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Post by gertie on Apr 4, 2010 4:47:04 GMT
Not sure this is the right place (if not, where is the right place? could mods correct please?) but I ran across this article regarding events where three star chefs in France do wonderful picnic-y events as a way to keep in touch with the customers being organized via Le Fooding. Le Fooding puts out a book on restaurants rating them in Paris and the provinces. More info: www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/05/100405fa_fact_gopnik
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 4, 2010 4:54:38 GMT
Oh, I love Adam Gopnik! I thought English-isms were the bane of the French, though. Was the term Le Fooding chosen to provoke? (guess I should read the article before asking questions)
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2010 5:04:39 GMT
Oh, how I hate that term! That movement has been going on for about five years already. I think it should be known by a more accurate name: "expensive snacking."
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2010 9:34:01 GMT
I just read this piece last night and was going to post. It's worth a read.* I love Gopnik too. Thanks for posting it Gertie. (While reading it,I took note of several passages that would surely rankle some of our French posters ,which made reading it more fun,I must say.)
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2010 11:25:08 GMT
When they start charging the price of normal food instead of multiplying the prices by 3 or 5, I will be happy to look into it. Until then, you can invite me.
The biggest innovation in all of these places is to see how much they can skyrocket the prices.
If I open a restaurant in the U.S. where I serve turkey stuffed with lime Jello-O, I hope that people will be willing to pay $50 per portion.
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Post by lagatta on Apr 4, 2010 14:04:02 GMT
I can't abide that silly, false-English word. Doesn't it also evoke "feeding", as non-human animals do?
Not even the German - or Yiddish - distinction between "fressen" and "essen", as Fressers may eat like farm animals, but they do so with a joyous and indulgent gourmand abandon I can't fathom les foodeurs et foodeuses giving in to.
The ending of the article is hilarious.
Sorry, I'll keep on organising my own picnics. And a good roast chicken will definitely feature, no matter how banal and old-fashioned that takeaway might be.
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Post by bjd on Apr 4, 2010 14:27:25 GMT
With all their talk of "new" and "change", I found it ironic that the author compared all the women to actresses of the 1960s.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2010 14:49:57 GMT
Yeah, he's really "with it".
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Post by bixaorellana on Apr 4, 2010 15:29:58 GMT
With all their talk of "new" and "change", I found it ironic that the author compared all the women to actresses of the 1960s. Yeah, he's really "with it". Ha! I'm sure he did it on purpose, as that's pretty much his sly message all the way through the article, that many things that are old are being arrogantly presented as new again. You can see his tongue firmly in his cheek here, even as he uses said tongue to savor fashionable mini burgers and slow-cooked lamb: I suddenly saw the right analogy: Le Fooding was to cooking what the New Wave was to French cinema. The hidden goal was to Americanize French food without becoming American, just as the New Wave, back in the fifties and sixties, was about taking in Hollywood virtues without being Hollywoodized ... they had a vague sense of what they wanted, combined with a vigorous determination to achieve it, whatever the hell it was. ... Eating with a new attitude was as important to Le Fooding as actually eating something new. The creative act in cooking was to change the style of criticism. The morning after the Fooding event in Queens, I submitted this analogy to Alexandre ... He was shining with delight at the success of the launch, and was already making plans for new campaigns in France and America. ... "Our role is to work against that tradition: to open minds, to reveal history, to change views. It should be a movement of the young.”Le Fooding is really nothing more than a marketing device, and Gopnik captures the whole emperor's new clothes aspect of the presentation.
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Post by Jazz on Apr 4, 2010 15:35:02 GMT
This was a good read, although I don’t know if I was prepared for a five page food discussion first thing this morning. Gopnik is a good writer and I perservered. The term itself is unfortunate, ‘le fooding’ brings an image to my mind of swilling at the trough. We are taken through Gopnik’s attempts to understand what its all about and what is so different, other than time period…from comparisons to ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’, to a definite non-comparison with ‘Slow Food’ to the final aha!…it is to be thought of as the ‘New Wave’ of cinema in the food realms! Hmmm. I don't quite grasp this.
These thoughts linger with me,
'I don’t see what, exactly, in Le Fooding is revolutionary or even original—you’re searching for good little restaurants that aren’t too expensive. Where’s the novelty in that?” For that matter, a similar complaint about the conservatism of French cooking was at the heart of the nouvelle-cuisine revolution, back in the seventies; its version of the Fooding guide was the Gault Millau guide.
Nor were the cooks who were being touted by Le Fooding for challenging the paradigm in any real way revolutionary. Le Comptoir, La Régalade—perfectly nice places, but not wildly imaginative. And, anyway, it seemed to me, now that I was in Paris, that the new crisis in cooking looked about the same as the old—wonderful food, wonderful rooms, all passé by New York or London standards—and, surely, if the same crisis continues for decades it is no longer a crisis but merely a condition. The real absence in France was not of good food but of what might be called think food—places like El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, or like Fergus Henderson’s St. John, in London, where the food is devoted to an idea, whether of molecular transformations or of whole-beast eating. And, past a certain point, I realized that the absence of think food was not an absence that truly, in my heart, I regretted. Not everything has to evolve. There are enough ideas in life without having them all on your plate.'
I love the passionate French approach to food but am somewhat bewildered by this ‘revolution’. It just seems to be the newest phase in the evolution of food in France. The French have an attitude towards food that fascinates me and I have had some of the most pleasurable meals of my life there, often simple.
'The politics of food in France cuts haphaardly and unpredictably across party lines and allegiances; tell me what you think about eating, and I will tell you only that you are French.'
To go back to a much earlier time in French culinary history, 'Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are.', Brillat-Savarin.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2010 16:11:46 GMT
or "where" you are...
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Post by lagatta on Apr 4, 2010 21:24:15 GMT
I can't abide fads like "molecular gastronomy", and have friends in Catalonia who want to run screaming when they hear of El Bulli.
I think the real changes in French food are coming from work patterns (most women working full-time outside the home, for one) and contacts with other cultures, whether from migration or holiday and business travel. And of course the tension between traditions and discovery of new things.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Apr 5, 2010 21:16:44 GMT
I am SO disappointed. I read the subject line as "Fondling".
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Post by lagatta on Apr 6, 2010 1:12:05 GMT
You lucky person - I know it is "Fooding" but keep reading it as "Feeding", as at the trough.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2010 8:57:05 GMT
El Bulli always makes me want to scream, and I have never even seen the place -- just read articles about it.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Apr 6, 2010 10:15:40 GMT
El Bulli always makes me want to scream, and I have never even seen the place -- just read articles about it. It's the suckers clientele, vying for a coveted reservation, and once achieved, who then relate each minute facet of their "life-changing, revelatory"* experience to Internet food fora that make me cringe. *I hope to sometime write at length on the use of hyperbole in food and restaurant reviews. I'm just starting to gather cringeworthy material. Por ejemplo: • "To die for". No self important foodie would ever use such a common term, certainly not I. This one needs to be interred asap as it has begun to decay badly. Similarly, "Yummers". • "A revelation/revelatory" Oh, please, come on! Just say it was an eye opener and leave it at that. • "Life changing". Give us an effing break. • "Deconstructed". The chef is lazy, or egotistical and disrespectful of tradition or all three. Now that I think about it, "egotistical chef" is a tautology.
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Post by hwinpp on Apr 6, 2010 10:44:08 GMT
Good start, DC. I hope this develops further so I can sink my teeth into it ;D
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Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2010 13:11:56 GMT
Your article sounds much better to me, DC.
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Post by lagatta on Apr 6, 2010 13:44:34 GMT
¿El Bullshit? If I once more hear of foamed anything....
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Post by Deleted on Apr 6, 2010 14:25:59 GMT
I may start foaming at the mouth.
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Post by Jazz on Apr 6, 2010 15:43:16 GMT
I detest 'honest' food. Images of animals placing their paws on the bible and swearing to be 'authentic' and 'intellectual' on the plate. People seriously using this word. What is an 'honest' artichoke?
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Post by fumobici on Apr 6, 2010 16:01:45 GMT
Food trends are ridiculous 99% of the time. Does anyone really think there's unexplored culinary territories awaiting discovery? Is cooking fish in a plastic bag really a good idea? Is foam?
Italy, or at least Tuscany-Marche-Umbria, seem pretty much immune from all this foolishness, insulated by refined culinary conservatism.
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Post by lagatta on Apr 6, 2010 16:04:07 GMT
I don't like that expression either, but I thought it just meant food that isn't fake. Of course it is an over-the-top, to-die-for expression. The prose in food writing can be painful indeed, whether of the pretentious type or the fakey down-home folky type.
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Post by spindrift on Apr 6, 2010 16:21:06 GMT
I have never, until now, heard of the term 'Fooding' but then I live in the provinces.
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Post by lagatta on Apr 6, 2010 16:45:34 GMT
spindrift, "fooding" isn't a real English word. It is a fake anglicism invented in France. I only know of it from reading about it (in French media) and from viewing a "fooding" website (for restaurant reviews). Ghastly word.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Apr 6, 2010 18:53:59 GMT
Food trends are ridiculous 99% of the time. Does anyone really think there's unexplored culinary territories awaiting discovery? Is cooking fish in a plastic bag really a good idea? Is foam? Italy, or at least Tuscany-Marche-Umbria, seem pretty much immune from all this foolishness, insulated by refined culinary conservatism. Uh-Oh; Bad News From Italy: tinyurl.com/ykocftzThe main trend these days is for Government to restrict or prohibit what you can eat and how you want it cooked. So far, it's not a problem in Mexico.
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Post by fumobici on Apr 6, 2010 19:47:26 GMT
Wow. After a quick read I suppose it's probably really meant to keep dodgy canned Chinese tomato sauces off of Italian pizza and pasta and to make American-type fast food places near impossible to run.
The distinction between food additives and ingredients does sound pretty arbitrary and ad hoc xenophobic. I'm not sure this is much less logically tenable though than the DOC-AOC designations where a cow or vine on one side of a fence cannot be used to make a certain wine or cheese but the cow's sibling or a clone of the vine on the other side can.
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Post by cristina on Apr 7, 2010 1:14:56 GMT
I need some time to devote to the New Yorker piece so will comment later. But I had to add after DC's link on of the ban on on additives in Italy, that a legislator in NY recently introduced a bill to ban all salt in foods served in restaurants. The bill in part: S 399-BBB. PROHIBITION ON SALT; RESTAURANTS. 1. NO OWNER OR OPERATOR OF A RESTAURANT IN THIS STATE SHALL USE SALT IN ANY FORM IN THE PREPARATION OF ANY FOOD FOR CONSUMPTION BY CUSTOMERS OF SUCH RESTAURANT, INCLUDING FOOD PREPARED TO BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES OF SUCH RESTAURANT OR OFF OF SUCH PREMISES. And in whole.I'm pretty salt sensitive and am careful about certain salty foods. However one cannot abandon salt altogether. For one thing, if this bill were to pass, no New Yorker would ever enjoy a bagel again. And I am still a bit hung up on the the focus on restaurants, rather than on food manufacturers. Banning salt (or powdered gelatin) is foolish. Restricting the use of high fructose corn syrup might be a more worthy endeavor. And it might serve politicians well to have a committee of people knowledgeable in the ways of healthy food collaborating with them before issuing proposed bans. I'm going to stop now, because I feel a novel coming on. But making healthy food available and affordable to as many as possible is my pet peeve. Besides, I think I have digressed enough from the OP. Mea culpa. I shall slink off and read the rest of the New Yorker article now...
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Post by gertie on Apr 15, 2010 4:01:44 GMT
It seems to me that additives thing might well also make vegetarian and vegan cuisine MUCH harder to prepare, seeing as Agar Agar is out. I didn't see what they thought of nutritional yeast but would seem to me it might well be declared out. That about police seizing any powdered products...does this mean baking powder and baking soda are out, too? The whole thing sounds beyond crazy to me and I certainly hope the constituency will band together to put a stop to that nonsense. More because I can just see other countries trying similarly crazy things. Personally, I think one should wonder where these politicians are getting their money. I don't mean taxes, either, I mean cold hard cash in their pockets from commercial mass food producers. I am thinking rather than keeping Italian cuisine wholesome as they claim, they want to ensure their mass producing companies or those of people who give them cash will be selling lots of prepared foods vs kitchens making their own, because what I see as the most likely result of this nonsense is an Italy filled with a mass of fast food and psuedo cuisine joints where everything comes from frozen or tinned goods.
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