Great article/reviews in the New Yorker

[solanna]

The article is called Toque Envy: So you want to be a chef?

It reviews a bunch of the newly released (or re-released cookbooks) while taking a look at where the US is in terms of the intersection of the chef, the home chef, american culinary history, and our current food culture.

A choice quote from the article:
"...Many of the new chefs are baby boomers, whose sense of themselves as dramatic remakers of the world is generationally appropriate. They are the cooking equivalent of early rock stars like Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger—members of the educated white middle class who immersed themselves in traditional folk styles and then presented reworked versions of them to a mainstream audience, to wild acclaim."

Thoughts?

[ September 23, 2001: Message edited by: solanna ]

 

[isa]

Then pen is mightier than the sword… This guy sounds upset. I’m not sure why. I think he’s an over analyzer. It’s only natural to be curious about food, part of a natural evolution I would say. People’s attitude about food is changing, they’re learning to appreciate it better, asking for better products and produces.

In Québec, we now see the emergence of a terroir as the French would say. We now produce cheeses of superior quality, a new diversity of fruits and vegetables, artisan style chocolate etc. Many suppliers grow more diverse produce. Heirloom vegetables and fruits are more and more available. The same hold true for the US.

As you want to learn more it’s natural to turn to teachers, to people who are knowledgeable in food. In this case it happens to be chefs. So chefs are in these days. Nothing wrong with it, generally speaking. They can teach us Some may go a little overboard, upstaging the food. That’s ok not everyone has the same taste.

All this does not mean everyone wants to be a chef. It can be a hobby. Since you have to eat daily, you may as well enjoy it and try to et better at it. In the course of a lifetime, you will eat about 80, 000 meals. That’s a lot of food and if you don’t like Kraft Dinner you better learn about cooking.

I do own more than a few cookbooks. So what? It’s healthier to read about food than go gamble or get drunk every night. I don’t see why some feel the need to over analyze this. Again liking food doesn’t mean you want to be a chef. He speak of chef envy like psychologist speaks of other envy...