The New Frugality

To a certain extent, I enjoy watching certain food-related shows on television. I suppose I like the ones in which chefs are engaged in some kind of competition, whether it's to be Top Chef, or the Next Food Network Star. I'm really fond of Chopped, that show in which one of the Queer Eye guys gives the competitors identical picnic baskets containing impossible ingredients—an obscure fruit from Indonesia, a packet of beef jerky, a small twist of chocolate nonpareils, and a pound of rice crackers—and demands that they prepare within thirty minutes for the persnickety judges a delicious, piping hot gourmet entree.

I suppose what I like to see in my food television is the sight of perplexed chefs sweating in their food.

As much as I enjoy the seemingly endless parade of cocky chefs being publicly humiliated on the TV when they're unable in a quickfire competition to create the perfect amuse-bouche solely out of products found in a Krispy Kreme franchise, what I'm not particularly entranced by, of late, is the cult of the celebrity chef. The phenomenon is particularly odious on television, where any hotshot with a set of knives and a tattoo or three can bring his swagger in front of the camera. Bonus points if the chef in question wears douchebag hats and carries a skateboard in his late thirties.

And you know, my attitude with these people, whether they're some hopped-up nobody running a molecular gastronomy deconstructed pizza joint in the Bronx, or Gordon Effing-Eff-Effable-Eff-Eff Ramsey, is something along the lines of Listen, you're about the same to me as the slob at the IHOP griddle, so bitch, get in the damned kitchen and make me a stack of chocolate chip pancakes.

I just dislike the stink of the sanctimony of these people. I disliked it immensely when recently I read a chef autobiography of a particularly spiky and nasty woman who, three-quarters of the way in, ranted about how she didn't understand why the common people ate fast-food meals because she would rather go hungry than eat anything that wasn't made from locally-grown, in-season produce and free-range protein sources that weren't prepared with classical techniques at the hands of trained professionals. Like herself. For fifty dollars a course. Thinking about it only makes me want to go on one of my rants again. Hold me back, boys!

I'm not trying to malign all chefs, here. Just those who think that based on their profession, they're hotshots. To them and to their fellow foodies, consumption is a new religion. They've found a new (and admittedly, probably more delicious than mainstream Christianity) way to divide the faithful few from the great unwashed masses. Just like religious conservatives, they also use every opportunity to rub it in our faces.

I'm indulging in this rant simply to get around to a particularly irritating trend I've noticed floating around the blogosphere lately: frugal foodieism. Really frugal foodieism.

The essays start off innocently enough. The author and her husband (it's probably coincidence, but they're all written by women) find themselves in reduced circumstances. They've had to give up the flat in New York City and move to the cheaper suburbs, where there's not even a Le Pain Quotidien in the zip code. And what do they do when they get there? Do they haunt Whole Food Market and substitute flank steak for osso bucco?

No, what they apparently do is go scavaging in nature. They pick wild sorrel and dandelion greens for their salads, and scrape and dry obscure mushrooms found by roadside lay-bys. They harvest seaweed to season their brown rice. They use their high-speed internet connections and Macbooks in order to write genteelly about their poverty and to research which lichens are edible and can be used in a chic post-modern fusion of Japanese and classic French cookery.

It's freakin' irritating. Not only are they claiming the sanctimony of foodieism, but they get to experience a Thoreuvian rush of self-sufficiency from the land and a (probably false) sense of economy as well. It's like the trifecta of poncey cliquishness that makes me want to reach for a bag of taco-flavored Doritos and munch on them sullenly.

Listen. I know I do weird-ass stuff, like make my own jams from fresh fruit (peaches were a dollar a pound! I had to do something with them!), or bake my own bread, or make my own yogurt. But I don't bask in the self-righteousness of it all, after. I eat my good eats and move on.

If I ever start lovingly eyeing my neighbor's dandelion-covered lawn and licking my lips while I contemplate writing an article about The New Frugality, though? Please knock me cold with a box of Bisquick and bury me in the dumpster in the back of the IHOP, thank you very much.