green smoothies, avocado toast and pastries attached to the string of the red and white baker alongside mini-milk bottles. Such a twee vision of our culinary culture would be a false tragic declaration of food that America makes the best. I fear that Instagram, blogs and brilliant magazines will continually give in my favorite foods from their collective menus in favor of eye candy. I am terrified that the less loyal and monumentally delicious canetons will be lost in the ages, overshadowed by pretty dishes in this new era of visual gluttony. If they are not beautifully documented, printed or displayed, they should not be worth it.

When did we start losing the purchase on this slippery slope? I can’t help but point a finger or two to Martha Stewart. From the 1980s, it was she who helped make Clench perfection to perfection of rigor for home cooks, rather than the bailiwick of restaurant chefs, caterers and civilians with money to burn in personal cooking staff. With beautifully excited features and photographic technology in its arsenal (not to mention a team of food stylists who had to suffer from brush cramps from debilitating tweezers), it was an engine of the physicity of food in the spotlight. And even if I have never found myself under its influence (mainly by self -preservation and, for a long time, personal courtyard), I saw some of my favorite people – rational human beings that I carefully care about – almost reduced to tears because their perfectly delicious choux paste Did not influence as nicely as Martha.

Martha was not the first person to challenge us as incredibly high. A paw through my collection of vintage magazines and home entertainment books –The art of serving attractive food (1951) and The perfect host: a husband’s guide to have fun at home (1975) are special favorites – obliges the importance of polished silver service and a wide range of mussels from which deploy aspics, meat rings and disturbing desserts. (A chapter of the first provides detailed instructions in the fashion of a lettuce skirt for a “Lady China figurine”, while another suggests making a clown of spicy fishing halves, gummies and bundles of cream cheese!) Then, once again, these books were intended to entertain the company. With the launch of Martha Stewart Living Magazine in 1990, however, such aesthetic was promoted as something that we have to integrate into a daily life style that allows – even insists on time and energy on daily lives.

Until Instagram age and bloggers with DSLR cameras, I didn’t come to mind that we, mortals, were on the hook to make our food as beautiful as Martha and his predecessors once. But I was always surprised when a commentator on my Instagram account took the time of her day to tell me how much she found my wedding food – including my father’s goulash and the chicken and the dumplings of my mother -in -law – to be. She was, as far as I remember, not on the guest list. I am not the only one held on the task. Even Martha was hoisted with his own Petard after having published images of dishes (granted, restaurants, not on his own cuisine, but always …) that the commentators compared all kinds of bodily secretions (“Spit”, “Poo”, even “Cat vomit”!).

Yes, Martha’s images were poorly lit, blurred and strangely framed. Yes, the fault was clearly that of the photographer. But behind the great heaps of Schadenfreude and smoking, there was a lot of condemnation of the food itself. And that made me freak out. Martha was partially responsible for the presentation of food and photography at an almost absurd level. And of course, she contradicted everything she had taught us by taking rather terribly lit and blurred photographs. But the French onion soup is even supposed to be very pretty? Isn’t the work of the chicken liver pâté just good? Do they really need to strut through the Instagram version of a swimsuit tour? Should each dish, it doesn’t matter how unattractive it can be, sucking in food porn? (And what is food porn anyway? Have you ever found the food reserve of your grandfather stuck behind the broken toaster and the cans of red beans in his basement workshop?

So be warned: the next time someone travels “You eat with your eyes” in my presence, I will seriously plan to test this theory by lighting biscuits crumbs to their tear gas canals and fascinating their sockets with a sauce at temperature at room temperature (I am not a monster) until his face is smoothed.

I don’t know your special life. I hope it is tall and delicious and satisfied all your senses. I only know that when I am hungry, my view is the last thing that must be nourished. And even if I will continue to document my favorite dishes with a point and a click, there is no need for the perfect photo, no mandate to try to make it pretty. If I share a photo of a bowl of soup or a garbage vegetable waste with you, I share it because there is something more than eye. Beauty not celebrated. If you see an ugly caneton, look more closely; Imagine what it smells and how he has a taste. And there you are, you could just see a swan.

December 2015