What's in a "foodie"?

Having thought a lot about whether I might be called a "foodie", and feeling uncomfortable about being labelled as such, I started thinking about why I feel uncomfortable with the term and what it really means (to me).

I think it is safe to say that when we think of a "foodie", we think of somebody who is almost obsessed with great food, who has the level of interest and takes the time to learn about it, often going to great lengths and expense to get their hands on top quality ingredients, to cook and/or enjoy (and probably be served) a tasty meal. Nothing wrong with that. There are worse things to be obsessed with! However, as implied above, it is inevitable that a foodie is normally comparatively well-off and, let's be honest, a bit of a "food snob" (which is probably a term that requires its own analysis!). There will always be dishes that a foodie will not touch or places that a foodie will not eat at, because it would literally be a sign of "bad taste". And this is precisely what bothers me about the term. The term "foodie" is in itself, firstly, exclusive, and secondly, narrow-minded. My aim here is therefore to make a particular point related to the "democratisation" of food. Bear with me while I explain...

Do you speak foodie?

There are plenty of blogposts and definitions out there via which you can find out about what a foodie is and is not, and form your own view. Yet, I tend to agree with the (currently) 6th definition in the Urban Dictionary; it makes this point: "Are they gonna come up with a term for people who are really, really into breathing air???". My particular point is that, in an ideal world, the term "foodie" should be superfluous. It would not have the connotations of wealth and social status that it does. After all, food is a universal, primal language. Even though levels of interest in food differ from person to person, who can live without food? Doesn't everybody have some level of interest in their food? And - quite aside from the fact that the definition of a "good" meal varies in all sorts of aspects depending on whom you are speaking to - who does not enjoy a good meal?

Shopping for food - what are our choices?

So is everyone actually able to eat a good meal? Try as hard as you may, sometimes your hand is forced; sometimes you do end up buying food that you do not enjoy so much; that you would not normally buy if access to better food was easier, cheaper or perhaps "if you had more time". Many people, poor and rich, face this every day, but the poor are hit the hardest. Yet, paradoxically, apparently we have more choice than ever before. Sure, the variety of food at our fingertips may be high, but what about the quality of choice? And what about the choice between different suppliers?

The way I see it - certainly from a UK perspective -  is that essentially, access to food for the average citizen is actually limited to one or at best two suppliers, who supply a certain "class" of goods for a particular "class" of consumer. As a "lower class" customer, our potential for getting the levels of pleasure from food that a foodie does is thus limited. Apparently we still have lots of choice - all year round as well!-, but we get the more cheaply produced and therefore more cheaply priced produce from our one or two suppliers. With all the cheap processed foods available in food shops, in particular in poorer neighbourhoods, and fruit and veg - which are the healthier and should be the more delicious "raw materials" - being relatively more expensive and perhaps simply unappetising (take watery, tasteless tomatoes in the middle of winter for example), some people just aren't even given a chance to become foodies. If we had a more diversified supply of food - more markets, more local shops providing a larger variety of produce, more local farms supplying local shops - we would have a better choice.

Knowing food

Indeed, there are some particularly (culturally) vibrant pockets of London, for example, that are just brimming with better choices and those who live and buy food there are not your typical foodie... To go back to the exclusivity of the word "foodie", I know that there are plenty of less materially privileged people out there, who know how to cook up a feast every day as part of their everyday living, and who thoroughly enjoy their food. Would they be recognised as "foodies"?

At the same time, more broadly across the UK, there is not only a problem with access to food with "foodie potential" for a huge number of people, but also with knowledge of food, including what is in season, what is good quality food (how to pick the good stuff) and - most importantly - how to cook it so it tastes amazing. This means that there is also an element of what we do with the choice once we have it! I think that real foodies know what to do. But at the moment, a lot of people wouldn't know what to do even if they had the choice...

Growing food

The definition of a "foodie" should include more than just shopping for, cooking and eating food. Isn't growing food the most fundamental thing to get right and be passionate about, if you want to eat and cook it later? At the very least, foodies should care about what happens to their food before it hits their supermarket trolleys, home delivery vans or market/local shop baskets. But the fewest people have access to land where they might try to grow food or witness the growing of it. And this includes the wealthy. This means that they are not seeing the effects of their consumption habits - ignorance is bliss. If so-called "foodies" eat food that has been produced by poisoning the soil, rivers, groundwater and living organisms with pesticides, therefore negatively affecting future opportunities to produce food, then they can hardly be real lovers of food...

Caring for and about food

Allegedly I am in a city full of "foodies". At the same time, I am also in a country in which people care comparatively little about how and where their food is produced and therefore what they are consuming. In fact, there are some figures that support this view (see Oxfam's report "The Food Transformation: harnessing consumer power to create a fair food future"). I suppose this doesn't come as a surprise, as British food "enjoys" a rather - shall we say - "bleak" reputation for its food (outside London). There is a reason why, on a school trip to England (being based in mainland Europe), I sent my mother a postcard of a skeleton and "I miss your cooking" on the front of it... This is, to be fair, probably justified considering what the majority of British citizens eat on a daily basis, let alone the sad reality of what they don't or can't eat (without access to fresh, healthy and what should be relatively cheap, local produce). This is the country where ready-made meals have really taken off - aside from the US (for example, see this 2003 BBC article "Ready meals catch on" and a 2013 BBC article "The rise of the ready meal"). Also, from my own experience, travelling around the UK might leave you yearning to go home to eat a dish that is not deep-fried or that is not served with chips - unless you happen to have a "foodie guide" in your pocket, and therefore know where to find and have the appropriate level of income to dine at "foodie venues".

Social food - food "as a product of social pressure"

Given my disappointing experience with British food, I was very interested to hear at an event I attended recently, that cultural attitudes towards food have remained relatively stable. For example, there was much discussion about the long-standing difference between the US and the UK versus the French and Italian attitudes of eating together, and what this means for the respective societies and health of people (for an interesting article on this, see "Americans need to stop multitasking while eating alone, argues French sociologist Claude Fischler"). The event was a panel debate at the London School of Economics entitled "Fashion in Food" (you can listen to the podcast of the event) and the panel member who talked about stable cultural attitudes towards food was Claude Fischler, a senior French anthropologist (and director of research at CNRS amongst other things). Another panel member, Matthew Fort, a well-known food critic and "food celebrity" in the UK, talked about food as a form of social exclusion, choices being determined by necessity. This is definitely not a new thing. You only have to open the history books and check the culinary sections, to see that certain foods were accessible only to those who could afford it, mainly the nobility. "So", I thought, "perhaps there is no hope for British food after all." But what is new and what makes matters worse is that people are being dictated, lectured, "educated" about what (not) to eat, and then very often not given access to the "right" kind of food. As Matthew Fort stated at the above debate: "food has become the product of social pressure".

Food for social change - cooking up a storm?

So I think that now would be a good time to use the social pressure to work from the bottom up, rather than top down - and through food. Can we change our access to, perception of and knowledge of food? Can we harness the collective "consumption power" of foodies to create the necessary force for change? If we were to democratise and at the same time de-politicise the meaning of "foodie",  perhaps every person in the country would be able to answer the question "Are you a gardening foodie being, a cooking foodie being or an eating foodie being?". Everyone could and should be a foodie. Finally, replacing the word "foodie" with "human" will make for a far superior dish!