Can You Be a True Gourmand Under Capitalism?
No Reservations Season 1 Episode 6: Sicily
The man widely credited with inventing the gastronomic essay and contributing widely to our understanding of the gourmand, if not inventing the concept entirely, is one Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. If you couldn’t already tell from his name, we are talking about a rich Frenchman from a certain historical period, although he was a lawyer, not a nobleman.
Brillat-Savarin ate and wrote widely when he wasn’t politicking (and fleeing the latter half of the French Revolution after starting off as a deputy). His most popular work is The Physiology of Taste, in which he treats the pleasures of dining with a scientific rigor. I haven’t read the entire work although I want to, as someone who appreciates both food and the cheese that carries his name. In preparation for this essay, I did read Meditation XI, On Gourmandise, and Meditation XII, Gourmands.
According to Brillat-Savarin, the value of gourmandise is in its passion and its ability to elevate a society united by its appreciation of the finer things in life. Gourmandise is also a powerhouse of the political economy (he credits the passion of foreigners for French cuisine with repairing France’s reputation and economy post-Napoleon). He says, “[Gourmandise] it is that sustains the emulation of the crowd of fishermen, huntsmen, gardeners and others, who every day fill the wealthiest kitchens with the result of their labours. This it is which supports the multitude of cooks, pastry-cooks, confectioners, etc., who employ workmen of every kind, and who perpetually put in circulation an amount of money which the shrewdest calculator cannot imagine.”
While Brillat-Savarin talks about workmen, chefs, and fishermen that prepare gourmand feasts for rich people, he never bothers to think about the types of feasts they might enjoy at home—or would enjoy, if they had the possibility to indulge in the pleasures of the table instead of worrying about their next meal or spending their whole day working. Workers are cogs in the political economy in his treatise, not people that might also enjoy a good meal. Brillat-Savarin’s gourmandise is by nature exclusionary. He says himself that not everyone is built to be a gourmand, although he focuses more on the professions, physiognomy, and personalities that exclude a person from this category (Napoleon: too ambitious to be a gourmand). He doesn’t really engage with the ability of the lower classes to be gourmands, maybe it is present in some other section or maybe he just doesn’t care.
I’m going into an extensive digression into Brillat-Savarin because the last episode of No Reservations made me think about how it is impossible to be a gourmand under capitalism.
Anthony Bourdain famously had trouble shooting every single episode in Sicily that he worked on, to the point that it affected his mental health. The later Parts Unknown episode where the fisherman threw in dead fish for Tony to “catch” is worse, but he is also visibly miserable in this episode. The production crew drags him to a salt flat, a capers farm, and on an unsuccessful fishing trip. He has to rub elbows with the Sicilian president while eating pane ca’ meuza, a street food sandwich (in my opinion) best enjoyed in the middle of the night from some random unmarked cart on the street with a bunch of strangers, half of whom are drunk. At several points in the episode, Anthony comments on the pace of the show, which has him speeding around Sicily and the surrounding islands doing weird shit for television even though the Sicilian pace of life is famously relaxed. The same capitalistic forces of network television that gave him the platform to travel and eat on camera prevent him from truly enjoying the experience
Although Bourdain constantly talks about authenticity when he visits places on his show, his position as a TV host means that he will never have an “authentic” experience, which I think he is somewhat conscious of. In this episode, he sits down for a three-course lunch with a group of caper farmers and asks them if they eat like this every day when they break from work. They say yes, but I wonder if that’s true. I remember the shock I felt when I learned that my grandmother eats very differently when she’s alone with my aunt versus when my family would come stay with her for the summer. The people we uphold as rural ideals of authenticity are often putting their best face forward for the guests, saving the cheap meals for themselves, because they can’t afford to eat like that daily.
Other times, it seems to be that Bourdain is unaware of the inauthenticity of authenticity due to necessary adaptations to capitalism. At one point in the episode, he waxes poetic about Sicilian markets, saying, “when Sicilians go grocery shopping, they want to be seduced, they go to the market.” But when the camera pans to show crowd shots of the market, nobody in the shot looks below the age of 60. I’m assuming young Sicilians with jobs don’t have time to go haggle for lettuce at the market and go to the supermarket instead. I’m not claiming to be an expert on Sicily based on a one-week visit, but based on my own experience living in a country praised for its “slower pace of life,” that slowed-down retro vision isn’t accessible to everyone.
The impact of capitalism on gourmandise is double. The artificial scarcity of capitalism (as Brillat-Savarin put it, “the inequality of wealth produces the inequality of wants”) causes many people to worry about finding enough food for survival—they don’t have time for gourmandise and indulgence, although even poor people celebrate food and can prepare special meals. The wealthy, in a much less serious problem created only by themselves, don’t actually enjoy food, they enjoy the fact that they have something others do not. Their pleasures are empty, even if only a few are smart enough to realize it. I think Anthony Bourdain realizes this somewhat, although as the show progresses and his star rises, he winds up in sparse rooms and expensive wine cellars more and more often, rubbing elbows with those at the top of the human food chain who spend half their meal making sure some rival sees them taking a bite of the world’s most expensive steak.
I could, should have written more about Sicily in this essay, one of the few destinations from this show that I have actually been to. I could have touched on the style of this episode, which deliberately mimicked the style of Italian neorealism, particularly the work of the director Michelangelo Antonioni (I am less qualified to write this essay as I have never watched an Antonioni but someone who has should write it). But while watching this episode I kept thinking about how the lifestyle Bourdain lived, once aspirational, seems a bit hollow.
Maybe the only true gourmand experience can be had when we can all share a meal without knowing that someone else is suffering (too often, others are suffering precisely because of the very food on our table). To derive pleasure from pain is not gourmandise, it is sadism.
What Tony Ate:
pane e panelle, pane ca meuza, focaccia maritata, at Focacceria San Francesco with the Sicilian president
gelo di melone with pistacchio
frittola (mixed fried meat scraps) and red wines, street vendors
caponata, homemade pasta, octopus salad, salt-baked fish (Trapani salt flats)
Sicilian caper salad, pasta with tomato and capers sauce, grilled fish (caper farmers)
cannoli (Taormina)
Pizza (on Mount Etna)
What Tony Did:
met Sicily’s regional president
visited a tailor/folk musician
Campo Street Market
visits baroque church, compares it to baroque food displays
goes sailing and cliff diving with scantily clad women
visits Trapani salt flats
goes caper farming in Pantelleria
goes squid fishing in Lampedusa and gets caught in a storm
plays bocche with Lampedusa locals
visits Taormina, talks to local filmmaker
relaxes on Lampedusa beach
hikes Mount Etna
What Tony Mocked:
the piazza di vergogna/American habit of the walk of shame
ubermarkets (compares them to Big Brother)
Seinfeld
his own crew for getting sick during the stormy fishing trip