Back in March I had a phone call from the Evening Standard.
I was doing guy stuff, sitting at home watching Top Gear on a Sunday when the phone rang. Someone wanting to talk about the Sophie Dahl Tweets.
No need to ask who ate all the pies.
I’d read in the Telegraph that Bambi Dahl had been “plagued” by comparisons with Nigella Lawson, which was just ludicrous and so unfair. After all, Sophie’s got blond hair and smaller tits, as I Twittered. Vaguely worried it might be Sophie Dahl’s lawyer, then thinking even the most expensive libel lawyer wouldn’t bother phoning me on a Sunday, or probably at all before dropping a writ of maximus penuria on me, it turned out to a guy called Josh asking me for some comments on Sophie Dahl.
I mean, I don’t know the woman. I just found her irritating and I loath and despise her husband Jamie Cullen’s music, if that’s not too strong a word for it. If you want to listen to Sinatra then listen to that, not a twelve year-old who needs a cushion on his piano stool singing about things he should be blissfully unaware of. As I told them.
Tell me this is natural. And no, I didn't Photoshop this picture at all.
So they sent some clippings over, and could I comment on them and say who were my favourite and least favourite TV chefs and why.
I can’t believe anyone thinks there’s a debate about Sophie Dahl sexing-up food. There is nothing else she can be described doing with it. And Nigella did it all before, both ridiculous parodies of cooks and women, pouting and slurping like Daisy Duke working her way through a ‘70s skinflick.
So far as TV chefs go I like Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall because he gets directly involved and emotional about his involvement, killing animals and having the courage to show himself doing it, weeping and saying he couldn’t kill any more chickens in the Belsen of a battery farm he’d re-created.
I’m less keen on Mockney Jamie Oliver, but he’s still probably the person doing most to help ordinary people cook decent food in the places most people actually live.
Back in the late 1990s, when for the usual reasons I spent ludicrous amounts of money eating in London restaurants failing to disprove the 3rd Law of Relationship Mathematics that success is inversely proportional to trying to impress, I used to like Anthony Worral Thompson. But I was amazed he turned out to be a Sophie Dahl fan. He used to be interested in what went into food, instead of imagining what’s going into her. “Sure she’s got big doe-ey eyes but that’s going to draw an audience,” he said.
Well yes, she’s got eyes that Lady Di would have ordered the SAS to take-out, the kind you usually only see in Japanese manga-porn comics, but no-one watching her simpering over a cooker is going to give a monkey’s about the food. It might get the ratings up where the ad sales team want them, but it won’t do food advertisers any good at all.
The TV foodies I liked least are the ones like Dahl, Nigella and even Saint Nigel of Slater who make the show more about them. OK, it’s probably been that way since the start of TV cooking. Frankie Howerd did a skit on TV cooking on TV in the early 1950s, Graham Kerr gave it some very-slightly alternative Antipodean charm in the ‘70s and Ainsley Harriot (favourite word: “Ainsley”) took it to new levels of self-obsession. But all of them were eclipsed by Gordon Ramsey, with his totally staged rescue scenarios. One of his episodes was supposed to show the entire staff walking out after Gordon tried his usual shtick. If big commercial kitchens are more like the ones Anthony Bourdain describes then the real surprise is Ramsey never ends-up pinned to the fire-escape door by a boning knife. But it’s all so transparently fake.
The deal is this: You get shouted at and told your wife is going to leave you (never a worry for Gordon, as her dad is one of his major shareholders and little things like serial playing away are clearly not going to be allowed to get in the way of a good income), then you’re told your cooking is crap, tired, uninspiring and every week the very worst GR’s ever tasted.Bad.
Then he buys you a new kitchen, does a total make-over on your restaurant (“Surprise – just like last week’s show!”), pays for a major local media campaign, puts you on TV on two continents and sorts-out a whole new menu for you. Good.
It’s not a bad bargain for being made to look like a prat for 20 minutes before the predictable family-man US network mandatory: “I love you mom! I love all you guys!!,” just before GR fakes a tear, and all but looks straight to camera and says “Just another family I saved. But the real hero (big pause) is luuuuuurve.”
Even Ainsley Harriot, the dethroned king of culinary self-obsession, teaches people how to make something nice for their tea, more than I’ve ever seen GR do.
But Nigella and Sophie – another league entirely. It’s the big dark one and the smaller blond one. Abba built the prototype and I try not to remember the dream I had when I was 18 about Kate Bush and Debbie Harry. To say the pairing is clichéd devalues the word cliché. It’s beyond parody. But criticising Sophie Dahl for having cooked not in her own house was I thought a bit much. Ok, so Sophie Dahl cooks in a kitchen that isn’t hers, rented by Jamie Oliver’s production company. The last Nigella series was shot in a purpose-built studio kitchen on a trading estate, presumably so that the cameras and lights could get the best slo-mo shots of the last lucky drops of crème fraiche oozing out of her mouth. But big deal – if you’re making a TV show then a TV studio is the best place to do it. Did anyone really imagine Mockney geezer Jamie O. really rode round town on a scooter, before he went back to his gaff to cook for his mates?
I spoke to a builder who’d worked on the project. It was a little mews house. To start with. The whole place was gutted and re-wired for recording. The crew apparently used it as a luxurious shag-pad in between filming, but whether that was ever recorded wasn’t clear. Maybe Nigella dropped in. He didn’t say. Musing on that aside, I can’t see a problem with cooking in a studio, but it’s when there is a pretence that it isn’t really a studio but some part of the life and lifestyle of the presenter that I think it does get serious.
Because the Sophie Dahl show, like the Gordon Ramsey show and the Nigella show isn’t about food, it’s about them. Which is no bad thing in itself, if that’s what people want to watch, but there is something bad going down on Food Street that’s covered up by the cult of TV foodism.
By March 2010 there were 14 food-based TV shows per week on UK TV. At the same time there have never been more ready meals bought, sold and presumably eaten. Although, as a recent survey found roughly 1/3 of all vegetables bought are thrown away maybe eating the food really is a completely secondary activity. There has to be more than a suspicion that TV foodism is a subsititute for doing anything about cooking or knowing about food in any meaningful way. Not to keep hammering the man, obnoxious though he deliberately is, but for me the most disturbing thing about one of Gordon Ramsey’s shows was his total shock and horror seeing an animal killed in an abattoir.
Bullocks, Child Abuse & Bridgewater Market
I grew up in Wiltshire and my uncle Leonard who worked driving a slaughterhouse lorry gave me a fairly intensive introduction lesson in Where Food Comes From one week in the Easter holidays 30 years ago. We went round on the lorry picking up bullocks from Bridgewater Market before dawn, then later taking the cuts, sausages and pies they’d become to butchers all over north Somerset. When I looked for a lost tennis ball in some bins, I found-out what goes inside cows as well as what pieces of them looked like on hooks. I was 14. Personally, I’d recommend being made to wrestle bullocks up the ramp into a lorry when neither they nor you is sure which of you is more scared, but probably Uncle Leonard would be arrested for letting this happen today and I’d be in care. Not fun though it was, I knew where dead animals came from, unlike massively experienced professional chef Gordon Ramsey. I get the impression I’m missing something, sometimes.
Sophie’s programme hit some other wrong notes for me though. The idea that you’d need to go to a specialist cheese shop to buy mozzarella was just one of them. It’s a good cheese to cook with because what flavour it has won’t interfere with whatever other flavours you’re using, but you’d be better off just going to Tesco and getting it. In fact, I’d sooner go to Lidl, who sell a brilliant soft ewe’s milk cheese that nobody seems to ever want, to the extent that my local store only has 5 little cheeses delivered every week – I know, because I phoned their head office to try to get more of them. No deal. But if we don’t celebrate – and more importantly use – the little specialist shops everyone pretends they really love then they will disappear. This isn’t some remote scenario but straightforward economics.
A Daily Telegraph survey claimed that one in four small businesses now expects to go out of business during the recession. Not “worries about” going bust, but thinks they definitely will. It costs a lot to stock a shop, which sounds obvious but maybe it’s not. If customers don’t come and buy the things in the shop, the shop goes out of businesses. There are no Arts Council grants to promote civic pride and no Saga awards for providing OAPs with possibly the only genuine conversation they have in a week. And there certainly aren’t many supermarkets where the staff know anything much about the food they sell, or let you taste it and compare the texture and general merits of one cheese, for example, with another. Supermarkets aren’t about that kind of retail experience, but about catering to two obsessions, price and the great god convenience.
One of the baffling things about the last ten years has been how at the same time everyone was told they were so much better-off, year on year, with more and more disposable income, and at the same time the only real issue about food that was ever discussed by supermarkets was how cheap they could sell it. I can say as a fact that supermarkets sell some cheeses at a retail price lower than I can buy them wholesale. You can’t taste it in the supermarket, no-one will be able to tell you much about it unless they read the label, and if they can’t get such a good deal from a supplier any more they simply drop them and get another one who is prepared to pretend that appearance is a more valid food criterion than taste. And you can drive right up to the door and shove it in the boot of your car, pausing only to buy a magazine about the environment and food on your way out.
Just like Sophie, they’re not really much to do with food but a whole lot about selling a lifestyle. Supermarkets like to remind people that they’re really, really busy, real players, so lots of parking, a petrol station and lots of trolleys to dump food in all make sense. They make the whole food buying experience so dissociated, so isolated and so hellish that every time I go to a supermarket I end-up having to buy myself a present to make it feel better. Maybe a new laptop, or a widescreen TV, pair of jeans or something else conveniently there and hogging more floorspace than the boring old food you thought you came in for.
More TV shows about food, more small food producers in financial trouble, more obese people, more food regulations than ever and according to my local Environmental Health inspector who checks us regularly, more and more listeria poisoning. Listeria isn’t about having a dose of gippy tummy, it’s something that can kill you. This obsession is not healthy.
The A-Word
An article about Sophie’s Victoria sponge (not really a sponge, more Victoria sandwich) really summed-up the whole performance for me. Wait long enough and any food-porn piece will use the A-word. Getting an Aga into anything to do with food is supposed to bring it instant credibility all round. It did the opposite when I read about a country kitchen redolent of delicious smells from the Aga. I’ve got one.
One of the first and worst things you learn about Agas is all the smells go outside. Your neighbours know you’ve nuked the dinner long before you remember you put something in the ovens. So anyone writing about the smell of cooking from the Aga either lives next door or obviously has never, ever used one. It’s just pretend, which is why even Agas have gone for fake colours as they’ve realised there is much more to food than food nowadays. That’s what I really don’t like about shows like Sophie’s. The food culture, what was left after U-boats, rationing, the Milk Marketing Board, boil-in-a-bag cod, TV dinners and supermarkets, is crashing round our ears as sheep farmers kill themselves and small shops go out of business. All the while we can watch more TV shows where the food is little more than an out-of-camera sex aid and think all’s well with the world. It’s not so much pass the sick-bag as pass the tissues.
Here is what The Standard said they had edited it down to:
Is it really so “unimaginative” to compare Sophie Dahl to Nigella Lawson as Laura Craik complains? Dahl’s programme is so clearly derivative of Lawson’s, with both presenters portrayed as ridiculous parodies of cooks and women, using food as an erotic aid, filmed in studio kitchens made to look like their own homes.
Dahl’s Aga-worshipping show hit so many of the wrong notes for me. Just one example: her idea that you need to go to a specialist cheese shop to buy mozzarella. It’s a good cheese to cook with because what little flavour it has won’t interfere with whatever other else you’re cooking, but you’re better off just going to Tesco. I’d sooner go to Lidl, which sells a brilliant soft goat’s cheese that nobody seems to want.
There are now 14 food-based TV shows each week, and at the same time there have never been more ready meals bought. There has to be more than a suspicion that TV foodism is a substitute for knowing about food in any meaningful way. We should treasure the few celebrity chefs we have left, like Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, who care passionately about food and how it is produced, not just about self-promotion.
Hmm. Well, it seems the Standard doesn’t like the words sex, tits, tissues or supermarket but they do like the word Aga, which is odd because I don’t think Sophie Dahl actually mentioned it, although an article about her did.
I got some more Tweets back though. One told me basically to lay-off Sophie because she was “buff,” meaning you can do what you like on TV so long as you look like you’ll put out, and in any case it was only a bit of a laugh on a TV show and what was my problem?
Playing With Food
Well, my problem is this. It’s playing with food. The more we do this, turning cows and sheep and pigs into TV dinners and thinking food is something that needs to be made “attractive” or “marketable”, the further we get away from it and the further towards a very unhealthy place.
But does it really matter? Because, the perspective says, food isn’t that important, except for saddos and foodies. And that’s why I don’t like Sophie Dahl. Because along with Nigella, people like her play with food, which makes then as bad as Gordon Ramsey who so obviously had never seen an animal slaughtered and who seemed on his show amazed and genuinely shocked to find an animal was actually involved in putting meat on plates at all.
So no, for me, and for quite a few people who Tweeted, some of them involved with the Sophie show, looking pretty doesn’t make-up for it. And it certainly doesn’t give anyone the right to just ooze pretend sex at a camera and claim it’s all about food.
So gargle with the creme-fraiche a bit love, run it round your lips, look straight at the camera darlin,’ swallow and open yer gob to show us it’s all gone. Lovely. I like a laugh, don’t you?
