Foodie Culture as We Know It Is Over
A wave of culinary experts is responding to the pandemic with an accessible and empathetic approach to home cooking—and audiences can’t get enough.https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/05/foodiness-isnt-about-snobbery-anymore/611080/
In recent weeks, you may have seen YouTube clips of the Bon Appétit chefs fancifying boxed mac and cheese. Or a viral recipe for an easy shallot-pasta dish. Or Ina Garten getting real on Instagram about what her freezer looks like. Food media during the pandemic have, sometimes surreally, seemed to abandon elitism in favor of a less ostentatious approach to cooking. These cultural products don’t just emphasize accessible ingredients and techniques. They also present an inclusive vision of foodie culture that’s refreshing all on its own, especially at a moment when audiences are craving programming that cares about their daily realities.
The seeds of this new ethos were planted before the coronavirus crisis arrived. For years, The Great British Baking Show comforted viewers with its friendly, low-stakes competition—the spirit of which was captured by the Season 6 winner, Nadiya Hussain. Now the culinary champion is among those bringing that attitude afresh to American TV, via her Netflix cooking series, Nadiya’s Time to Eat. With good humor and charm, she visits “time poor” households and shares speedy recipes, celebrating food without sacrificing pragmatism.
The series is an engaging watch in large part because—like many other recent shows, YouTube channels, books, and blogs—it seeks to democratize the often-elitist landscape of food media. When Kim, an overworked mother of two, says she’s embarrassed by how haphazard her family’s meals have become, the host shakes her head. “This is real life,” says Hussain, herself a mother of three. “It’s hard juggling the cooking and trying to spend time with each other.” She then shares one of her quickest go-to recipes: a jazzed-up ramen that can be stored in the fridge the night before serving it. The dish is no panacea and can’t alleviate all of Kim’s frustrations, but the tasty, replicable meal acknowledges a daily quandary for many Americans.
Nadiya’s Time to Eat, which first aired on the BBC last year, wasn’t filmed with the prospect of a worldwide pandemic in mind. But as Hussain visits families, she speaks with candor and compassion about the profound, if mundane, stresses that many people face. This sensitivity to the concerns of everyday people—and to how those concerns inform the kinds of cooking they’re willing or able to do—feels timely. It’s common to see articles recommending lengthy baking projects and time-consuming individual dishes, which may be most appealing for those who can work from home or aren’t caring for young children. (Hussain’s fellow Baking Show finalist, the anesthesiologist Tamal Ray, recently wrote about how baking calms him after long shifts at the hospital.) But these kinds of diversions are often impossible for parents, especially mothers, whose schedules are even more congested now during the coronavirus crisis.
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Last edited Sun May 24, 2020, 08:36 AM - Edit history (1)
Let's hope temporary means shorter rather than longer since it's serving the needs of people who really don't want to cook but have to. Go free, little birds! Kitchen's once again for rewarming whatever's picked up on the way home from work.
Itm, those who enjoy cooking, or just insist on producing good meals when they do, haven't gone anywhere and aren't all that newly fascinated by one-pot half-hour meals but always happy to pick up new ideas. Those who love to seek out good restaurants are stifled, food travel's certainly mostly out of the question, but their demand is just bottled up, also not transmogrifyied into enthusiasm for dressing up packets of ramen.
It will be interesting to see what genuine changes to our various food cultures come out of this. As a nation, we'll average somewhat more competence in the kitchen, but how much more enduring enthusiasm? Will regional and ethnic cooking finally have real rebirths in home cooking, enabled by more comfort with cooking and less dismay at the very idea of grating beets or smashing lemon grass? 
Will delayed business changes, triggered and accelerated by this crisis, lead to permanent changes to the food supply -- to what's widely and economically available?
Except for possibilities from that last, I'm guessing most people will return to what they chose for themselves before. It'd be lovely if it were those giant national chains, with their 20-gallon buckets of factory sauces, that died and were replaced with the dreams of local enthusiasts. But this terrible blow is instead by far worst for those who'd turned their dreams into happy local realities, and most of those won't be able to just leap back in again. But it may just be that fewer people will be as happy with what those chains offer compared to what they can make at home, requiring changes from those. That does happen to people who learn to cook.