This documentary was part of the Sydney Film Festival 2015. It follows some food bloggers who fly around the world with the express purpose of dining at the most expensive restaurants, eg. Noma. They get selfies with celebrity chefinators, and take photos of the (usually small) objets d’art which are about to be wolfed down in seconds.

The objet d’art has a very short life between kitchen and stomach, therefore making it seem a bit pointless. It’s possible that the bloggers probably feel they are performing a very important social service. But they’re not really, because these celebrity chefinators are very unlikely to dish up something that is not palatable or immaculate, with no cause for complaint.

However, one of the bloggers, Andy Hayler, managed to find something to complain about – a lobster dish, and the French champagne he’d consumed. This caused the cinema audience to laugh, perhaps thinking something like “self-indulgent prat”, “poor wee petal”, or “first world problem”.

The Chinese blogger, Katie Keiko, was shown around a kitchen after her meal, and she looked lost. The inference from this could be that she had little idea about the production end of the food – only about the conspicuous consumption. How about a selfie with a celebrity farmer instead?

Would it be plausible to suppose that a food blogger might arm themselves with a smidgen of knowledge about food and cooking?

Then there was the Lithuanian ex-model turned celebrity blogger, Aiste Miseviciute. She flew to Japan, where there was a shot of her at a fine dining restaurant to eat two pieces of sashimi fish and leave. There were no signs of wasabi, pickled ginger, sake or tea. From what the viewer saw, it appeared to be an abstemious and joyless experience. Where is the satisfaction in eating two bits of plain raw fish? With no condiments or accompaniments?

The opinionated New York blogger, Steve Plotnicki, just wanted an argument! So he had one with chef Wylie Dufresne at his restaurant, WD-50.

Before we make accusations about conspicuous consumption which these bloggers open themselves up for, one of them correctly pointed out that other expensive hobbies are more easily accepted.

The big question is why are these bloggers so influential?

I have recently read The Tastemakers; Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but fed up with Fondue by David Sax.

Here’s a very long quote from this book (p282-286) which encapsulates its intention, and sums up the whole issue:

At their worst, food trends can be annoyingly shallow. They may start out as individual expressions of imagination, but ultimately they become victims of a herd mentality. One day everyone in your life is eating Greek yoghurt, and you’re not sure how it happened. In the case of trends like the cronut they literally attract stampeding herds of humans. It is easy to view the culture of trends as the vapid expression of a society obsessed with materialism, as insubstantial fads. We dine out for entertainment, watch hours of food being cooked and eaten on television, and plan road trips to taste the latest hot meal. Food has become fashion, chefs are hailed as rock stars, and photos of the latest dishes are our art. At the same time we live in a world where millions are starving or malnourished, and not just in distant poor countries but also within walking distance of our homes. In the United States alone more than 16 million children don’t have reliable access to food. They’ve never heard of cronuts or chia seeds or the ceviche from Ricardo Zarate’s kitchen, and they don’t give a shit that you just posted a review of the top-twenty hottest food trucks in DC on your blog. These people wait in lines and dig through the trash for their next meal, not for some sense of culinary thrill-seeking.

 It is hard to contemplate this reality when you’re walking the halls of the Fancy Food Show, having so many culinary creations thrust at you that you can hardly swallow them fast enough. While writing this book I was often tempted to blame the ramen burger, the bacon explosion, or the chia-flavored Greek yoghurt cookie for the sad absurdity of this problem, not to mention the much prettier but sometimes compelling problem: I was tired of hearing about food trends…..

 Food trends bring us happiness. You can groan all you want about how cupcakes are “over” as a trend, but if I placed a cupcake in front of you, you would still peel back the folds of its paper cup with the same eager anticipation you had when you were a kid at a birthday party……….

 Food trends are for everyone. They may originate as speciality items, available only in select cities for a high price and long wait, but eventually the nature of all food trends is democratic…..

 Food trends can also deepen and expand our culture beyond the plate. The success of Anson Mills grains as done more to further Glenn Roberts’s goal of preserving the Carolina Rice Kitchen than any political campaign or charitable plea ever could. The quality and flavour of his grits and rice may propel their trendiness, but their ultimate cultural impact has resulted in a revived interest in southern history, traditional cooking, heritage ingredients, and farming practices that are spreading across the South and around the world. Trends also bring the kitchens of that world together…………

 All of these trends created economic growth…….

 With that economic might, too, comes the possibility of even more change. If enough people get behind a way of eating, policy with eventually follow.

 Over the last few decades most of the food sold to us has become more processed, giving rise to particularly devastating health consequences such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes…… health problems related to overeating were entirely unknown twenty years ago. This shift, unfortunately, is also a food trend, and it is a hell of a lot more impactful than any hot pastry of the moment. Trends like these aren’t easily diverted or slowed down; they are powerful and change the way we eat on a biological level. You cannot litigate them out of existence. They require a shift in the opposite direction with equal momentum and force to unseat them. The only thing that can do is a countertrend.

 To come to this conclusion, Sax had to trek around to events, meet lots of people in the food industry, get first-hand knowledge, and read reports.

It started with Sax looking at the cupcake trend, for which customers would actually stand in a queue, for hours, to buy them. And probably Instagram their friends about it. Like many others, he seemed amazed that these people didn’t have a life, or thought queuing for a cupcake is a life. He wasn’t afraid to be humorous about people’s excesses and tastes, or his own.

As you can see in the excerpts above, these food trends are not all worthless junk food items with poor nutrients. Glenn Roberts at Anson Mills helped preserve the old Carolina rice breeds, and works with farmers, food historians and chefs to recreate the Carolina Rice Kitchen. And he now sells these ancient grains online.

Another interesting food trend is the food truck, as it gives diners a cheap introduction to different ethnic cuisines, which some Americans and Australians are not used to.

He’s a journalist and his writing style is very readable. It’s not a resource for cupcake recipes, ramen burgers, chia, kale, bacon, or sriracha; it’s about the influencers, and marketing of these products. Foodies and those with an interest in food matters, including trends, would enjoy this book.

This book was chosen for the Slow Food Sydney Book Group. We can’t say we enjoyed it, but everyone thought it was scary because the various food safety authorities seem to wave through food products as safe.

Here’s what is written on the fly-leaf:

Don’t trust those upbeat claims you see on food packaging. Behind the clamour of ‘clean’ labels, emblazoned with reassuring tick lists and additive-free claims, stand companies that exploit the creed of commercial confidentiality to stop us knowing how our food is made.

The paramount goal of the modern food processing industry isn’t giving us healthy life-sustaining food, but manufacturing lucrative products at the lowest possible production cost, using every trick in the book. It is aided and abetted in this mission by powerful supermarkets that have more to gain from selling us complex, multi-ingredient products than honest-to-goodness whole foods. The process food industry, which is aligned to the global chemical industry, takes full advantage of weak regulation. Driven by brinkmanship and a cavalier safe-until-proven-dangerous attitude, it foists on us new, inadequately tested technologies that compromise the integrity of natural foods, without stopping to question what this might be doing to our health.

It pretty much sums up the book. It’s not about horse meat substitution, or passing off foreign onions as Australian. It’s more about what goes into prepared meals and any ready-to-eat products from retail outlets. Even a bag of lettuce has been rinsed in water which has had chemicals added to it so that it won’t go brown, and therefore lasts longer on the shelf.

There are chemicals which keep food: from discolouring, going stale on the shelf, looking a pallid colour, tasting sweeter, tasting saltier, becoming misshapen when packed.  Some of these chemicals have names which sound like ‘ethyl methyl deathyl’. What’s more incredible is this:

….I rapidly realised that for big companies with a finger in many business pies, food processing is just another revenue stream. They experience no cognitive dissonance in providing components not only for your ready meal, but also for your fly spray, air freshener, shower sealant, deodorant, computer casing, scratch resistant car coating, paint and glue. But as a food manufacturing outsider, this queasy juxtaposition of the industrial and the edible comes as a sobering shock. (p 77)

This sounds like the battle with Big Tobacco and Big Sugar. Recently, there was a Canadian doco on SBS television about the sugar industry in North America. There were some shocking data about the increase in people developing diabetes in the last few decades. Plus the fact that when large companies price their products, the cost of potential litigation is factored in as a cost.

So, it’s not just that people are swallowing unsafe chemicals, but that large corporations which can afford legal and public relations representation, pay to defend these indefensible practices.