A backlash is brewing to our age of food perfectionism, reports The Atlantic. With all manner of “experts” prescribing how and what to eat, there now comes an eruption of blogs, tweets, Facebook groups, listicles, Pinterest pages and other celebrations of “dishes that are disastrous, unattractive, or just unhealthy.”
“Some poke fun at the mishaps of chefs, bakers, and cookbook authors, like the website Cake Wrecks, with its pictures of tragically ambitious professional cakes,” writes Irina Dumitrescu. “Other online collections, like the Gallery of Regrettable Food and Vintage Food Disasters, are filled with scans of disgusting-looking concoctions from old cookbooks. Websites like Someone Ate This celebrate the failures of home cooking in triumphantly unappetizing photos. Even Martha Stewart, who made a generation of homemakers feel inadequate, has been tweeting revolting photos of her meals, to general delight and horror.”
In part, Dumitrescu argues, it is all just a “playful rebellion against the excesses of gastronomic prescriptivism … In the face of rapidly changing scientific recommendations, it feels liberating to throw caution to the wind and deep fry a Big Mac—or to at least fantasize about doing it.”
But it’s also a reflection of the reality that “good food” is whatever people like, and that most home-cooking is done under severe time and budget constraints, for picky eaters, and with whatever one has on hand. Getting a meal on the table is an imperfect process. “Real homemade food often looks like failure, but it’s not,” Dumistrescu says. “Feeding yourself or others is a success, an act of love, even when the meal resembles unappetizing brown mush. This is why it’s sometimes necessary to celebrate culinary disasters. They reveal the reality of cooking: tedious but necessary chore, creative outlet, daily ritual.”