#9 | Under Review
Searching for prized fungus, cooking for labour and love, and thoughts on "reopening"
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This is the ninth edition of In Digestion, a weekly survey of the best food media on the web, and why you should care about it. If you like this newsletter, please follow @in_digestion on Twitter, and forward it to a large number of people. It should feel like too many. It won’t be enough. Thank you.
Restaurants are reopening in the U.K. Well, some. Plenty never closed: cooking throughout the novel coronavirus lockdown, finding comfort in old ways or ingenuity in new ones to continue to serve the communities around them.
But this is The Reopening. Government-endorsed, blessed with fanfare, light after darkness, bound up in a spirit of national recovery while the virus is still very much present. Like most things in the U.K. food media landscape, it’s been cast as a false dichotomy, between cheering on the return of clean plates and smiling staff and ladling doom-infused cold water all over the whole affair. It’s neither of these things, and nothing to do with that old, problematic adage of “yucking on someone’s yum.” Risk remains, and it’s restaurant staff, not the owners, who are at risk the most in this whole equation, left by government policy to sacrifice control over their own safety for the need to earn money and someone else’s dining pleasure.
Also in that equation are the restaurant critics, and before the fateful day of 4 July, the Observer’s Jay Rayner declared that:
That dichotomy between cheering and doom, once again. The implication is that negatively reviewing a restaurant is in some way amoral — economically, socially, possibly both — because of The Current Circumstances. But restaurants have never really been more than precarious; if it’s morally defunct to pan a restaurant because it might suffer, then, when was it not? Meanwhile, The Infatuation announced that it was retiring scores from its reviews. Another dichotomy that has emerged, more keenly in the last three months crosses the Atlantic, as U.K. critics transpose their opinions to home kitchens, and U.S. critics engage more closely with the realities of being a restaurant under lockdown conditions, and then under reopening.
A broad-stroke distinction might be that of “here’s what is happening to me” and “here’s what is happening.” Why, in the restaurant criticism space, does the former now feel more lacking than ever?
There might be an answer in the fact that the pandemic appears to have engendered a keener understanding of restaurants as businesses that exist for longer than the one night of a meal, a sentiment with which the “restaurant review” as it currently appears in U.K. newspapers is fundamentally incompatible. Datedness is baked into the form, and the time capsule that a “good” or “bad” review necessarily becomes can never really be in dialogue with the shifting realities in which all restaurants exist. Quantifying a score with stars or numbers preserves it in amber even further, both codifying a personal opinion as expertise and denying it the chance to evolve — before even broaching the limits of applying an unmoving scoring system to wildly different sociocultural spaces, and asking who exactly that scoring system serves. Especially if it’s now just an exercise in celebration.
This advertises the fundamental limits of the “review” as a form of restaurant criticism — even before shrinking its horizon ever further to “positive vibes only.” Theodore Gioia addressed this in a piece on American criticism that U.K. critics largely dismissed as parochial which tells its own story. In the same week as Rayner made his declaration, longstanding critic Fay Maschler implied that Chef’s Table star and restaurateur Asma Khan should be grateful for the impact of a review; the Guardian’s Grace Dent declared the choice to “to treat death as an occupational hazard” while many restaurant workers have no choice but to do so. It’s clearer than ever that positivity and negativity are not cut from the same cloth as criticism, and in the solipsistic confines of the restaurant review as opinion journalism, “what’s happening to me” is simply no longer as important as “what’s happening.” It never really was to begin with.
Jenny Dorsey takes down some culinary straw men on the subject of cultural appropriation at her website, Jenny Dorsey.co. Subtitled “and other common sentiments in the food industry, examined,” it responds to Dorsey’s experiences of fellow chefs describing food as “restrictive” and “PC,” thoroughly dismantling the false premises behind questions like “so, I can only cook the food from the culture I’m from?” and “Food shouldn’t be so political. Food is supposed to bring us together.” Spanning power dynamics, the recognition of how cooking affects a dish’s future as much as it must be in dialogue with its past, and recognising the false casting of knowledge gaps as “unimportant” subjects, it is both a thorough primer to anyone coming to this for the first time, and a centre of accountability for the food world at large.
Goldthread travels to Litang County, Sichuan to examine how an extremely valuable “caterpillar-parasite-zombie” links to Gwyneth Paltrow. Cordyceps, a prized ingredient in Chinese and Tibetan medicine, has a short summer season, and the film tracks budding harvester Li Na: “when we dig up the fungus, our income increases by quite a lot.” Between warmer winters and a Goop-driven demand in the Western world, there are increasingly fewer cordyceps and increasingly more people wishing to harvest them; the film dispassionately examines the culinary rituals of harvest season, and the reality that if trends continue, something historic may be lost.
Lindsey Danis parses the apparent dichotomy between cooking for labour and cooking for love for Vittles. Danis recounts an initial flush of romance, “so wrapped up in the joy of learning, growing and feeling connected” that long days and one proper meal feel like effortless joy. Then, they don’t, and the piece examines the “dizzy horror” of retrospect, having romanticised what is now “one more daily duty performed at the margins of a stretched-thin life.” The centre of the story is “the question of who gets to cook as a luxury hobby and who cooks out of necessity, where pleasure is incidental,” and Danis is able to take joy in small, personal gestures of pleasure while recognising that only “meaningful policy” can shift the fundamental imbalance between the demand of labour and access to love.
Anubhuti Krishna espouses on an “intrinsic part of Uttar Pradesh’s culinary landscape” for Goya Journal. Dalmoth, the “crunchy, spicy, tangy, mix of fried lentils, finest besan sev, and some basic spices,” has fuzzy origins within Uttar Pradesh, and Krishna examines how a food’s seemingly stable regional identity can splinter under more granular analysis, between placed, agricultural priorities, and dalmoth makers themselves. The fineness and softness of sev, the spices and their proportions, and the cities and towns in which they are mixed complicate the story of dalmoth, and Krishna’s own family’s preferences interface with its longer history.
Korsha Wilson talks to chef, restaurant owner, and urban planner Adrian Lipscombe about Black foodways and land ownership for A Hungry Society. Lipscombe, who is establishing the 40 Acres and a Mule Project to help Black farmers purchase land and safeguard culinary and agricultural histories, discusses “preserving Black foodways in agriculture, but also in hospitality.” Through mixed media, Lipscombe aims to document and preserve culinary tradition both through education and on the land, creating a living archive which offers testimony on which new farmers can build their work. Per Wilson, it’s “ownership in many different ways,” which for Lipscombe is both a means to “hold identity in the world … the generations of what’s happening that goes really deep within our culture.”
An interview with Korsha Wilson on her podcast, its resonances, her wider work, and its relation to food media will be the seventh paid post on In Digestion, going out 11 July. Thank you again for being here.
That’s all for this week. Before the next edition, why not follow Black Book, look through the food edition of Words Without Borders, or subscribe to A Hungry Society. Oh, and please forward this to those three friends and one nemesis. Or just, like, everyone.