Restaurant critic: STFU up about food already!

Could not agree with him more whole-heartedly. It's out of hand.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/shut-eat?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook

Food is my favorite thing to talk about and to learn about, but an interest that is reasonable on a personal and an individual scale has grown out of all proportion in the wider culture. Imagine that you’re fascinated by model trains. You’re on fire with interest, you think about them all the time, they’re your consuming passion. But then, over about twenty years, the entire culture becomes obsessed with model trains. The model-train blogosphere grows exponentially. Model-train makers are plastered all over the covers of magazines, and stage train-building smackdowns on TV, and are treated as the new rock stars. Might you, in your private heart, think that maybe the whole model-train thing, still of tremendous interest to you, has somehow got a bit out of hand? That’s where I feel food is today.

 

Sort of like baseball and sabermetrics.

 

When I'm among milennials every day, the conversation isn't about sabermetrics. It's about what the latest Chez Foo Foo they ate at was, and how the grass-fed asparagus was delightfully chewy, particularly paired with the apple blossom-infused pomegranate cous-cous.

 

"Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s ..."

...

"Pesto is the quiche of the 80s."

 

Aww, someone likes it when he's a special snowflake. Everyone else needs to stop liking things to make him feel better.

 

Where do you hang out?


I feel the same about beer and beer discussions.

 

Mostly at the safe haven of my home. But, during the day, Chicago.

 

Food is a big topic at our house. My son and daughter, as a team, have won amateur cooking contests. She's in the wine business and worked for a summer at a three-star restaurant-hotel in France. But it's not the only topic, and why shouldn't food be a big subject of interest, considering how folks eat it every day? This reads to me as if Rich Eisen starting complaining about the high level of interest in the NFL. It's nuts.

 

A lot of that is signalling, DW. By droning on about the "infused this" and the "aioli that," people are trying to let the rest of the world know that they're hip, they're with it, etc., etc. If it weren't food, it'd be something else.

 

Because I'd rather talk about music, movies, sports, and current events.

But seriously, I like to talk about beer, cocktails, and spirits a little bit. But people lose me when they start saying that they can taste burnt buttered popcorn and dried apricots in their Johnnie Walker Mauve Label. Wine assholes are even worse. And, yes, I've read reviews where people talk about tasting burnt buttered popcorn in their spirit. Can't remember if it was gin, whiskey, or wine.

 

You know it's pervasive when wannabe food porn clutters our "social" media.
I don't give a blooming fig what someone chooses to put in their mouth and eat.
You love kale- hooray for you.

 

I don't mind if you busted your ass for four hours making a meal and want to show it off.
But to snap a photo of your T.G.I.Fridays club sandwich? Gimme a break.