So let’s talk about the Alinea Project.
For those of you who don’t accidentally stumble across interviews with the creators of food blogs while looking up the twitter account of a food truck on the SFWeekly website—I am including this humiliating introduction to make it clear that I am complicit in everything I describe here—the Alinea Project is this guy Allen Hemberger, a special effects creator who lives in the Bay Area, and his one-man quest to make everything out of the Alinea cookbook. What’s the Alinea cookbook? Well, Alinea is a molecular gastronomy restaurant in Chicago. What’s molecular gastronomy? It’s a word for the kind of place where you are served bubblegum-covered tapioca pearls in a glass tube with creme fraiche and hibiscus gel, or, to use the recipe I have open in a tab right now, white ale gel rolled up into a spiral, topped with its own foam, with a pool of almond jam and malted milk powder, crushed pink peppercorns, lavender, orange zest, and tonka beans as topping. I’m not making this up, you can see it for yourself right here. Hemberger wrote a whole post about the saga of trying to make a mozzarella balloon with tomato foam inside. (Apparently this is hard! Who knew.)
On the one hand, this is an amazing blog and I’ve spent all of today and yesterday staring at it and salivating. Alinea is definitely the kind of food that you classify as “art”, and this guy, in recreating them and innovating as he goes, is making art at home. On top of that his food photography is stunning and there’s a certain baffling, glorious beauty in the shit he goes through to make the tubes.
NOW! Let’s get into why I hate that.
First of all, what I just said about this being “definitely the kind of food that you classify as art” is of course tied up in a world of gendered, classed, racialized bullshit. Why is tuna cubes on a wire any more fucking art than the homemade sushi components my friend’s mother makes? Why is it more art to dehydrate coffee grounds until they look like dirt than to spend twenty years of your life learning how to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie, except for that the first one involves buying a dehydrator? I’m not talking here about the photography (all food blogs include beautiful photography, that is why I don’t have a food blog) but about the experience itself. The idea is basically that you spend a week of your life, taking time off work in one case, to craft this perfect ten minute tomato experience that is both ephemeral and as close to perfection as you can make it— sure, that’s poetic and artistic and deserves more considered reflection than “lol he has no life,” but it’s only different from the devotion it took and takes housewives to manage recipes for the week on very little money while still trying to preserve nutrition and do something delicious and beautiful in that this guy has a blog about it and has chosen to do it.
I think this crystallizes what drives me up the wall about food blogging and fine cuisine, a world I am, for better or worse, totally immersed in. Food blogging, in general, is written by married/partnered women with kids/dogs. I like these women an enormous amount, but their blogs come from the same voice, a self-deprecating, funny, wry, sweet tone that says “No no, I just whipped this up.” A lot of them started the blogs as they started learning to cook/cooking more seriously, and kept them running, creating a narrative of the talented amateur who does it for love. Fine. If I started a food blog, it would contain the same information. I am not running a restaurant, and last night I made spring rolls that looked like hideous malformed burritos. But the marketable, popular narrative of women cooking is a familial, friendly attitude saying “you can do this too, it’s no big deal.” Ree Drummond (the Pioneer Woman). Paula Deen. Julie Powell. The marketable, popular narrative of men cooking is a rarefied art, one that takes years of expertise, one that qualifies for that Ira Glass quote about the gap between taste and production. Allen Hemberger. Yotam Ottolenghi. David Lebovitz. Oh, hell, most of the best chefs in the business, I’m actually saying something very boring and statistically supported when I say that high cuisine is a male-dominated world. When women are elevated to that status—Martha Stewart, Julia Child—it’s not looked at as the normal expectations of professionalism but as the unusual and in fact sick expectations of a heightened domesticity.
To convert cooking into a leisure activity, you need the class privileges of money and time. To be praised for the creativity and brilliance of your cooking, you need the gender privilege to not be just expected that your recipes are passed down for generations (or made to be passed down for generations) (“my mother’s soup” in how many restaurants, exactly? how many French chefs invented their grandmother’s chicken?) and the race privilege that says that whatever you put your hands on is something you invented. Oh, you deconstructed the sushi roll? That’s fusion food, you genius! Let me kiss you on the mouth and give you a Michelin star.
And this blog and the restaurant it’s from just perfects it to a staggering extent. You cannot try this at home. Yeah, he MacGyvers some of the ingredients and processes, but the money and time it takes him to do even that is unimaginably out of my reach and I am not exactly hurting for either! And I don’t necessarily think the inaccessibility of the ingredients makes it wrong— I can’t afford the time and effort to get professional sculpting equipment, either, or champion ice-skating— but I do think that the praise he gets for it is just staggeringly hilarious in the context of the wastefulness of the endeavour.
It really does come down, even in the highly female world of the food blog, to the fact that when a white rich guy is doing it, it’s art. Take away any one of those qualifications, and at best it’s creative necessity.
