hi i’m z (he/she/they/it) or tabby (she/her). white, 30, even i don’t know what my gender is anymore (however, materially, i am tme). who’s the lady in my icon? her name is virenina and she’s from By Blood Entwined, which you can read for free here (science fantasy story set on a world called tei ura where executioners are celebrity idols. follows virenina as she goes from troubled young royal to god in the blood-drenched making)
We are not living… we are struggling to survive amidst death, hunger, and fear.
In this war, we have lost everything. Hunger tears through our stomachs, water is barely enough, and prices are soaring to the point where getting a single meal has become a miracle. No meat, no fish, not enough food—only scraps that we try to share just to stay alive for another day. No jobs, no income, no way out.
We live among destruction, within cracked walls and ceilings on the verge of collapse. No safety, no stability—the sounds of bombing haunt us even in our sleep. The sick are left to face their fate because there is no medicine, no hospitals able to provide treatment. The wounded bleed to death, children cry in pain, and the elderly suffer in silence.
The borders are closed, as if we are trapped in a prison with no escape. We try to endure, we try to hold on to any glimmer of hope, but how much can a human being take?
We literally cannot let them start charging 80 dollars for video games 70 dollars was already outrageous 60 was pushing it. 80 fucking dollars. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND. For MARIO?!?!?!?!?
i guess the take here is that i believe in pretentious versus unpretentious dining as a useful gastronomic rubric the same way i believe in it as a useful literary rubric ie. pretty much not at all. what i think is constructive is thinking about how particular styles of food + service attract or detract from prestige and how the social currency of those styles is determined relative to the usual suspects of broader social formations ie. class, racism, colonialism.
which cuisines are allowed access to a ‘pretentious’ sphere in the first place? western european, undeniably. 'street food,’ to me, is a racialised term; off the top of my head (& speaking from a specifically british metropolitan context), jamaican, indian, chinese, nigerian, southwest asian, greek cuisines, among others – 'authentic’ or otherwise – are “street food” (found at food stalls or in cheap cafes and restaurants w/ a v. basic standard of service). paying the same prices for an upscale chinese or indian restaurant meal that you might for an upscale french or italian catches ire, often irrespective of the quality of the meal or service; there’s a derision towards these spaces that i think gets caught in the net that 'pretentiousness’ casts, and i don’t like the assumption that western european countries get to dominate the upper echelons of culinary development whilst racialised cuisines in european settings are only ever cheap, accessible, low-fuss meals.
& similarly, what does it mean to 'elevate’ a racialised cuisine to a higher price point & a more involved standard of service? i hate dishoom is a great piece about the british 'indian street food’ restaurant phenomenon – i worked in one of these places in central manchester, hated it, and used to say all the time that it attracted a crowd of white people who wanted to think of themselves as the sorts of people who ate “authentic” south asian food but were too racist to go to places like the curry mile. in conversation w/ a friend about these sorts of restaurants a few weeks ago, she described the discursive apparatus of one of them as a “noble savage”-type view of indian cuisine; the family recipe, passed down through generations, coming straight from the orient to yr doorstep. it’s not at all uncommon for racialised cuisines to be picked up by predominantly-white ownership, predominantly-white FOH (and even BOH sometimes), and get sold back to a predominantly-white clientele in a neutered form, often pricing out people from the communities from which it originated. so you see the contradiction here – i don’t like the assumption that the food of racialised communities ought to be shut out from these higher-end settings (i do think higher-end settings have a lot to offer, i find as many of them to be interesting and unique and intellectually involved as i do pneumatic and unchallenging and overpriced, and i do think there exists w/ pretty much any dish you can think of a gradient of quality that comes into being to some extent relative to quality/expense of ingredients and expertise in craft), and nor do i like what often ends up done to those cuisines in order to break into those spaces, or at least mimic them.
& how do these more elevated spaces sustain themselves? dress codes, security guards, different codes of conduct for different guests. who gets to be a welcome and uncomplicated recipient of hospitality in fine dining/premium casual settings? i used to work at a fine dining-adj place where we were instructed to give far more careful + attentive service to the tables who were willing to spend £100+ on a bottle of wine. like, it’s a classed space, and maintains itself the way any other classed space does.
i want culinary styles outside of the western european hegemon to emerge into the more 'elevated’ spaces in hospitality on their own intellectual terms & through interaction w/ gastronomic science that allows for the development & elevation of a dish, but that feels like a tall order. i ask the same q’s of restaurants relative to prestige or a lack thereof that i ask of texts relative to the literary canon; why do we attach value to this but not that, why do i like this, why do i dismiss that. what do i think it’s saying about me as a person to enjoy or deride this or that, what assumptions have i let go unchallenged. what interests me, how do i follow up on this interest. what do i know about this, what don’t i understand, do i want to understand, how do i go about understanding. how did this get here in this form. i like what i like w/ restaurants – i like an elevated service, i like complexity, i like food and drink that tastes good – i think the best i can do is discard this v. inchoate framework of 'pretentiousness’ and simply try to consistently challenge myself & my assumptions along the way of developing my taste.
