007 Culture Solution: good food
Cheese-whiz. Mac and cheese. TV dinner. Sugar Pops. Hot pockets. Dunkin’ Donuts Glazed Jelly Stick (480 calories). Burger King Oreo Shake (730 calories). Dairy Queen Royal Reese’s Brownie Blizzard (1510 calories).
American culture loved bad food.
Feverishly alert and inventive, it then invented good food.
It’s hard to calculate how big a change this was.
Bad food was deeply installed. It served many corporate interests. It was promoted and defended by big brands augmented by big agencies. It had built itself to consciousness. Many householders couldn’t imagine a meal that was not first packaged, preserved, processed, sweetened, fattened, and otherwise adulterated.
Happily, good food is now on the ascendancy.
And this tells us that change is possible.
That we can change culture with culture.
Our culture can escape its worst moments. It can reinvent and relaunch. It can repair.
Yes, but how?
Here’s the way I talk the artisanal revolution in The Return of the Artisan.
Alice Waters opened her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971. Inevitably, it was a part of the hippie moment. But it was also going to be an experiment within the counter cultural experiment. Having studied French culture at UC Berkeley and lived in France, Waters could see culinary possibilities beyond tofu, tempeh and avocado pits.
The first order of business was to redefine food.
[An] ideal was coming to fruition—French techniques pepped up with jazzy improvisation, bright-flavored and utterly fresh California ingredients, purity of flavor, simplicity of presentation, seasonality. This was the birth of what came to be called California cuisine. (McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse [Kindle Locations 253-257]. Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.)
Beneath the cuisine were new principles: local ingredients, grown organically, harvested in season, taken straight, when possible, to market, unadulterated by preservatives or industrial intervention. In a perfect world, the supply chain was a partnership, farmers working with chefs working with patrons working with farmers working with farmers’ markets, working with (certain) food trucks, working with CSAs (community supported agriculture), working with cheesemongers, bakers, butchers, mixologists, baristas, and a great profusion of artisanal brands, all committed not just to better dining but a new vision of food and society.
The restaurant was not an inevitable success. As McNamee puts it,
How the slapdash, make-it-up-as-we-go-along little hangout and its harried mistress [Alice Waters] became such icons is a story of adventure, misadventure, unintended consequences, steel will, pure chance, and utterly unrealistic visions. The characters who thread through its history range from hedonists to Machiavellian careerists, from the crazy to the coolly rationalist; nearly all have been driven by passion, passion sometimes so fierce as to be blind. The road Chez Panisse has traveled from there to here is neither straight nor smooth. It is potholed, booby-trapped, cliff-hanging, devil-daring, sometimes not quite a road at all. (McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse [Kindle Locations 253-257]. Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.)
But rise Chez Panisse did. We can chart its rise to greatness in the press coverage. The first plaudits appeared in the late 1970s. By the middle 1980s the New York Times was prepared to celebrate Alice Waters for “revolutionizing American cooking.” In 2001 Gourmet Magazine declared Chez Panisse the “best restaurant in the US.” This was the little restaurant that could.
The hippie revolution was a ground swell. News traveled not so much by word of mouth as line of sight. Sometime in the middle 60s you could see new eddies forming everywhere in the fashion pond. Fabrics, colors and styles of clothing were changing. Everyone seemed to be growing their hair long or at least “out.” The hippie thing came up through the aquifer. Suddenly there it was.
Adopting the new look was easy. All we really needed to do was devolve, to repudiate fashion, propriety, status aspiration. The trick was to stop acting like the “barbecue people” [this refers to a prior talking point in the book] and forsake those brush cuts and A-line dresses.
But the Chez Panisse revolution was different. It had to reach us by stages. It had to find its way out of Berkeley, a secret message fast becoming a sacred message, passing from one person to the next.
The Chez Panisse conversion called for knowledge and cultivation. It demanded that neophytes learn and then teach. The restaurant might look like a funky old house embraced by a Bunyan pine on Shattuck Avenue. It was in fact a seminary, sending waves of zealots into the world.
In fact, getting the message out of Berkeley was actually going to take an ecosystem of collaborators, what Freeman calls a “network of chefs, activists, investors, and food enthusiasts.”
At the creative core of the network was Alice and her several collaborators and competitors, including: Danny Meyer, Ruth Reichl, Thomas Keller, Jeremiah Tower, James Beard, Mark Miller, Wolfgang Puck, David Bouley, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, to name a few.
The take-away for us:
Culture change is possible.
But complicated.
Good food did not come from simple change. There was no single agent. No coherent movement. The revolution contained wheels within wheels, many parts embedded in several wholes. The artisanal revolution appears to have harnessed our complexity. As opposed to all those cultural trends that run up against this complexity and expire.
I have simplified too much. I have given Alice Waters more than her share of the credit. On the other hand, sometimes people give her too little. If we could climb into our “what if” machine and see American food without Alice Waters, this food and American culture would be remarkably different.
The middle ground might be to give Alice credit as a prime mover (even as we say she is not the only one). And then observe how she ignited many parties to engage in many transformative activities.
Chez Panisse was the restaurant that could. But it could only because it created new food ideas, criticized and shaped by a diverse audience of eaters, braised in a rich sauce of political, economic and cultural ideas. Alice Waters shaped her chefs, then set them free. The diaspora took them across the US where they set up many little restaurants. In the book I compare them to “local radio stations,” low watt, small range, but a highly effective way of getting the word out.
Eventually the message come even to the CPG (consumer packaged goods) corporations that made all that adulterated food that sat at the center of the supermarket. Most of them learned the hard way. Sales plunged. Increasingly, they could see Alice staring up at them from their sales data. Consumers were up now happily repudiating all that stuff at center of the supermarket.
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Ok, enough. Here are some conclusions.
American culture can repair itself. It can use culture to transform culture.
There is no simple movement or path or casual chain.
But we do now know quite a lot about how the various parts emerge and interact in a moment like the artisanal revolution.
We could and should build models to help us grasp a revolution taking wing, and especially the ignition points that drive the revolution forward.
Constructing models would be an interesting exercise for a variety of players, “design thinking,” strategy making, meme making, anthropologing, show running, planning, marketing, and those now at work in the creator economy and the curator economy. Engaging many players would improve our ability to capture the sheer complexity of the problem.
Now that we know what a cultural revolution is and, roughly, how it works, we could use it to foment any number of cultural revolutions.
There are many candidates, including Failure to Launch people (001), the missing middle of American politics, the failure to teach literacy and numeracy, the opioid epidemic, to name just four. And not least, we could use the model to make sure that the artisanal revolution completes its colonization of American food and embraces those who still eat bad food. (Thank you, JC, for your comments on the 006 post).
The people who gathered at Chez Panisse in the early 1970s must have wondered if bad food would ever change.
Then it did.
So we can.
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So far:
001 Culture Problem: the “Failure to Launch” people
002 Culture Problem: vibe shifts in decline
003 Culture Solution: fluidity as an adaptation
004 Culture Problem: decline of the water cooler
005 Culture Solution: big pictures
006 Culture Problem: bad food
007: Culture Solution: good food
008:
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