My personal and highly arbitrary definition of art is that it is something that brings the viewer or participant a little closer to the sacred that resides within the artist. When art was the subject of countless philosophers’ attentions, it was relegated to four basic spheres: visual, auditory, performative, and rhetorical. Since then, our conceptions of what art is have been consistently morphing to account for the hybrids in genre found all over the world. Enter food, once thought of in the olden days as only fuel for our bodily engines, now yet another form of expression.
Try to remember a time when chai wasn’t a part of your daily Starbucks vocabulary, when sushi had never been west of Tokyo, and when bubble tea just meant carbonated iced tea. “Foodies,” those self-identified experts on food, whether through industry experience, critique, or simply observation, follow these food fads with eagle eyes. Food trends permeate and define our cultural vocabulary and, more importantly, our consciousness.
Until recently, France was viewed as the center of the culinary universe. But around the same time that the American majority dumped their wines into the sink and their brie and foie gras into the trash at the bidding of our, the foodie minority started looking a bit farther west for inspiration. Spain, specifically the Costa Brava, is the new center of haute cuisine, and the location of current gourmet favorite El Bulli.
Ferran Adri?, the owner and chef of El Bulli, only keeps his restaurant open for six months out of the year, the remainder of which he spends cloistered in his “laboratory,” where he conceives and carries out innovative juxtapositions of taste and texture. His dishes are meant to challenge his patron’s conceptions of what food has historically existed as. Each visitor is served a fixed meal of thirty small dishes ranging from carrot-coconut foam to seared salmon belly with bitter cherries. He experiments with chemical treatments of food that toy with the textures and tastes that we’ve come to assign different dishes.
American food connoisseurs have been quick to make the pilgrimage to El Bulli (whose six-month seating season’s reservations disappear in less than a day), praising Adri? as the most exciting, innovative cook out there-the Frank Lloyd Wright of food, some say-but his food isn’t for everyone. His critics have been scarce, but skeptical of his mission. We don’t even have a national cuisine of our own, they say, and our infatuation with Adri? is just another manifestation of our trendiness. Haute cuisine is like haute couture-who really wants to wear most of the works of art designers exhibit on their runways? And does his food actually taste good?
Good food has clearly made the transition from being something that marginally pleases our taste buds while providing us with the vitamins and minerals that we need to survive to being an creative outlet and a subject of philosophy. What’s more, American foodies tend to be the most willing to pick up a new trend and turn it into all but an obsession, while we still have no national cuisine stateside of which to boast. In the minds of some Adri? critics, food has become just another manner in which we American schizophrenics can exhibit our individuality and trendiness, another line along which to draw social status boundaries, another manner for us to discern between the “in” and the “out.” With his willingness to tread deep into uncharted refrigerators, Adri? has spurred a world of speculation. He is a leader in the field of culinary arts, yes, but when did that become such a suitable focus of our attention?
Questioning the validity of our cultural obsessions is important, but when all of his clients have left the building, Adri? is still doing things with the food that have never before been done. With his gastronomic audacity, he is spearheading the movement towards imagination in food, which has been absent in the recent past. His commitment to individuality is unwavering, in contrast to many chefs, who are content to perfect an existing recipe.
In this day and age, copycats are everywhere. Anything that’s not viewed as an art, that resists being stuffed into the little box delegated for the things that don’t really fit in any other box, carries little originality. Whether or not food is a classically defined genre of art, it is a genre of cultural heritage and progress. Originality should be valued, if only because it is the harbinger of cultural changes. If Adri?’s contemporaries hold dear his personal philosophies-passion and creativity, the importance of the mantra “do not copy”-let them all infiltrate the world through the mouths of fixated American foodies.
Adri?’s concoctions have piqued my interest; I may not fly to the Costa Brava to taste them, but given the chance I’d willingly sit at his table. What’s more, he got me thinking about the presence of art and creativity in our modern American world. Anyone who can so actively challenge preconceived notions and inspire reflection is an automatic stimulant and deserves recognition. I recently enjoyed a warm Valrhona chocolate cake with coconut sorbet that brought me a little closer to God. Here’s to hoping that Adria, in his laboratory, finds a previously undiscovered union of tastes that shows someone else the light.
Julia Cooke is a junior in the College and assistant leisure editor of The Georgetown Voice. Dessert is her favorite part of every meal.
