This was in response to an Article in the Globe and Mail, in which the author, Ann Birch, suggested that attention to food preparation somehow “gets in the way of living”, or that cuisine interrupts conversation.

I sincerely hope Ms. Birch’s paean to chips-and-dip and macaroni-and-cheese was written with a tongue firmly tucked away in the cheek.  After all, how could any sane person suggest that the Italian or the French or the Spanish or the Belgian devotion to food gets in the way of their lives and – even more incredibly – conversation?  Is it at all tenable to argue that cultures that thrive on prepared food and/or simple fare – boiled kidneys and mash, sausages and potatoes – somehow have a better grasp on life than those that insist on at least four courses at dinner, with good wine, all prepared with natural and fresh ingredients?

But if she was even remotely serious, there are at least two objections to her line of thinking: first, good food (in the sense of well-prepared food from good and varied ingredients) has value in and of itself; second, the preparation and enjoyment of food is the very epitome of a healthy social activity.

I confess I’ve never been a fan of chips-and-dip as a proper way to introduce a dinner, not for business contacts, and certainly not for friends.  In this I am a creature – perhaps, a prisoner – of my background.  I grew up in a country where the average meal takes about four hours to prepare.  A typical Iranian dish overflows with herbs, fruit, tastes and colour.  There are the “starters”: eggplants, garlic, tomatoes and eggs, topped with fried mints and onions; yoghurt mixed with walnuts, cucumbers, raisins and rubbed mint.  There are the rice dishes: one mixed with dill, coriander, parsley and shallots, served with fish or a shank of lamb (which takes four hours to cook properly); or another mixed with sweetened orange zest, almond and pistachio halves, dried berries, served with saffron-lime chicken and topped with saffron rice.  There are the stews (sun-dried plums, spinach, celery and sun-dried lime; or pan-fried eggplants, split peas, sour grapes, potatoes and tomatoes).  And then there is dessert: Baklava (filo pastry filled with crushed almonds, or pistachios and topped with syrup) is the simplest fare; then there is the saffron-rosewater ice cream, with chunks of frozen cream, which can only be savoured to be believed.

And so on.  What this taught me – and that, early on – was that to insist on fresh, tasty and varied ingredients was not food snobbery.  Far from it: it was an acknowledgement, an affirmation, that even “normal” people have taste buds that could be teased and titillated, that it does not take the palate of a food critic or a jet-set gourmet to be able to tell the difference between refined food and that which is merely (and often barely) nourishment. 

Of course, this also taught me one of the most dangerous lessons of being an epicurean: once you’ve experienced arugula salad (say, with dried cranberries, pomegranate vinaigrette and pine nuts), it is next to impossible to go back to the iceberg lettuce, the Model-T of greens.

But what of the charge – and grave it is – that cuisine gets in the way of life and of conversation?

It is a curious thing, the Dinner Conversation.  It is even curiouser (to borrow from Alice), how societies with lively dinner conversations tend also to be those that pay a great deal of attention to food preparation.  This is not idle musing by an armchair connoisseur; there is an entire continent across the pond that has served as something of a controlled experiment in these matters over the past thousand years, give or take a century.

I lived in Belgium for three years.  Belgium – for those not familiar with the social history of Europe – straddles The Great Beer Divide: the line going through the middle of Europe that separates “beer” cultures from “wine” cultures.  The Divide is, admittedly, a crude measure, but one that is for the most part accurate. 

Simply put, look at a country with large consumption of beer, and the food is likely to be heavy, unrefined and uncomplicated.  Swedish cuisine is an oxymoron; Ms. Birch would feel right at home in a German kitchen and its quasi-religious insistence on efficiency über alles.  But there is more: beer cultures tend also to kill food as a cultural phenomenon.  Babette’s Feast was not far from reality.  A culture that considers the point of food to be simply to stuff one’s mouth to avoid hunger (as opposed to spending time to make something interesting) would also pay little heed to the social aspect of enjoying dinner.  Big Night could not have been set in a German restaurant.

This brings me to wine cultures – the countries to the south of the Great Divide – and their attachment not only to elaborate meals, but to the social production that a proper meal should constitute.  There – in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, which was governed by France and Spain for centuries – the food is refined, the ingredients fresh and tasty; and the object of cooking is not to cook all the taste into oblivion, but to preserve it.  Wine is a central aspect of dinner, and not an adjunct. (And, incidentally, is not that expensive.) In those countries, preparing, serving and enjoying food is not an atomistic exercise but a highly social one.  She who thinks Italian cuisine – with all its complexity, and I mean more than simply three-dozen sorts of pasta – “gets in the way of conversation” has never sat at an Italian table.  Similarly, a seven-course meal served à la Provençale is an occasion for boisterous conversation and enjoyment of life.  The cuisine is the conversation and the life: a big gathering of family and friends, around the same table, enjoying the bounty of nature (or the Lord, if you prefer) eating, drinking, talking, living.

Call me a food snob, but I’ll take a linguine alle vongole over chips-and-dip any day.