Foodies are the complete opposite of culture snobs

The CBC's Jian Ghomeshi tweeted today about an interview he's doing on his radio show Q with some authors who claim foodies are culture snobs, and it struck me as wrong.  And not just wrong, but completely wrong; in fact, I actually think that it's the other way around.  What some have termed foodie culture — the obsessive blogging, documenting and photographing of meals, the fetishistic love of cookbooks and fanatic devotion to particular chefs — seems less about the cool, aesthetic taste of snobbery and more to do with a kind of mainstream trendiness that can't distinguish fad from food.

If anything, I'd consider myself more of a food snob in the "culture snob" vein than a person toting a camera to a restaurant and raving over another variation of French/Italian cuisine.  I don't care about where I eat my food — a hole in the wall or a high-class Michelin-starred resto — as long as the food is interesting, tasty and unique.  The "foodie" (a term that should rightly be termed an epithet in my mind) is someone who spends more time admiring the environment of a restaurant, the expense of kitchen knives and accessories and the photographic arrangement of the food they're presented with, than the food itself.  And to me that is not culinary snobbishness, but cultural tourism.  It's like going to Paris and snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre because everyone goes there and it's a masterpiece and — well, what about the beautiful piece of art at the gallery in the Marais?

If anything, foodies are victims of marketing.  What might have started as an appreciation of culinary skill and a fine dining experience has become an easy way to signify one's breeding and sophistication, in the manner of people becoming wine aficionados by adopting the terminology and attitude of so-called "wine experts".  For the restaurant world, it's been a gold mine, after years where working in a kitchen was the domain of the criminal and the immigrant.  Chefs are celebrities, knowledge of food commands high prices and "opening a restaurant" is a goal and not the newcomer's economic foot in the door.  People ("foodies") dream of culinary school, working in top kitchens, and yet… it all seems contrived, just another calcified genre with its tropes: think Tuscan cooking vacations and "Northwest Cuisine", charcuterie and "tasting menus".

There's a woman I know who got into wine.  She bought a wine fridge, splashed out regularly for $50+ vintages, hosted a blind wine tasting at her home with some friends.  With this hobby came an attendant interest in food and cooking — she had a stack of cookbooks and a little kitchen herb garden.  One day she made a meal for me and my wife, supposedly an Italian pasta dish, where she dumped a bottle of Ragu in with some cooked shrimp to make the sauce.  I knew then that being a "foodie" was like a coat that one could put on, something that might be fashionable for a few hot seconds, and that could be discarded quite easily.  This woman never talks about her planned trip to Tuscany anymore, and there aren't any more wine tastings.  The last thing I saw in her fridge was a nacho cheese dip from Safeway.  Perhaps she comes off as a snob to some, but to me it's just the veneer of the tourist.