Ah. That penis thing.
I Blame The Patriarchy explores the unfortunate mindset of chef and writer Anthony Bourdain in "The Foie Gras Chronicles: Part the First".
Twisty Faster is responding to a post by Lauren at Faux Real, also worth visiting.
I knew Bourdain wasn't the food writer for me when I happened upon his loving description of killing a pig in the newspaper; it was full of ego, cruel and sad-making, and seemed to have no point other than crowing, "Look, ma, I killed a pig! Ha!" The two blogger's posts above only confirm what I already suspected about Bourdain: tosser. Anyways there are plenty of other chef writers out there, so why bother with this one?
Jamie Oliver, a professional chef and well-known TV personality in the United Kingdom, has put the blame for "loss of food culture" squarely on the shoulders of working mothers. Rhetorically Speaking notes "the utter irony of a male chef who absolves men of any role in a nation's food culture".
She writes:
"Describing social change is one thing: pretending that the only remedy is 'go back to the way things were' is another. If we're going to talk about the impact of working mothers (a tautology at best), it might be useful to talk about the consequences of working fathers and their mysteriously frequent absence from discussion of family and food."The comments are quite good, as readers expand with historical information, and disagree with her post. Swing by Rhetorically Speaking and see how she winds up with the concluding line,
"Ah. That would be the penis thing again."
Over at Cardiff blog Mind the Gap, Jamie Oliver's "experiment" as a fat person gets Winter Woods tapping at the keyboard. She objects to fat people being portrayed as "miserable, slovenly, greedy and, of course, poor", and wonders why someone like Dawn French wasn't used in the programme:"No, we can't have her! Yes, she's fat, but she's also successful, entertaining, healthy looking and we love her. She'd counter the story that being big automatically leads to poverty, misery and illness, not to mention the fact that she'd cry bullshit on the whole narrative."See Winter Woods' excellent post, "Fat Phobia".
Photo: I Blame The Patriarchy (top), Mind the Gap (bottom)
2 comments:
Glad you liked the Fat Phobia post. Jamie Oliver's becoming quite a problem on more than one level.
Comparing ducks to porn actresses was definitely not a well-thought-out metaphor, and Bourdain deserves to be called on it.
But even so, I have to say I am a fan of Bourdain's. Why bother with him? He's a good writer, and entertaining.
I first started reading his writing when The Spouse was thinking about changing careers and becoming a chef. I like his take on the professional cooking world and his obvious passion for good food. I also liked it that he was self-aware enough to realize compared to master chefs like Keller he's a journeyman craftsman.
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