Food as Music: When Foodies Went Too Far

Are you super excited for the Great GoogaMooga festival in Brooklyn this weekend, where the chefs are the real rock stars? Fuck you.

This has all of the earmarks of a great shark-jumping moment, when twee Brooklyn identity politics-based foodieism finally went too far, tipping from mild subcultural hobby into macrocultural caricature. This is the foodie shark, jumping right into a big vat of... some kind of really niche kimchi, urban rustic, something-something. Fill in the blank, foodies.

You know who likes food? Everybody. Everybody alive, almost by definition, enjoys eating, which makes it quite unfortunate that we're going to have to stop eating, now that foodies have made the entire notion so disgusting with their gross out-of-proportion fetishization, in the same way that seeing a 500-pound transvestite leather fetishist being fucked by a chaps-wearing horse might put you off leather jackets for a lifetime. This is all, quite naturally, brought to a head by a New York Times trend story—the herald of any modern day cultural apocalypse. Food: the new music.

"I think everybody and their brother knows that food is the new rock 'n' roll," said Justin Warner, a 28-year-old chef at Do or Dine, a Brooklyn bistro known for both its Michelin-recognized cuisine and its prankish spirit. "Right now people collect tastes like they're records."

Fuck that preceding statement right in its prankish spirit.

The Grub Crawl will involve chefs like Roy Choi and Sang Yoon on the West Coast, and restaurants and bars like Mile End, the Meatball Shop, Fort Defiance and Seersucker in New York. It can't be an accident that many of these places and personalities resonate with fresh-out-of-college food hunters who seek transcendence through a Korean taco just as their Generation X forebears once sought it through the Smiths, Run-D.M.C. or Fugazi.

Fuck you, fresh-out-of-college food hunters. If you think The Meatball Shop is akin to Run DMC then I just don't even know what to do with you, except to gaze at you in disgust.

"When we were kids, food was something that your parents cared about," Mr. Rapoport said. "You'd go to 7-Eleven after the show and get a chili-cheese dog. Now, kids in their 20s are planning their weeknights around going to the coolest new restaurants in Bushwick or Williamsburg or wherever. You know, you go to Roberta's on any given night and it feels like you're at a punk-rock show from back in the '80s."

Fuck kids in their 20s, particularly in Bushwick or Williamsburg or wherever. Twentysomething foodies are nothing more than the awful inevitable unbearable spawn of child foodies. Who themselves are the awful inevitable unbearable spawn of grownups who really should know better.

Fruit Roll-Ups and Wu-Tang are good.

[NYT. Pic: FB]