orgtheory.net

If you’re interested in food and social movements, then you should check out Steven Shapin’s LRB review of a new book about the rise and fall of French cuisine. Readers familiar with Rao, Monin and Durand (2003) will recognize the first part of the storyline. Nouvelle cuisine rose to prominence as the new French style in the 60s and 70s, replacing the “cuisine classique” that relied on heavy sauces and lots of butter and cream. The nouvelle cuisine was “simpler, lighter, fresher, prettier, healthier, at once more artistic and more ‘natural’, more open to foreign inspirations, especially from Japan.” The thesis of the book, however, is that nouvelle cuisine was a victim of its own success as some of its early stars sought fame and growth over adherence to the basic cooking rules they established. France has since been replaced as the center of the cooking universe by the U.S. and Britain (of all places).

The demise is partly due to an economic shift in France, where resources are more constrained and people have become less interested in fine dining than was true in the past, but it’s also attributable to a “failure of nerve and imagination” spawned by a revision of what it means to be a successful chef in France.

[I]t was betrayed, Steinberger says, by the media-savvy chef Paul Bocuse, wrongly identified as a leader of nouvelle cuisine. The new cuisine revolution needed its Trotsky, but what it got in Bocuse was its Stalin. What Bocuse did was to erode culinary creativity by taking its human source away from the stove. He established a new conception of what it was to be a successful ‘executive’ chef: abandoning the kitchen, launching frozen food lines in France and Japan, and turning himself into a global brand. The model was followed by a younger generation of star chefs, such as Alain Ducasse.

Shapin (and I assume Steinberger) associates this conception of excellence with a horse race logic. The goal is to be the fastest growing, the biggest, etc.  Unfortunately, in their efforts to grow and dominate the market, the chefs distanced themselves from the core standards of excellence that defined their genre. The horse race conception contrasts sharply with a dog show conception of success. Dog show awards are not based on being the fastest, the biggest, or the most dominant. “Best in show” is rooted in standards of authenticity – i.e., the best representation of a type. Increasingly, foodie culture in the U.S. and other parts of the world has begun to adhere to these “best in show” standards as they seek for authentic representations of food. Here’s Shapin on the comparison between the two:

[P]art of what’s been happening in the foodie world is a rejection of the exclusive horse-race metric in favour of the dog show: very good stuff which is not necessarily more expensive, more elaborate or more innovative, but which is truer to type. It’s not a matter, as Voltaire said, of the best being the enemy of the good; what’s at issue are different conceptions of what is good and what is best – whether the beagle that loses a race with a whippet is necessarily an inferior dog.

I think this is a fascinating distinction, which probably has relevance to industries outside of cuisine as well, especially other cultural industries where authenticity matters.