A few months back, food lost a worthy advocate. This is not an obituary for the person of Ruby Tandoh; the former Great British Bake Off contestant remains quite alive and well. Let’s call it a birth certificate. When Tandoh announced in June that she had resigned as a columnist due to culinary snobbery, an era in food democracy was born!
Okay. I may be over-egging this moment a bit. We don’t bring a new omelette to all the people of the world when just one food celebrity cracks it. But let’s not turn Tandoh’s departure over easy. (And let’s fry all the egg puns. Starting now.)
Ruby, as it happens, is exceptional. As a writer, she is surprising, ambitious and gifted—a bit like the late A. A. Gill, but without so many posh mates. As a foodie, she’s been rather a marvellous disaster. Food is not, for her, a thing that exists within an Instagram filter. It’s the real stuff of real life that we really, truly eat.
The snobbishness of clean eating, for example, was annoying to an author given to making jokes such as “Eat seasonally: have a creme egg.”
But, even if Tandoh, so well-known in Britain, were not an exceptional figure and never drew, as she did just last month, connections between racism and food, an unexceptional fact remains: food snobbery is persistent, sneaky and real. It has done and will do far worse than cause the resignation from a prominent newspaper by one clever and confident queer young woman of colour.
The snobbery that rankled Tandoh, and may rankle you, did not seem to be that most obvious sort: people banging on about how foie gras tastes best if eaten in Provence. It was the concealed, polite can’t-always-put-your-finger-on-it-instantly sort. The snobbishness of clean eating, for example, was annoying to an author given to making jokes such as “Eat seasonally: have a creme egg.”
The point of a joke like this is not to prescribe creme eggs. (Like I need a prescription.) It’s not an aggressive “nutrition be damned, swallow all the chocs you can” tantrum. It is, in my view, a saucier, funnier version of Michael Pollan; a reminder that the world and its various forms of elitism can alienate us from food.
A reminder that the world and its various forms of elitism can alienate us from food.
It’s at once so odd and obvious to consider that we can be estranged from the stuff that brings us life and can bring us pleasure. The Tandoh book Eat Up is a comic attempt to defend food against societies that can mystify it; change it, through the magic of modern bigotry, into a thing that is dirty or harmful or marks you through its consumption as a dirty, harmful person.
Now, all cultures have their food prohibitions, but these are no real biggie. It’s not a huge deal to forego pork, beef or onion to make the case to yourself, “I am a member of this cultural group”. To obsess about a range of foods or to fret about pseudo-scientific fads or the true source of body fat or whether I’m eating what a person like me should eat, according to some emerging principle, is bound to send me potty, however. The rules will change next season.
What hasn’t changed in decades, though, is the uncertainty many feel in approaching the stove, the shops or the table. Yes, we should eat “right” — Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. — but in order to do so, we must find the means to outrun the fabricated concern that we’re not.
Tandoh may have found her way by leaving legacy media and writing and saying things about her own experience of estrangement from food, and her return to it through the kitchen. I’m glad she did. She, I imagine, would be very glad to learn that there are folks like you aiming to get as close as you can be to the ingredients that bring you life and pleasure.
Helen Razer is your frugal food enthusiast, guiding you to the good eats, minus the pretension and price tag in her weekly Friday column, Cheap Tart. Don't miss her next instalment, follow her on Twitter @HelenRazer.
