22 ★ 26 October/27 October 2019F
ormer England footballer
Peter Crouch is my new hero
for his savage attack on a fish.
In his third memoir,I, Robot,
the 6ft 7in locker room wit
turned social media star observes that
his mates in the Premier League aren’t
equipped with great skills in food
selection. When in London trying to
alleviate their bank balances, they
rotate through just four establishments
— Novikov, Sexy Fish, Nobu and the
May Fair Bar — the “Golden Rhombus”
of Mayfair as he terms them, and
always eat the same dish: black cod.
Why? “Through habit, fear, a lack of
adventure,” posits Crouch. “I’m not
sure who first ordered it, but now
everyone has to... it’s become a totem
of footballers’ herd mentality.”
It is not just footballers, though, who
follow food fashion blindly. Consider
the avocado. A central American fruit,
it became known as “midshipman’s
butter” in the 18th century by the
European sailors who put it on their
biscuits. Cultivation spread to
California and Australia, and then it
attempted to sashay on to the world
stage of cuisine in the 1960s and 1970s
in prawn cocktails and the palettes of
bathroom designers, but mostly just sat
in the fruit bowl like a riddle. When
would it ever ripen?
Then, in the past decade,
supermarkets worked out how to sell it
ready-to-eat and Gwyneth Paltrow ran
a recipe for it in her 2013 cookbook,
served on toast with a pinch of salt and
a few grinds of black pepper. The
global appetite for the avocado
became insatiable. Breakfast menus
from Belfast to Berlin were rewritten
and Mexican cartels took over the
avocado fields.
Add to the black cod and avocado
the prized Japanese Wagyu, yellowtail
for sushi and all sorts of weird and
wonderful foodstuffs. Produced to
meet international trends, there are
ever-larger plantations, farms and
fisheries, and new trade routes in a
low-tariff world. It is a vindication ofthe theory of comparative advantage.
It is the neoliberal diet.
If one hasn’t drunk too much sake,
one might also see the madness of it.
We fret about taking a plane — but the
foods now revered in society
restaurants are racking up serious air
and sea miles on our behalf.
It is not quite at the same level as
when the River Cafe’s Rose Gray
bought a business-class seat for the
beautiful Tuscan pumpkin that she
simply had to have, or when the Shah
of Iran threw “the party of the
century” in Persepolis in 1971, flying in
18 tonnes of French foods, including
peacocks, quails, lamb and gallons of
vintage Bordeaux.
Even so, it is now quite normal to fly
salmon to Asia in the belly of a big
aluminium bird — a cargo plane.Alaska sends us the black cod. We swap
Scottish beef for the Wagyu. Beijing,
with a new taste for British cream teas,
jets in the clotted cream. Burrata, with
its short shelf life, is such a frequent
flyer it might as well have access to the
first-class lounge. And those avocados,
so natural according to Gwynnie, are
meticulously refrigerated on the high
seas and reheated once ashore to
achieve their ripeness.
Over a year, an average westerner
eats approaching a tonne of food. In
the UK, half is imported, much from
continental Europe. One can’t quibble
with everything — I mean, I’m not
giving up my Italian tomatoes. But the
extravagant and perishable exotics that
are a parade of social status?
If being eco-conscious is the new
badge of honour, when does it start
pervading our food fashions? There’s
not been a full onslaught yet, if youdiscount the vegans, in their own crisis
about whether almond milk is good for
the planet. But you can see the first
signs in the menus of some London
restaurants, those that serve very
British fare. It is almost passive-
aggressive the way they now name-
drop their sourcing. Rabbit in Chelsea
will serve you a wood pigeon from the
restaurateurs’ own farm in Sussex.
Along with South Downs venison at
Southwark’s pointedly named Native,
there are wild mushrooms and even
courgettes from a particular farm.
There’s Orkney scallops at the Pollen
Street Social and Cornish mackerel at
the Quality Chophouse. And beef from
the finest estates: Glenarm at Hix,
Buccleuch at Boisdale. If one has to eat
red meat, at least make it from a
bloodline good enough to feature in
Debrett’s Peerage.
Those name-drops are advertising
how authentic and fresh we are, how
we believe in hardy toil (much
required in the picking of wild
mushrooms) and in sustainability —
we’ve been eating this way since Henry
VIII. In reality, it is not feasible to feed
the nation such highly curated food;
indeed, there wouldn’t be much left for
the high tables if we tried. But it
indicates a new direction of travel, of
turning towards nativism again — and
not in a bad way.
We’ve learnt a lot in the age of the
aeroplane. We’ve seen grand vistas,
we’ve mixed and merged our peoples
and our diets. That has been one of the
riches that globalisation has yielded.
But the price we are paying is more
than just the overinflated ones in the
golden rhombus — it is one of further
degradation of the planet. Not
everyone can make extravagant
choices about what to eat. But those
who can might at this point want to
gently lead their pack in a new
direction — back home. While we await
Ms Paltrow’s recantation of the
avocado, perhaps Mr Crouch could
start a new trend by trying the cock-a-
leekie soup.Time for some home
truths on exotic foods
T
here is still time for
Kamala Harris (born 1964)
if she gets a move on.
Cory Booker (1969) will
run while his campaign
resources last. Beto O’Rourke (1972)
remains nominally in the arena.
Failing these long shots, it is
increasingly likely that Generation X
will never produce a president of the
US. Outnumbered by baby boomers,
the ruling cohort, and millennials, the
eager dauphins, those born between
the mid-1960s and the end of the
following decade are doing as they
have always done. They are passing
without fanfare.
The analysis of generations can
sometimes verge on pseudoscience.
Each one is too internally diverse to
characterise with generalities. In
America, the X-ers are associated with
a bleak dropout culture in the 1990s.
In Britain, they stood for a hedonistic
materialism. The big bands of the time
rather embodied the contrast.
But whether they admired Nirvana’s
insularity or the Everest of cocaine that
Oasis hoovered, X-ers were united in
the things they were rejecting. Big
ideas. Noble causes. Political zeal.
No living generation has shown less
interest in changing the world. As
a result, no living generation looks
wiser today.
At the time, Gen X was accused
of apathy and stroppiness — often
by itself. Bret Easton Ellis calls his
the most “ironic generation that has
ever roamed the earth”. Their
disengagement was blamed on
parental neglect (these were latchkey
kids) and on economic
disempowerment.Well, we now know what
“engagement” looks like. In a world
succumbing to true believers, X-ers
appear less like sulkers and more like
the kind of sceptics who keep society
on the rails.
It was not Gen X that voted for
populism and it is not Gen X that
promises a counter-revolution. They
represent a precious interval of
hardheadedness between two utopian
generations. What was pathologised as
their “alienation” turns out to be a lack
of credulity in the face of big ideas.
It is striking how apolitical they were
in their entertainment habits. Looking
back from 2019, when even superheromovies have a subtext, the defining
Gen X films stand out for their near-
total absence of allegorical meaning.
Pulp Fiction oes not have anything tod
“say”. Neither doesFargo. You would
not know from the John Hughes films
on which Gen X was nursed that Aids
and the cold war were rampant at the
time. The emphasis is always on the
personal and the particular.
This is a generation that threw up no
great protest movement. It delivered
no big electoral shock. Pressed to join a
cause, its contribution was so often the
curled lip and the flippant shrug. Its
view of the world was deeply jaundiced
but not so hostile as to actually do
anything about it.I mean every last word of this as the
highest praise. This millennial salutes
his immediate elders for their
disinclination to change things. Where
others see bloodlessness, I see
prudence. In the coming years, I
suspect I will not be alone in wishing
that other generations shared their
sardonic refusal to get carried away.
David Foster Wallace argued that
postmodern irony did not achieve
anything. It did. It achieved the
prevention — or at least the delay —
of today’s all-too-sincere passions.
The great error is to confuse the
circumspection of X-ers for mediocrity.
Their imprint on modern life is wildly
out of proportion with their
generational size. Some of their
number founded world-improving
companies (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk,
Larry Page), which suggests no lack of
talent or pluck on their part. It is just
that these gifts were seldom deployed
in public life. The cream of the
generation chose business and the arts
over politics, which is why their
presidential hopefuls come across as so
many three-star hotels.
They lack the political vision of their
elders and juniors. But I mistrust vision.
Sometimes, vision results in blameless
people having to pack their things in
the night and flee their own country to
survive. I like caution. I like moderately
countercyclical fiscal policy with a view
to 2.25 per cent annual growth over the
period, thanks. The least excitable of
generations is about to miss its
chance to rule. It would be just like
them to shrug. I fear none of us can
afford to.[email protected]Gen X represents a
precious interval of
hardheadedness betweentwo utopian generations
“Blackness can get pigeonholed
into a one-dimensional
viewpoint, but in reality, it is as
diverse as the galaxies in the
universe,” says 24-year-old
Micaiah Carter. He is part of
a wave of black artists whose
vibrant visual vernacular is
reinvigorating notions of
beauty, race and sexuality.
Fifteen photographers in this
“new black vanguard” have
been selected by curator and
critic Antwaun Sargent for a
book focused on images that
break downbarriers between
fashion and art.Dynamic
portraits, formed through
abstract angles and rivers of
colour, crackle withcreativity.
“A form of visual activism”,
Sargent’s book is a magnetising
expression of power and
inclusivity.
Madeleine Pollard‘The New Black Vanguard:
Photography Between Art and
Fashion’ is published by ApertureSNAPSHOT
‘Adeline in
barrettes’
(2018) by
Micaiah Carter
Joy Lo Dico
Trending
Chess solution 2338 Qd8! b6/g5 2 Rd7! g5/b6 3 Rd2! exd2 4 Qxb6 mate (by Fritz Giegold) 1A millennial’s hymn
to Generation X
anan GaneshJ
Citizen of nowhere
Burrata, with its short shelf
life, is such a frequent flyer
it might as well have accessto the first-class lounge
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OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 24/10/2019- 17:59 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD20, Part,Page,Edition:WIN, 22, 1