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I got caught with a bad croissant-wich last month and felt the kind of shame only a serious eater can know: I was eating beneath myself.
Struggling with late-morning motivational drag, I'd slipped out for a bite: a turkey-cheese croissant from a bakery that exists to sell hulking, sugary cookies to office workers seeking comfort out of greasy paper bags. The gastronomic me knows to shun the turkey croissant’s ribbon of lunchmeat, sticky cream cheese, and heavy, almost weirdly buttery pastry. The human me craves it—especially since I don't have to walk far from the office to find it.
Soon after I returned, my boss—prepared to be awed—approached to see what I'd gotten, making me regret that I didn't eat it on the walk back, wearing one of those handy McDonald’s shame masks (pictured) to take refuge behind.
The shame mask reveals just how polarized food has become at a moment when our choices are cleanly split between conventional and organic, big box and farmers' market, feedlot-raised and free-range. Julia Child once confessed a liking for McDonald's fries, back when they were cooked in beef tallow. Nowadays it’s less likely for an establishment figure—the ones on Colman Andrews's list of the 50 most powerful people in food, say—to admit a liking for anything as colorless as the Extra Value Meal, even Guy Fieri or Rachael Ray.
Chefs, food writers, Chowhounds: We're all more likely to apply the notion of fast food to Shake Shack burger reinventions or the idlis at a neighborhood dosa truck, not the foods of the mass market. In 2008, pressed to name her favorite fast food, Ruth Reichl pulled out a list of insider finds she could have cribbed off Chowhound, including the Manhattan-specific Gray’s Papaya and a tripe cart in Florence.
A tripe cart in Florence. That’s what serious eaters are supposed to like—hell, I expect I’d love it. But frozen broccoli and teriyaki bentos with California rolls, the kind stuffed with mayo-oozing “krab”? Or burritos packed with bland chicken and faded beans? These are the unofficial foods of my weekly life, things I eat without readily admitting it.
Interviewers often ask chefs to reveal a guilty pleasure, but how many answer the question honestly? Red Vines, Doritos, and Cup Noodles seem like a dodge, indulgences too fashionably ironic to accrue actual guilt. Would Grant Achatz have the courage to publicly admit eating Annie’s mac and cheese? Or frozen niblet corn? Not anything flamboyantly bad, just banal—and the things everybody but serious food lovers admits to eating. So much of the food we all eat is merely mediocre, neither unambiguously good nor definitively bad, just convenient.
That for some of us it's a source of shame says more about our own aspirations, and the demands of an ever more homogeneous world to find authentic pleasures. As for me, I'll be the one in line for that utterly forgettable chicken burrito, eyes averted.
Image source: Jest.com
Everyone needs to take a step back and realize that ultimately it's all just fuel for your body so you don't die. Anything more than that is just language to pretend we can rank or categorize things as better or worse.
I enjoy haute cuisine, but I also enjoy the occasional Big Mac. If you feel ashamed of your meal, it's your problem, not an inherent problem with the food. We ascribe values to...+READ
Everyone needs to take a step back and realize that ultimately it's all just fuel for your body so you don't die. Anything more than that is just language to pretend we can rank or categorize things as better or worse.
I enjoy haute cuisine, but I also enjoy the occasional Big Mac. If you feel ashamed of your meal, it's your problem, not an inherent problem with the food. We ascribe values to calories, not the other way around. It's all social custom and nothing more. I feel no need to create religious ecstasy around mere food. I'd rather eat a bag of Doritos and read a great novel than feast on foie gras and steak tartare surrounded by a bunch of boorish food snobs all claiming to have found enlightenment in a scrap of meat.
If you feel guilty about your food you're really feeling guilty about yourself.-COLLAPSE
I was in a mall today and walked by a crowded food-court . i feel like weird by saying this but , they were ALL eating beneath me.
I think there are differences between guilty pleasures, as in foods you really enjoy that are not "foodie" foods because they are not sophisticated/healthy/local/natural enough (pop tarts, cheetos), and feeling guilty about caring about food yet regularly eating food that you personally consider mediocre or worse. I think having a guilty pleasure is something most of us don't actually feel guilty...+READ
I think there are differences between guilty pleasures, as in foods you really enjoy that are not "foodie" foods because they are not sophisticated/healthy/local/natural enough (pop tarts, cheetos), and feeling guilty about caring about food yet regularly eating food that you personally consider mediocre or worse. I think having a guilty pleasure is something most of us don't actually feel guilty about, but maybe you should feel guilty about frequently making the choice to eat something that you actually think is kind of gross.-COLLAPSE
Ikrier, I'm right with you on the Carl's Jr Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger! And I just adore KFC mashed potatoes and gravy. In fact, I crave KFC when I've had a migraine. If my body apparently needs something from it, who am I to turn my nose up at it?
I long ago quit apologizing for liking "crap" food. I find the people that poo-poo it and claim *never* to eat it, to be a dull, boring...+READ
Ikrier, I'm right with you on the Carl's Jr Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger! And I just adore KFC mashed potatoes and gravy. In fact, I crave KFC when I've had a migraine. If my body apparently needs something from it, who am I to turn my nose up at it?
I long ago quit apologizing for liking "crap" food. I find the people that poo-poo it and claim *never* to eat it, to be a dull, boring pretentious lot....who are lying through their teeth. They just haven't gotten caught with a Taco Bell chili-cheese burrito....yet.-COLLAPSE
Anyone on CH who knows me is aware that I'm into haute cuisine and am very vocal about it. However, I don't chide people who have a "jones" for something that's not "gourmet."
I'll "come clean" with CHers: peppered among my trips to exotic Chinese locations in CT and NYC, great French Cuisine and all manner of exotic meats (grilled and roasted), I also indulge in the following:
- Kentucky...+READ
Anyone on CH who knows me is aware that I'm into haute cuisine and am very vocal about it. However, I don't chide people who have a "jones" for something that's not "gourmet."
I'll "come clean" with CHers: peppered among my trips to exotic Chinese locations in CT and NYC, great French Cuisine and all manner of exotic meats (grilled and roasted), I also indulge in the following:
- Kentucky Fried Chicken, original recipe, 2-piece meal (order breast and thigh and extra biscuits)... the chicken gets torn up, placed with the coleslaw between the biscuits, and dipped in the mashed potatoes with gravy.
- This past New Year's Eve I craved a child-hood treat - I made sour cream dip for potato chips with Lipton's onion soup mix, and *didn't doctor it up.* The next morning, there was some of the dip left so I cracked open a jar of the cheap Roland lump-fish caviar and placed that, and the dip, atop toasted slices of Italian bread.
- Reuben sandwiches (even with mediocre, corn-syrup-laden "Russian Dressing") are my down-fall, as are really nice hamburgers.
- Finally, I've astonished some of my friends in the Chinese restaurant business when I come into their restaurants and ask them to make old-fashioned Chicken Chow Mein and pork fried rice. It's a comfort food to me similar in effect to macaroni and cheese.
If *anyone* ever tried to "shame" me for going off of my "epicurean" quest for a moment and enjoying a melted ham and cheese sandwich (or, God forbid, chicken croquettes at the local diner) I'd fight back... probably hold them down and make 'em eat some of my food...-COLLAPSE
I love all the people who feel the need to comment to register their complete disgust that some people experience emotions around food. Everyone's experiences are different, why do people have to be jerks about it?
I feel a little guilty for my love of bad chain delivery pizza (Dominos and Round Table spring to mind), boxed mac and cheese, and Carls Jr western double bacon cheeseburgers. I'm...+READ
I love all the people who feel the need to comment to register their complete disgust that some people experience emotions around food. Everyone's experiences are different, why do people have to be jerks about it?
I feel a little guilty for my love of bad chain delivery pizza (Dominos and Round Table spring to mind), boxed mac and cheese, and Carls Jr western double bacon cheeseburgers. I'm not supposed to like these things...but I do.-COLLAPSE
Bless me chowhound, for I have eaten bagged salad, Baker's chocolate, salted butter, boneless skinless chicken breasts, and reduced fat Oreos.
Guilt is for idiots.
Some people way over think food. Eat and enjoy, less talk and more chewing.
There's nothing mediocre about fast food, it's lousy, if you want mediocre go to a local family-style restaurant.
Whenever I visit the US, I enjoy the occasional bag of cheetos. There's nothing boring tasting about them. The same with fried chicken, on visits to the US--when you don't get to eat it a lot, it stops being mundane.
I'm o great home cook, blue ribbon-winning baker, and culinary historian. Here it is, I love cheetos!
No, Luniz, the article was saying the opposite. That people do feel guilty for enjoying/eating at the very least those boring items. They feel shame for enjoying KFC, and, to keep their image up, will never admit that they enjoy pop tarts/KFC/popular foods that the "masses" eat.
Then they scoff a little bit, and use the word "Sheeple".
lol so we should feel guilt because we don't enjoy stale mass produced bagles, boring fried chicken, and crummy rubberized fast food hamburgers? It's got nothing to do with shame and everything to do with putting the extra effort into finding something that's at least mediocre.
"those fellow foodies who won't eat leftovers"
WTF? why in the world would a foodie not eat leftovers?
This article inspired in me confusion, then intense molten rage, then I was like, "fuck it, I'll never understand these people". I can't identify with anyone who feels shame because what they eat isn't sophisticated enough, or doesn't adhere to some kind of dogma. "indulgences too fashionably ironic to accrue actual guilt??" What the fuck?!! We have no basis for communication.
Michel Richard has admitted to loving Popeye's fried chicken, and while I think Richard is brilliant, I also agree with him on that.
This is so true! When I admit my addiction to diet soda and sugar free jello, I am given the ultimate look of pity by those fellow who foodies who won't eat leftovers and never admit to using bagged lettuce in their Wednesday night salads.