Future Food

In the Travel and Indulgence section of the Weekend Australian, June 25-26, 2011, Kendal Hill cites a half dozen or so 'world's leading chefs at the recent S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants in London' on 'the next big trends' in food, meaning here only restaurant food, and indeed, given those he spoke to, only the haute cuisine end of the restaurant spectrum.

I have to say I found their views underwhelming, gratingly cliche and out of touch. They all talk of turning to food that is local [though what they mean by this means anything from locally sourced to a constructed national cuisine] and natural, in opposition apparently to molecular. I wonder as I read this where and with whom these chefs have been eating for the past dozen and more years that they talk as if it is they who are discovering the value of these and will now proceed to instruct us in how this will be achieved, all the while of course charging us premium dollars.


What, for example am I to make of the following comment from Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma restaurant, the current 'best chef in the world' according to the organisers of the event. In response to the question where is food heading he said ;In our region it's heading towards more thorough exploration of ourselves. Of our soil, of our waters, of our gastronomic heritage. A deeper understanding of why it is we eat as we do; that cooking is a way to explore the world; that food is something that should be integral, not like some weird alter ego to you that you feel awkward about.'

Copenhagen's a fair way north of Italy but I can't believe that the discussions about regionalism, sustainability, and the cultural meanings of food  -sustenance, conviviality, hospitality, it's capacity for stimulating cross-cultural understanding and so on  - kick-started by the Slow Food movement a dozen years ago has not been part of the food culture of Denmark for at least as long. Nor can I believe that there are many people sitting down to their daily meals worldwide who 'feel awkward' about their food. The degree of dissociation apparent in these statements is staggering.

As it is in the proposal by Brett Graham of The Ledbury in London that  there will be a 'real shift towards tasting menus'. I don't see your average punter being happy about coughing up the $250 or thereabouts that Tony Bilson is now apparently charging for his new degustation menu when they want a night out of fine dining.


But then I reflect that these are views from kitchens where feeding has been stripped of most of its cultural meanings and values and distressingly retains only its capacity for class distinction and self-aggrandisement.