Part 2: Food and Wine Columns
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Food and wine columns Paddleford in the 1950s (Photo By Arthur J. Daley/From "Hometown Appetites".
When we look at Clementine Paddleford’s work, we are reminded that for decades magazines and daily papers have been dedicated pages or whole sections to ingredients, cooking, recipes, or culinary traditions. Columns are often written by persons that establish connections of trust and intimacy with the readers, often turning into surrogate counselor and guides. At times, these persons are purely fictional, and columns are actually written by the editorial staff or by individual writers that assume a different persona for that job. The approach and tone of food columns depend of course on the media outlet and on its readership. Women’s magazines frequently tend to deal with issues of domesticity, providing ideas on how to make food enticing and varied for the family. They may offer advice about how to save money or time without giving up quality and flavor, or they may teach new things and deliver culinary information that can be used to surprise friends and family and boost one’s social capital. In upscale lifestyle women’s magazines the focus is rather on originality, creativity, uniqueness, and knowledge.
In men’s lifestyle magazines, articles and columns about food and cooking tend to reflect preoccupations about masculinity, where eating often becomes a way to improve one’s fitness and overall health, and cooking is either an inevitable nuisance when one lives a single life and nobody is around to cook for you, or a form public display of skills on special occasions, like cookouts, BBQs, sport events, and other celebrations. With the increase of single men and the so-called “metrosexuals” in urban environments, it is not rare for men’s magazines, including the upscale ones about lifestyle, to include actual recipes, both for daily consumption and for entertainment. However, also in these cases, U.S. popular culture and media frequently refer to “men’s food”, such as meat, burgers, chips, pasta, pizza, and such. These foods are presented as “naturally” craved by men, reaffirming their manhood by the very act of consumption. Marketing often exploits and exaggerates a supposedly natural connection between men and their appetite for abundant and appropriately masculine foods. In certain mythologizing approaches within U.S. mainstream cultures, it appears relevant that men consume food that, as the idiom goes, “sticks to the ribs.” In other words, masculine food is supposed to be to be nutritious and satisfying, making a man strong and keeping him full without much concern about the effect on his looks. Things change when a man is supposed to cook for a romantic dinner or to entice a possible partner. In that case, attention is paid to preparation, refinement, and visual aspects of the dishes.
The approach is quite different in men’s fitness magazines. The goal of editorial features dealing with nutrition and cooking is usually not to follow a balanced and sustainable diet, but rather to obtain fast results that are immediately visible on the body. The focus is on food as building material for a better-looking, longer-living body, rather than as a source of pleasurable experiences or a marker of cultural identity, let alone a cherished instrument for caring and nurturing. Control issues are often evident: if one does not keep one’s otherwise wild appetites in check, one can neither lose fat and build muscle, nor maintain a fit body frame. Besides cooking, there is a growing number of section and columns in magazines and newspapers completely dedicated to restaurants, culinary traditions in exotic destinations, or exclusive and expensive products. These texts are often illustrated with exquisite photography to entice their readers and establish aspirational patterns of consumption. Websites, blogs, and social media dealing with food and restaurants frequently embrace this glamorous and taste-conscious style. At the other end of the spectrum, there are other media sources that make a point of expressing the supposedly every-men preference for no-fuss, simple foods and establishments. In that case, a tone of mockery towards refinement and high prices often permeates the discourse. Other columns share editorial and cultural elements with travel guides, a genre that has played a fundamental role in shaping contemporary leisure habits. For instance, reviews of restaurants and shops can be organized around itineraries whose scale can vary from a neighborhood to a city or even to a whole country. Feature articles can be written about the exploration of an area occasioned by the curiosity about a single ingredient, a dish, or a specific tradition. These stories are often accompanied by photographs that add interest to the piece by allowing readers to visually participate in a trip without leaving their couch.
(source: http://www.crystal-rose.com/colorado-wine-tasting.html Links to an external site.)
A very noticeable trend is the growing popularity of wine columns. Until the 1960s, wine connoisseurs and professionals frequently formed closed circles that did not communicate with the public at large. However, in the past decades increasingly larger segments of consumers have shown interest in enjoying high-quality wines beyond the best known ones like Champagne, Bordeaux, or Burgundy. This change in consumption patterns has been paralleled, or some say stimulated, by the explosions of wine writing also in countries that, despite being important wine producers, were not traditionally wine consumers and limited wine drinking to high-end restaurants or to female use. For example, in the United States consumers have only recently shed their perception of wine as a woman’s drink, partly because it is now clear that wine connoisseurship requires expertise and professionalism, elements that some men tend to enjoy and that are frequently considered as masculine.
Unlike food writing, which more or less employs current language - even when it sounds celebratory, excessive, and rhetorical - to share the writer’s gustatory experiences with the readers, wine critiquing has established a vocabulary that frequently appears as mysterious, pretentious, and even nonsensical to the non-initiated. Descriptions of sensations, scents and colors are often metaphorical, referring to flowers, plants, foods, and object that might appear strange in describing a wine, such as “chicken shit” for rustic pinot noir or “tomato leaf” for sauvignon blanc. However, thanks to the growing interest in wine consumption and the resulting mainstreaming of wine writing, increasingly larger segments of readers are familiarizing themselves with this kind of expressions. At the same time, some writers are striving to employ a more accessible language, while focusing on issues of price or pairing with food.
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