You can't produce good food without some humility.
Ruth Bourdain of
Twitter fame has been revealed! If you’re like me, you had no idea there ever
was someone named Ruth Bourdain on Twitter, or that she was a satirical
character made up by an anonymous — but very funny — prankster.
Now that “her”
identity was exposed in The New York Times (“she” is food
blogger Josh Friedland), I’m paying attention.
The name Ruth Bourdain
is a combination of Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain. Reichl famously tweets
her breakfast, sending out such gems as “Still. Gray. Cicadas screeching. Such
a mournful sound. Fragrant strawberries, just picked. Rivers of yellow cream.
Color for a muted day.”
Friedland’s version is more like: “Foggy. Stormy. Lightning in the night. Is that asparagus tucked into your softly stirred eggs or are you just happy to see me? Brown butter me.”
With the joke exposed,
Friedland went on NPR’s On Point show for a thought-provoking
conversation about the blurred line these days between
humor and reality. They discuss a Chicago restaurant that sets smoldering oak leaves on the table as it serves
tempura-fried pheasant with green grapes and walnuts so that the diner can
“experience the pleasures of a Midwestern autumn.”
That sounds like it
could be satire, and yet it’s real. It reminds me of Bittor Arguinzoniz, the
chef who flavors all of his food with smoke, who Michael Pollan writes about in
his book,Cooked. “I watched Bittor ‘cook’ an oyster,” Pollan writes, “a
process that involved choosing a single, perfect ember and placing it beneath
the plump dove-gray ovoid with a pair of forceps, just so.”
What, it’s not like
that in your kitchen either?
An average night in my
house involves a frenzy of chopping and stirring as I try to not burn the food.
I set the fire alarm off so much that I had to move it away from the kitchen.
There are days when I’m too lazy to bother at all, so “dinner” is toast with
peanut butter plus a whole, raw cucumber and a ripe peach or two.
I can only imagine the
breakfast one might tweet if they had a few school-aged kids and a job to get
to. “Running late. Again. Stop putting cereal up your sister’s nose or you’re
grounded. Eat it, don’t play with it. And put your shoes on.”
I self-identify as a
foodie, but my love for good, ethically produced food doesn’t extend to the
level of absurdity. I will go to the lengths of making homemade yogurt and
cheese and canning my own jam and tomato sauce. I’ve got my own fruit trees,
garden, and flock of chickens. All of that puts me well outside of the American
mainstream, but I do it because I enjoy it.
And yet, it’s
impossible to produce good food and lose your humility. Any attempt at
arrogance will be lost when you find yourself on your hands and knees in the
chicken coop looking for the eggs the chickens hid down there. Your self-image
as the perfect parent goes out the window when you take your children to a
potluck on an organic farm and they ask, “Can we go to McDonalds?” (Yes, that
happened to me.)
The modern “food”
movement is a fantastic force that’s helping move many Americans toward a diet
that’s healthy, sustainable, and delicious. Yet, when they reach the level of
absurdity, some of its denizens wind up alienating people. Satirists like “Ruth
Bourdain” do us a big favor by reminding us of that.
OtherWords columnist Jill
Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org