Ketchup As Sacrament

Lileks this morning, kicking off with a "foodie" quote:

“Sharing food is with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” M. L. K. Fisher.

Criminey. Look, I like a good meal as much as the next fellow, but it’s not some sort of sacred ritual...People have a hole in the soul-spot, and they’re going to fill it with religion, politics, art or food. Preferable a nice balanced combination of all four, but we all know someone who chose one and has no room for the other three. The people who worship food – “foodies,” to use a term that makes my skin crawl – are the least interesting zealots imaginable, because in the end it’s just grub. Well, actually, in the end end, it’s much worse. I’m all for good healthy diverse food, but the minute someone starts talking about ritual and connections and elemental truths I want to shove a Space Food Stick up their nose. Taken lightly? Ever eaten with a five-year old lately?

Or teenagers?

People who replace religion with food are indeed tiresome; the question, which variety irritates one more?:

• Aescetic foodies, the ones in their hairshirts with their macrobiotic vegan exercises in self-abnegation, who passed "holier than thou" back sometime before they went from "green and tan only" to "must be picked live from the vine".
• Jim and Tammy Bakker foodies, the ones that put their food somewhere above their mortgage as a personal priority
• Fundamentalist Foodies, the ones who reminisce about how much better is the French perspective about food ("They linger over their meals, they savor it! Lunch is a production"), or the Japanese one, or...

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at March 3, 2006 06:22 AM | TrackBack