Food for Thought: Episode 2

You’re listening to Death in Numbers, a podcast created by the humanities media projects in the College
of the Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Welcome back to our Food for Thought series. I’m Amy Vidar. And I’m Carolyn Baarda. Today,
we ask a seriously hashtag important question Does insta food actually taste
good? Why are there so many
Reynholm?
Can you taste the rainbow in your bagel? The unicorn in that milkshake? Should sushi
be in your burrito? Today’s episode about foodie culture breaks down into several
bite sized pieces. First, we’ll consider how our visually obsessed world encourages
both food, culture and community. Well, think about why you might buy a physical
cookbook in twenty seventeen and discuss the influence of tastemakers on food trends.
Then we’ll debate the future of the professional food critic. In the age of Yelp, we’re putting on our
predictor hats, diving into the weird, wonderful world of modern food, writing criticism.
Join us, won’t you? As we consider the world’s most bewildering archive, the Internet.
Viral food. It’s one of the hottest trends in the foodie world. Sometimes viral
success comes overnight and remains like the perennially stacked line of Franklins barbecue in
Austin, Texas. Franklins is an award winning barbecue establishment. In fact, it’s been named
the best barbecue in Texas. And in the nation, that’s a pretty big deal. It is a pretty to you in
Texas. And Aaron Franklin, the owner, has even had a successful cookbook, which we feature in
our show, notes that has become wildly popular because it gives away his secrets about the barbecue
industry. Franklins opens every day at 11:00 a.m. and stays open
until they sell out of meat, which can be as early as two o’clock in the afternoon. And from the first
day Franklins opened in 2009, they’ve sold out the line at
Franklins is now as famous as Franklins itself. It seems to me that part of the experience
of this hallowed institution is the communal effort and patience it requires. And they aren’t
kidding about the line. They wouldn’t let Konya a west cut. And he’s been known to interrupt a few people
and let you finish. I mean, they like President Obama cut, but he
had a country to run. And he was really polite about it. That makes sense. Sometimes viral
success seems accidental and can happen after years of obscurity. The bagel store
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been making rainbow bagels for 20 years. When a Business Insider
video about the candy colored carbs went viral on Facebook. Sixty five point one
million views later, the store was so slammed with customers seeking to in Sudhakar meant their rainbow dreams.
They were forced to shut down until they could cope with the overwhelming interest in their product.
Sometimes food morality, it targets in-store audiences with concoctions that are really
designed to be shared. Austins The Peach Tortilla creates two shareable
milkshakes for Spread Fast, which was a social media, marketing and management software
companies lounge at the festival South by Southwest. The donut shake me a
vanilla milkshake was topped with a sprinkled donut and three donut holes. The other shake,
the socially sweet, stunned the eyes with its blue tinted vanilla ice cream, cotton candy,
whipped cream, sour tapes, lollipop and candy necklace got sugar
high just talking about it and to go along with that milkshake. They’ve staged multiple pop
ups around their viral milkshakes. They are ticketed events curated
by a guest chef. And they’re actually promoted by several different venues offering these exclusive
opportunities for those in the food note. SNAP can be seen. What you have to ask yourself
is, is it about eating this food or taking pictures of it? Do you really want to eat that
milkshake or to photograph it? And so that question is,
if you don’t share post or stream, it did happen.
In this series, when we talk about food writing, we broadly mean almost any writing focuses on food.
It might be a review or reference book by a food critic or historian or the genre most associated
with the kitchen. The cookbook. The cookbook really represents a particular subset within food
writing. It may contain images as well as descriptive or narrative passages.
However, the majority of the text of a cookbook comes in the form of recipes which teach
a cook how to make a dish by presenting some type of formulaic instructions. But
our culture encourages us to expand food writing to include social media posts. Essays about
food. Food, blogs. An increasing number of food critics. Virality
hasn’t just changed how we dine out, it’s changed how we cook in it’s time to talk. Twenty first century cookbooks
with Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle e-reader in 2007 and Apple’s i-Pad in
industry and the print media more broadly. There’s been rampant speculation accompanying
these technological advances. Surely now whether it was in 2007
or in 2010. The book was dead. Many who participated in these
moments of mass hysteria especially assumed that the bottom would fall out of the book market
after all. Cookbooks tend to be pricier than the average hardback. They’re often filled with high quality photos
printed on glossy paper. And much to this publishing industry, surprise cookbook sales
flourished in the years following the Kindle, with books like Ayana Gardens, Cooking for Jeffrey,
selling over 400000 copies in 2016. I know one of them lives in your house.
The reason cookbook consumers remained faithful to print editions, however, is quite simple.
As the so-called Queen of Cookbooks editor Amelia Tarragona explains the way
in which books are put together, the selection of the recipes. The photographs. The
idea of going back and forth when you turn the page. It’s an experience that I think the digital format
hasn’t managed to reach in the same way. Cookbooks today are more than just technical manuals.
They can be aspirational or decorative. They’re filled with rich images and sprinkled with narrative.
And so they’re really prime candidates for coffee-table browsing. And in another form of
food writing, we have cooking blogs and cooking blogs really fulfill readers
desire to know something more about the chef who is creating the recipe. And sometimes a cooking
blogger is not necessarily a professional chef. They might be an amateur, but a food blog allows
readers to get a glimpse into the home cooks life, whether they’re professional or not.
Because bloggers often provide descriptions of their day, the activities they did before they made a meal,
or what they have going on in preparation for a specific evening. Fun facts can be things like how
their child likes their macaroni. In fact, preferring the craft box to a homemade, tried and true recipe,
fans really get attached to different blogs, often because of their fundamental gimmick for smitten
kitchens. Deb Perlman posts about fearless cooking in a tiny NYC apartment are interspersed
with stories about her Dorval children. These all captivate readers for of my name is
Ya and the Pioneer Women Redrum. And it’s their decision to leave. Bustling city life
for a rural farm in North Dakota and a cattle ranch in Oklahoma does sometimes seem like
a really good choice to leave everything behind and go live on a farm, especially
in 2017 for that kitchen readers. It’s profanity laced, borderline insulting vegan
recipes for those who need more veggies in their life. Whatever your cup of tea food bloggers are here to serve it up.
In return, readers get to interact with the bloggers, leaving feedback about the success of a recipe,
making suggestions and requesting substitutions. Can you make that gluten free? Can I use rolled oats
instead of quick oats? And they often debate the merits of high quality ingredients. Do you really need
that fresh vanilla bean or leave inquiry messages into the blogger’s personal lives?
For example, how far along are you when your pregnancy? Who knows if you follow these bloggers? You
might just cook your way into your own unique life too. It’s really no surprise that bloggers
score book deals because publishers are willing to bet on their massive fan base, which is really quantifiable
in daily site visits or social media followers. It’s still a gamble, though. Writer
Leslie Kaufman notes transferring readers, even loyal ones from a blog to a book is tricky
business because there’s no magic formula for knowing which bloggers have audiences that are invested enough in
them to purchase an expensive hardcover. Much of the material is available free online. For many
people, that gamble has paid off. It’s hard to imagine a time before international cuisine
and culture seemed approachable for the home cook. The ubiquity of blogger personalities and their
glossy cookbooks emblazoned with mouthwatering images of food have ingrained foodie culture into our
kitchens. Of course, not all food is created equally. Surely some things
look better than they taste. But who gets to make that call?
In previous decades, being a tastemaker meant exclusivity and usually anonymity.
Publications like the Michelin Guide dictated global food standards and food. Journalists
at large newspapers handled local reviews. These critics cultivated a certain mystique,
hiding their personas from the public eye. They wanted their reviews to be as unbiased as possible.
They wanted to critique their experience as if they were an average diner, not somebody special.
A restaurant quality had to be consistent for all guests. Even today, reviewers for
Michelin maintain high standards. There are only 120 inspectors worldwide operating
in 23 different countries. They have to be anonymous. If an inspector suspects their
identity has been compromised, they cancel the booking and have a colleague reschedule for a random future date. Then
they do not visit the region for 10 years. It’s a bit like being a spy book. A cooking spy.
Yeah. And then you’re banned from a country for 10 years. Michelin, of course, is at the extreme of the
food criticism spectrum. The other extreme is the 21st century self-proclaimed
capital T. Tastemaker. They flaunt their status on social platforms, pushing their
names and faces alongside their content. These social media tastemakers often have their meals
comped in exchange for a positive Instagram post. These famous tastemakers
rarely write negative posts, something about a free meal. They should be pretty positive.
And this carefully curated world of Instagram leads to tastemakers who are only spreading
positive criticism for their own brand. In fact, have to respond to the lack
of anonymity if they do say a bad review. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean
the world of modern food writing is only positive. It’s got a dark side to
other internet criticism, especially on the open source kind of world
can lead a little bit more into what we might call opportunistic trolling or really horror
stories about an experience you had at a restaurant where not only did you find a bug in your food, but
the server was late. They overcharged you. And all of these things kind of happened at once.
And, well, it might have happened. In fact, you might be digging for or hoping that
you will get some type of compensation in response for your negative review. These kind of
audience posted bad internet reviews can only severely harm businesses so
well, of course, it’s useful to look at audience posted restaurant reviews.
It’s important that audiences take seriously their roles as increasingly critics in our
modern age. And one of the things that we’re seen is that not only are restaurants responding to
this change and criticism, but so are universities and institutions that focus
on food cooking at the Culinary Institute of America. There are even courses on food, photography
and styling so that their students can publicize their culinary creations and really understand how
their food is becoming a social media brand. Yeah, the importance of presentation,
you know, not just what you see at the restaurant, the momentary appeal before you eat it, but the lasting
frozen image of the meal as it’s stored forever. In your Instagram archive matters
to the ranking and appreciation of the food experience. I mean, after all, if it’s not Instagram worthy, is it fine
dining? So one of the things that we’re gonna consider in our next episode is the ways in which this
food archive, which might exist in your Internet history or your social media platforms, can
be translated into a physical archive and thinking about what type of food and which
food stories we preserve and how we preserve them. Stay tuned.
This is then Death in Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project in the College
of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and a Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. We are
Amy Vidar and Caroline Baarda. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our website.
Humanity’s Media Project gorg. Our theme music is enthusiast by Tourre’s.
Thank you for listening.