Siddity in the City

I think food has officially jumped the shark.

Food obsession in popular culture isn’t exactly new, but we’ve certainly reached a new level of media saturation.

Celebrity chefs are everywhere except in the kitchen. Tyler Florence is stumping for Applebees. Tommy Colicchio, when he isn’t busy opening another Craft-y gastrohaunt he won’t actually be working in, is busy playing co-host on Top Chef. Tony Bourdain, who decried the celebrity chef in his best-selling Kitchen Confidential, is skipping all over the world snacking on crickets and innards instead of prepping steak au poivre at Les Halles. Gordon Ramsay has enough media plates spinning to get his estimated bank to rival the GDP of East Timor. Rachael Ray–who is criticized for having had no formal culinary training before becoming a food celeb, has managed to parlay her popularity into a talk show (not that those are terribly hard to come by, nor do I think formal training has anything to do with really good cooking).

Maybe it was Martha Stewart, or the rise of the Food Network–or perhaps it was just an extension of our insanely celebrity-crazed society, which demands we not only know where the stars dine, we dine there ourselves–but at some point, Le Creuset and beurre blanc seeped into the common parlance of everyone from Manhattan celebutantes to Portland hippies.

Once casual dining joints like Applebees and Ruby Tuesday make a play for “fine” dining appeal, you know the movement has gotten really, really big. The question is, where will it go from here? I wonder how many celebrity cookbooks and talkshows and branded K-Mart cookware sets the market can sustain.

I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t mind being paid to write about chomping cricket, myself. And I was really excited to learn Chow–a food magazine that folded in paper–has reappeared online, seeking freelancers, no less. But sometimes I wonder how enthralled with pancetta I would be if it wasn’t the latest hot DIY.

Who am I kidding? OF COURSE I would still be enthralled. That shit is delicious.

Which is, of course, exactly why the food craze will continue to grow. It’s status and excess, but it is, foremost, pleasure.