Special guest post by Elizabeth Gordon, MSW and cookbook author
As a Midwestern child, I often spent Friday nights and Saturday mornings at ugly folding tables in musty church basements blissfully stuffing myself with the delicacies of the Midwest: chili, pancakes and piles of spaghetti. These spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts were about gathering as a community to support important, local organizations like Rotary and the fire department, and pies or sides of bacon were the happy by-products. Such dinners were cheap and fun, and we ate everything without irony. We ate pancakes with maple syrup-soaked bacon because the combination tasted good and one just dripped onto the other, not because bacon on top of everything was considered campy haute cuisine.
Not once was a bowl of chili dished up on a picnic table set with mismatched porcelain, jam jars spilling forth with black-eyed Susans and pitchers of homemade, minted pink lemonade. We did not eat in the middle of fields, and I am from rural Ohio. The farmers that we knew did not gather at long tables, feasting family-style on goat cheese-sprinkled roasted beets from their fields as today's magazines suggest. I never heard someone tuck into a green salad and comment, "The sherry vinaigrette perfectly complements the piquant raddichio!" So, when I had this very conversation over dinner not so long ago I wondered: "When did we become such food snobs?"
In our collective effort to return to the simpler things in life, has anyone else noticed that we, the New York foodies, the Minneapolis hipsters, the Seattle slackers and everyone in between has become pretentious and just a little too precious about food? Sometimes, I want to pull people aside and tell them that my parents bought a cow from the 4H kids at the fair every year and had it butchered not because we were particularly enlightened but because it was probably cheaper than supermarket meat. We had a garden because my dad simply enjoyed building the garden boxes and had a fraught relationship with the groundhog that ate his annual crop, not because he wanted the neighbors to think that his children were eating pure food.
When did Americans turn to romantic notions of food and dining rather than fur coats and Ferraris to prove us "worthy"? Is food snobbery this millennium's answer to flamboyance? After all, food and funky china are a lot cheaper than a Birkin bag. It's arguably all so very 80's. No one is running around plating dishes and drawing pictures with raspberry Coulis, but isn't the elaborately sparse food styling and adorable prop styling of the aughts the same thing in a way? Doesn't it just scream: I'm smart, sophisticated and thrifty! in the same way that white chocolate mousse shouted excess! from the table tops? Or maybe the whimsical dinner parties and menus depicted in magazines and on the Internet are the non-narcotic Quaalude that we all need to get through the health care crisis and indictments on Wall Street.
I'm not at all suggesting that fantasy and beauty are not acceptable. I love both and find them quite comforting. I really do love food. I write cookbooks, and I am guilty of looking at blogs, wishing that I could style a party that beautifully. However, I just want to have parties and eat food that serve the exclusive purpose of pleasure in the present and emphasize the true comforts in life, community and authenticity. Despite great props and copious research to make the meal beautiful, rustic and pure, it's still just food. So many people are struggling to even put food on the table. Aren't we really communicating frivolity rather than cleverness, thriftiness, sophistication and style through our super-styled backyard dinner parties?
I propose a return to an updated version of the spaghetti dinners and fish fries of yesteryear. Let's make them gluten and nut-free so that everyone feels welcome and just get together. Let's not dissect every dish on the table or photograph the cleaned plates for sloppy yet arty leftover shots. It's getting tiresome. Can't we just be real and not take food so seriously, because isn't that what a truly rich life is all about, feeling comfortable with who we are, not staging and posting photographs of the dinner party that might make other people envious?
Elizabeth Gordon, MSW, is the author of Allergy-Free Desserts: Gluten, Dairy, Soy, Nut and Egg-Free Delights
