MasterChef, Stein, Foodies and the idea of quality food

If we set up a food taste scale, with one being soil and 100 being manna, a terrible custard might rank as taste 10; inedible as it tastes like dog sick and has mould on it.  An average custard would rank at 65, a work a day custard, custard is delicious anyway. A great custard would rank at 75, slightly more delicious, but only a slight difference from the average custard. Foodie-ism is the incredible bourgeois obsession with the minute taste differences between these slightly different variations of custard.  


Custard A has been made using rinsed Andalusian cream, this custard tastes mildly bland.  Custard B has been made with slightly too much Dominican sugar syrup,  this custard is middlingly plain. Custard C has exactly the right ingredients, in the right combination and quantities, for this particular custard loving judge's entirely subjective taste receptors. The judge is thus able to judge that C is definitely the best custard and, because his entirely subjective senses are thought of as being better at judging the taste of custard than yours or mine, we go along with his decision. 


Sometimes the judge's knowledge is so respected that he gets to bring out his own range of eggy custard tarts.  We eat the over priced tarts with the knowledge that they contain custard sanctioned by a nationally televised custard expert, and feel superior to the other plebeian tart eaters in that they don't have the custard knowledge that we have attained, by proxy, through imbibing the products endorsed, but not made by, the said expert.

Stein - Cold dead eyes

The king of these fuckers is Rick Stein.  A man with barely a sliver of humanity floating on a ocean of vacuity. You can tell Rick Stein is a monster by looking closely at his eyes.  Whenever he stops patronising people with his random inconsequential musings there is a kind of barely concealed anger that begins to creep its way in to his blank face.  An anger and a sadness.  He's constantly on the verge of being short with people.  Telling them what's what, setting the world to rights. Of course he is also famous for getting demonstratively angry at the standard of British cooking; over and over and over again. Episode after episode. Lionising "authentic peasant food" and belittling the lack of British "flair and imagination".  All we need is "authentic British ingredients, simply cooked".

I've got news for Stein and every other patronising cook that considers themselves to be a serious gastronomic ethnographer and an arbiter of British tastes. It's only fucking food.  It functions as a symbol of good taste only because people like you set apart the "good" and "bad", the "quality" and the "trash" with meaningless ad hoc associations.  "Hilariously" prawn cocktail (snigger) and black forest gateaux (snort) were the height of middle class taste in 1977, but we know better now.  Those foodstuffs were eaten by people who didn't understand food the way we do in the sophisticated 21st century.  The best food to eat is obviously LBISC (local British ingredients, simply cooked). 

MasterChef takes the concept of infinitesimally small differences between "good" and "bad" food to it's logical conclusion.  Hundreds and hundreds of slight variations on the same glossy, cloying ingredients, presented to elicit the deliberately pointed responses of two fat faced nobodies, one of whom only got the job because he can distinguish between different types of vegetables. After a while every plate looks the same.  But the opinions of the experts are always consistent in their banality.

Jonty Road: Her tart was delicious, the filling was perfect but the crust didn't have enough salt in it.  

Veg expert: That's the second time she's left an ingredient out that, in my opinion, should be in a meal. She's out of the competition.  

How much difference did that salt make?  We buy into the myth of gastronomic perfection.  That there exists somewhere an uber-tart. The tart that all other tarts that are created have to be measured against. But such a tart doesn't exist.  All tarts are measured against each other on a subjective internal bank of tart memories.  MasterChef is essentially a program about what Veg Man and Jonty Road like eating. It should be called Line Up to Please the Randomly Chosen Men that have something to do with Food.

Keith Floyd had the right idea. Show people a place, show them how to cook a food item, tell them it's easy to do and to enjoy it, eating the food with some delicious wine. End of story.  What's not good is patronisingly lecturing people on what they should be eating, constantly harking back to a non existent British peasant food culture and obsessing about what the average family (for average family read the working classes) cooks for their tea. Chicken nuggets exist and people really really like eating them, it may make you feel slightly queasy, but do you know what? Hard shit.  No matter how many times you call chicken nuggets tasteless cardboard processed rubbish, it won't change the fact that their popularity kind of proves that they taste nice and lots of people prefer eating them to food that you consider to be more worthwhile.

Depression, self perception and subjective reality

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes feel when I woke up in the morning that someone had opened my skull and blanketed my brain with a thick layer of cotton wool. This  brain fog felt like I was peering out of my own eyes at a world that, although I definitely knew I had seen before, I could not quite remember where.  I now know that this experience has a name, depersonalization disorder, but at the time I had no idea what the hell was going on.  I experienced depersonalization disorder on and off for a couple of years.  It mostly stayed for an hour or two but when I was about 15 the feeling came and stayed with me for about a week.  It felt a little like the opposite of deja vu. I knew everyone's names, and recognized their faces, but something intangible was missing, as if the world had been replaced overnight by an exact copy of the world that had  existed the day before.  I knew that I had seen the objects, places and people that made up my life before, but they elicited in my brain the wrong kind of responses; as if a particular part of me was seeing them for the first time.  These feelings were the first time my perception of reality, and my perception of what it was that made "me", was altered.

In my experience depression is primarily a disorder of perception.  We can live our whole lives without asking basic questions of ourselves, without beginning to perceive and challenge the constructs and fixed modes of thinking that make up our personalities.  Understanding that our opinions are as much a product of our  upbringing, the random accidents of our birth, our geographical location, our health, our family wealth etc. as of our continued conscious engagement with the world.  Depression, very quickly, destroys any illusion that your "PERSONALITY” is something that lives in your head, a true reflection of "you".  It does this by taking away the "who" of you very quickly indeed.  Your personality is voided; removed.  It seems like you have to start again from scratch.  Now although this void is an horrendous experience in one very important way I found it enlightening.  When you sink down into the rabbit hole the blinkers are off. Your perception is flipped.  This new mode of perception is of course as much a construct as that which it replaced, but the important thing is the fact that you have experienced two separate personality states.  You have stepped out of the box. When I was severely depressed I no longer remembered who I was before the slow slide downward.  I was a essentially a different person.

Nothing has been the same since this experience.   After my first, and only, major depressive episode in my teens, I lived in constant fear of that person coming back. I did not fear being "unhappy", but of feeling like, and to all intents and purposes being, a completely different person; of being haunted by something that I could not control, that destroyed the "me" and replaced it with a different, darker, "me".  When I was depressed I knew that things seemed profoundly different to the way they were before the depressive event, but my memories of who I was then were no longer accessible. To ask me to recall being "happy" was like asking me to recall what it might be like for someone else to be happy. I knew what happy meant, I could imagine it, I could give it substance through associated signs, a couple hand in hand in a corn field, a smiling father, a happy baby etc but the essence of what was signified by "happy" was completely gone.

This is where my struggle with "who" I am comes from; my current interest in perception, identity and involuntary memory and my on going distrust of my instincts and decision making capabilities.  I struggle with whether my words, and opinions, have any real meaning or weight.  I can never say for certain whether that which I proclaim to be true is really true, or simply what I believe at any given moment in time. I am swayed Daily by the Mail and The Guardian. I think one thing that depression has taught me is an awareness of the fragile nature of ideological positions and the ease at which people can fool themselves into thinking that their opinions are "common sense".  How quickly the unusual becomes normality in society; and the previously normal becomes sidelined and abnormal. Throughout our lives we encounter people who don't ever seem to have begun to truly engage with this concept.  The world is one way, their perception is correct, that is how it is.  The Certaintists.

Many people lack any empathy to perceive that other people are not just carbon copies ejected from the same mould but individuals with their own unique inner lives. Or the imagination to see that other people may  see the world entirely differently from themselves. Not just in that they prefer cricket to football or Tory to Labour, but in profound ways that defy description. That they themselves, and our current consensus reality, is in a constant state of change.

When I'm not in a down phase I can skip past negative thoughts as if they are barely there at all, but when I feel low they trip me up time and time again.  It is at these moments that the difference between my low and high states becomes most clear to me.  I cannot let the negative thoughts go.  I have no tools for doing so.  What is effortless for the up me is impossible for the down me and the gulf between the two personalities that exist within me seems immeasurably distant. One side cannot offer solace or help to the other because when one personality appears, the other is entirely subsumed.  My mind changes the world.

When a depressive episode begins to recede it sometimes feels like my knowledge of reality, or the un-knowable, subjective  nature of reality, is becoming less real and more blurred. I feel that my brief insight into "the truth" such as it is, is being de-realized and that somehow I am retreating back into the forest.  In that forest lies the entirely illusory comfort blanket of my un-depressed mind.  This is perhaps the reason behind the great irony of how the leaden paralysis of depression can inspire great art and provoke radical thought. Because along with all of the turbulence and misery can also come a new perception and a clarity of thought that can provide a deeper understanding of the subjective quality of conscious experience and give sufferers a glimpse of the world through another's eyes.

The (continued) Rise of the Idiots – Super Super Magazine - Channel 4 - Monday 7th Sept

I really don't know where to start with the above clip. I assumed, at first, that it was a group of art students doing a really, really out of date Nathan Barley pastiche but some cursory searching seems to reveal that, unbelievably, Super Super Magazine is very real, and so are the wacky, entirely un-ironic funsters in this edition of the Channel 4 documentary, Three Minute Wonder. Watch it.

I could write a whole treatise on why Kassette player's oversize glasses are a fucking joke. I don’t hate these people, I just think that they are all absolute fucking idiots. I’m not saying that they should conform, for all I care they can dance through Shoreditch on to Dalston and out into Walthamstow dressed from head to toe in whatever flamboyantly unexpected attire they deem suitable.

I've changed my mind. I do hate them.

And why do I hate them? Because they are self satisfied, arrogant idiots. Idiots that are convinced that what they are doing definitely has meaning and worth and obviously gain such enormous satisfaction from their perceived 'differentness' that they never, not for one minute, question whether the stuff falling out of their brains has any real worth at all.

“Young people are fashionable yeah? So…Erm? Let me think. Why don’t we do a photo article on why old people are fashionable? Why should it only be young people that are considered fashionable? It will totally confound people’s expectations!”

“London's full of tramps, yeah? Why don’t we dress some tramps in some great clothes and take photos of them? It will totally confound people’s expectations and make, like, a really profound statement about poverty.”

“Most fashion photography contains images where the clothes are the focus, yeah? So people can see and compare the clothes they would like to purchase? Well, that's really obvious. Why don’t we totally confound people’s expectations and do a shoot where we blur all of the clothes, yeah? ”



Professing to not like irony, and claiming sincerity, whilst attempting to be as ironic as possible is something that idiot hipsters have been doing for generations. Check out the clip from Fist of Fun based, I think, on the short lived 80’s anger magnet The Modern Review, then watch Dan Ashcroft lamenting the rise of the idiots in Nathan Barley, a spot on show that, brilliant though it was, was already 3 years or more out of date when it aired; a lot like Super Super magazine, which seems to be shouting about the fact that it created the horrendous shit clash that was Nu Rave 2 years after the trend has become as fashionable as rickets. Idiots move on fast.



Some of my favourite bits from the film:

1. The way that Kassete recorder manages to both name check that she was contacted by a fashion magazine, subtly indicating she is very fashionable, and also, through word trickery, pretend that she hadn’t a clue why they phoned her up. I don’t know why anyone would think she was following a fashion. That is just how she dresses. She’s not that shallow! That bit made my teeth hurt. Also the t shirt she is holding is an ironically shit tribal design 'like a chav might have', on the cheeks of someones arse! So unexpected!
2. “What did you like about us”, the nice Brummie pensioner asks. “the colours”, she manages to babble. Why did they shoot this bit in Birmingham? To confound your expectations!
3. I love the 'new trend' of people wearing clothes from charity shops. 'It’s completely anti-fashion, but then comes all the way round and becomes fashionable again. Ironic really. I wouldn’t expect you to understand’. And I was really impressed when she said that she wouldn’t want to wear an Armani shirt and would prefer the Armi brand copy! She’s got so much integrity. I would totally have expected her to say that the Armani shirt would be a better thing to wear, as the Armi one is a hilarious low rent copy only twats would buy! She confounded my expectations by saying the opposite to that which was expected.
   

I hate them for another reason as well. A reason that Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris touch on in Nathan Barley. Because they ARE the industry. They exist in all levels of the media. They are television producers making the same fashionable crap over and over again for the 'youth market' and the magazine editors writing the same old stories, as if the stories have never been written before. They're the photographers and stylists convincing the world, as they are convinced themselves, that what they are producing is exciting and new, when it in fact it's derivative and dull. They are the commissioning editors telling script writers that the latest hit comedy show is the future, and more of the same will be even funnier and they are script writers writing appallingly lazy sketch shows and thinking them innovative, when in fact they are valueless, superficial wank. They are all those rewarded for producing boring non-ideas by artless superiors in an industry constantly in thrall to the rehashed vomit of the latest generation of talent. Talent that, with rare exception, exists on un-noticed cliche, monstrous egos and fleeting and mundane trends.

Being funny is good. That’s clever. Using irony correctly, for interesting reasons, that’s good. Making interesting statements about important things, that’s good. Making challenging art that makes people think, that’s good. All of these things are really hard things to do well, and very very easy to do badly. They are done badly every second of every minute of every day.

Most people that strive to produce something interesting and worthwhile beat themselves up over their lack of ideas, the fact that what they may think or write, or film, or make, has been thought written filmed and made a million times before. A new angle on a joke. A different way to tell a familiar story. Calling yourself Kassette Playa? Wearing hilarious over sized glasses? Designing ugly t shirts with arses on? Saying that you hate irony whilst existing entirely in a twatty London fishbowl, constructed almost entirely out of irony? These are not worthy things. Of course being fun and flippant rather than worthy is not a crime. But to do them with such a lack of self knowledge, such a massively misplaced sense of self confidence is incredibly offensive to people that know clever from stupid, which I hope is most people in the country.

Who knows if Channel 4 meant it to be a joke at these naïve young things expense? They certainly gave them enough rope to hang themselves with.

PS. All of the above, and so much more, is also why the film Juno was shit. But that is another blog post.

Richard Herring and his Hitler Moustache, Brighton

Saw Richard Herring's live show, Hitler Moustache, last night at Upstairs at the Three and Ten in Kemptown. It was an Edinburgh warm up show. I'm not a natural gig goer. Although i love stand up i find the potential for prolonged, embarrassing silences and performer humiliation way too much to bear. I'm the sort of person that has to say something, anything, to fill a void left in an stilted conversation. For me the thought of someone on a stage, being shit, in a silent room full of dispirited faces, is a vision of hell. This is why i will never go and see Rhod Gilbert (ho ho). This is also why i have never understood hecklers. To be a heckler you'd have to have a powerful combination of a staggering lack of empathy, a redundancy of compassion and leonine like confidence in your own betterness than the poor person who is attempting to entertain you. My sister told me about a time she went to see one of my favourite comedians, Simon Day at the notorious stand up hell that is Bangor university student union. Like so many comedians before him, I've heard, he died horribly and at one point said the terrible words, "I'm really sorry about this" to the tiny unamused audience. Those words, and the image of noble Simon Day, suffering in unwanted silence, have stuck with me ever since. The awk would have been incredible.

According to the Brighton Argus the Hitler Moustache set would at points make me "genuinely laugh-out-loud". This made me slightly less nervous. I would have been sorely disappointed if i went to a stand up gig and the comedian only managed to produce jokes that made me laugh internally; or, in fact, jokes that only made me pretend to laugh out loud. That wouldn't be very entertaining at all. We arrived at the venue half an hour early and had the usual gallon of wine. Then, at 8pm, made our way upstairs to the tiny room with its tiny stage. My first instinct was to sit at the back of the room, out of sight. If Richard was shit and a disappointment, i could feel sorry for him in the shadows. Amanda was up for sitting towards the back as well as she has a morbid fear of being dragged up on stage to "participate"; a hang over from too many South African childhood pantomimes perhaps? We were already hovering over the safely hidden seats when the mischievous Gods of conflict avoidance challenged me to be a better man, as they have so many times before, by presenting us with two seats directly in front of the mouse like stage. Amazingly, my love of Herring won out and we threw awk to the wind and advanced to the front.

The gig was great, i didn't feel at all awkward and was very pleased to have taken the chance and not settled for the easy option, as i would have normally. A small victory. Herring was very good making me genuinely laugh out loud pretty much all the way through. Although i do admit to falsely laughing out loud on one occasion. At one point he even singled us out, saying i looked like a bit like David Brent with my "combination of every beard style known to man" face . He also indicated that Amanda should be as creative with her ladygarden as she is on the allotment. When he left the stage i was excited to see an enormous and truly terrifying red/yellow puss mark on his back, a remnant of a recently exploded cyst. Lovely. A grand night.