todd m. sweet

You never know what people are hiding. When Dan Oppenheimer opened the door to Jack Robinson’s apartment, for example, he had no idea what he’d discover. He knew that Robinson had been a photographer in an earlier chapter of his life that he rarely spoke of.

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In this case, what was awaiting discovery was a stash of iconic photos.

Found In A Closet: A Photo Trove Of ’60s Icons : The Picture Show : NPR

Lately, however, food has become a defining obsession among a wide swath of the young and urbane. It is not golf or opera. It’s more like indie rock. Just like the music of, say, Drag City bands on a nineties campus, food is now viewed as a legitimate option for a hobby, a topic of endless discussion, a playground for one-upmanship, and a measuring stick of cool. “It’s a badge of honor,” says Chang. “Bragging rights.” She says she disliked M.Wells, last year’s consensus “It” restaurant, partly because of “the fact that everybody loves it, and I just don’t want to believe the hype.” The quest for ever greater obscurity, a central principle of the movement, reaches a kind of event horizon in Chang’s friend James Casey, the publisher of an idiosyncratic annual food magazine called Swallow. Lately, Casey has been championing the theory that mediocre food is better than good, the equivalent of a jaded indie kid extolling the virtues of Barry Manilow.

Food’s transformation from a fusty hobby to a youth-culture phenomenon has happened remarkably fast. The simultaneous rise of social networks and camera phones deserves part of the credit (eating, like sex, is among the most easily chronicled of pursuits), but none of this would have happened without the grassroots revolution in fine dining. “You can now eat just as quality food with a great environment without the fuss and the feeling of sitting at the grown-up table,” says Chang’s friend Amy, who is, incidentally, a cook at the very grown-up Jean Georges.

The timeline looks roughly like this: In 1998, Mario Batali gutted the space that was once home to the stodgy Coach House and replaced it with the loud and brilliant Babbo. The Times later cited Babbo’s “Led Zeppelin soundtrack” as “one of the dividing lines between a restaurant with three stars, which it unequivocally deserves, and one with the highest rating of four.” That missed the point. The whole idea was to fuse fine dining and rock and roll. Anthony Bourdain’s 2000 Kitchen Confidential destroyed the archetype of the foofy French chef in a toque and replaced it with an image of cooks as young tattooed badasses. Then, in 2004, a young neurotic chef named David Chang (no relation to Diane) opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, serving what Bourdain has called the kind of food that chefs themselves like to eat after-hours—that is, simple, ingredient-driven food, often global, that is unfailingly delicious but not necessarily expensive or stuffy. Somewhere along the line, young people even began to view cooking as a form of artistic expression. The idea of eating well wasn’t just democratized. It was now, improbably enough, edgy.

- When Did Young People Start Spending 25% of Their Paychecks on Pickled Lamb’s Tongues?, New York Magazine

There are times, crazily, when I’m almost happy about the gout, the flare-ups of which are subtle now that I’m medicated and reformed. It provided a dietary shove where the gentle pushes of a vague desire for self-improvement hadn’t sufficed. I always sort-of meant to kind-of get around to paring down the meat in my meals, and I always sort-of meant to kind-of get around to decreasing my drinking. But it wouldn’t happen. I lacked the proper motivation. Illness and the threat of extreme pain have provided it. Why must it take something like that for so many of us to pivot in a healthier direction?

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Former NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni confronts health issues related to food. (via kottke.org)

Red Meat and Gout - NYTimes.com