Peak Foodie?

"Seattle doesn't need fine dining right now..." This was the opening line of Canlis' announcement that they had closed their famous dining room and would now be offering take-out and delivered dinners. Comfort foods. High quality ingredients. Basic but yummy.

The subtext was that, yes, even class pretense in dining has its limits now, during this pandemic.

With a government-ordered shut down in sit down dining, we are going through the largest scale experiment ever in determining what exactly we loved about restaurant eating.

And what we don't give a sh*t about.

I'm as guilty as any upper middle class citizen for falling into the utter pretense of the modern foodie orgy. My wife and I spent $500 on a honeymoon dinner at Dinner on the Rocks located on Koh Samui island in Thailand. In 2007. That dinner would cost about $1,200 now. Yes, it was fun. Yes, we recirculate the story every once in a while.

And therein lies the fatal flaw of modern global foodie culture. It's simply a form of status display, amenable to G-rated narratives of sensory adventure and delight.

Yet, nothing could be more ridiculously pretentious. Pretending that chasing the latest ingredient and flavor fad (80% of which are simply plagiarized from the indigenous cuisines of the poor) has some higher purpose had always nauseated me as a social scientist.

We're a little too good at deconstructing the arbitrary when it comes wrapped up in such vehement insistence of its own importance.

And modern American foodie culture has for 25 years now been one of the new markers of class mobility and class reproduction, of fitting in with the urban elite. It's the epitome of vapid class identity performances. It's so obviously arbitrary and unnecessary.

How do we know this? Well ask yourself how much you really miss all the overpriced dinners? I haven't run a survey to be clear. I think we miss the socializing at those dinners more than the pretentious food that we ritually required to be there. I used to work with self-identifying 'foodies.' I imagine they're clinically depressed right now. They really only cared about the food. Competitively discussing it that is.

The foodie orgy attracts all sorts of folks with deep-seated insecurities about their class position: black sheep from the 1%, bourgeois drug addicts and alcoholics, college drop-outs, ethnically marginalized people whose college degree was highly 'impractical', etc. The late Anthony Bourdain was notoriously aware and critical of these status-mongers.

Food, they always claim, is the great leveler. Loving food is a democratic value. Yet, we knew this defense was always dis-ingenuous, didn't we? Five month wait lists to attend restaurants in Spain. Really? This is just a mere delight in food? Hardly.

As America's upper middle class more than doubled (not the 1% by income, but the college-educated elite) in the past 30 years (based on Census research a team and I did a few years back), ever fashionable dining has become a way to convince others you are part of the elite, when one conversation with your parents would quickly suggest otherwise.

That much insecurity had to express itself somewhere. But the COVID-19 pandemic has cast an ironic spotlight on this particular modality of class performance. It contributed an out-sized % of restaurant dollars and employment for the relatively few number of meals and consumers. Quick-serve has been half of restaurant revenue for years and feeds far more Americans daily.

I feel bad for the employee in these places, because many are caught up in the orgy itself, in earning above average tips and in the status conferred by saying 'I serve at Alinea.' Yet now , they realize their meagre income was tied to a house of cultural cards.

The one reason that health trends in our dietary landscape can spread deeply into the middle class is that they promise outcomes unrelated purely to class identity.

Yes, there is plenty of pretense here too, but the foodie orgy was a house of cards built entirely on class pretense of the most naked and medieval form. It was simply democratized by credit card access.

Many of the country's elite restaurants have shut down. Many will cease operations permanently. But how many will re-open? I suspect a considerable number will as the economy re-opens. The rationale will be re-employment. But very few will question what lies behind the demand for these elite dining experiences, including the ones staged even more pretentiously as peasant meals (remember eating out of cast iron pans at your table?).

I lay-out this unfair social deconstruction in part, because I hope we all can use this time to reflect on our social priorities moving ahead. In the excitement of moving away from processed foods and bad tasting Olive Garden meals, did we as a society lose our way in a foodie orgy that controlled us more than we it?

The irony of the Fancy Foods' Summer Show cancellation, to me at least, is that the attendees are most likely to educated enough to realize that virology is real and that fancy foods are as optional as a Netflix movie.

If you're building a brand or a business right now, this pandemic is a reminder to peg your proposition to outcomes the consumer doesn't consider optional, doesn't use merely for extravagant pretense pegged to a corporate expense account. Build a brand built around the deepest possible social outcomes we desire. The ones even the zombies can't take away from us.