Most of the charm and the taste for me is in the food culture. In this respect both Delia and Blumenthal share a characteristic for me. They are both charmless. They cook, literally in the case of Heston, in a vacuum..
Delia is the reductio ad absurdam of Blumenthal..
Take Blumenthal's philosophy and boil it right down and you end up with Delia. Delve a little further and you end up with lambs fat on the cheapest chump. Pedigree Chum dog food research scientists say dogs go mad for it.
"Adobo" is a very bitter red substance. It tastes quite acrid. Who would think to consume it? Or rotted fish - Where does the taste for that come from? It comes from 80,000 years living by the shores of the North sea without enough salt or time to preserve the fish. It doesn't come from Willy Wonka's food texturing lab. Marmite is the taste of the industrial revolution. Vegemite is a vegetarian riff on Marmite, there is something William Morris about it. Something post industrial. That is food culture.
Perhaps Blumenthal should be making food for the space station. Those textured smears of colourful nutrients on the plastic plates in the film 2001. Delicious. And then there would be some sense to him. Aha. Space food. But it is just post-modernist food. What's wrong with post-modernist art and architecture and post-modernist food? Well, post-modernism has a problem. It can't take itself seriously and no one else can take it seriously.
Listen to the beach while you eat your "Ocean pie" and smell a bit of seaweed. What utter, empty rubbish. HB is the Damien Hirst of cooking. There is no culture there, there is no honest narrative there, nothing but the sensory body with a superficial smear of psychology to Blumenthal's food culture. And such a creature could only get prominence in a relative desert. The celebration of Blumenthal abroad is a wry comment on eating food in Britain. The mocking irony is lost on British food critics.
Scientists hoping to create artificial food life with complex molecules, protein and carbohydrates - shooting different voltages of electricity through strange mixtures in the faint hope that something will form out of nothing. No, sorry, this is not a food culture.
Delia is the reductio ad absurdam of Blumenthal..
Take Blumenthal's philosophy and boil it right down and you end up with Delia. Delve a little further and you end up with lambs fat on the cheapest chump. Pedigree Chum dog food research scientists say dogs go mad for it.
"Adobo" is a very bitter red substance. It tastes quite acrid. Who would think to consume it? Or rotted fish - Where does the taste for that come from? It comes from 80,000 years living by the shores of the North sea without enough salt or time to preserve the fish. It doesn't come from Willy Wonka's food texturing lab. Marmite is the taste of the industrial revolution. Vegemite is a vegetarian riff on Marmite, there is something William Morris about it. Something post industrial. That is food culture.
Perhaps Blumenthal should be making food for the space station. Those textured smears of colourful nutrients on the plastic plates in the film 2001. Delicious. And then there would be some sense to him. Aha. Space food. But it is just post-modernist food. What's wrong with post-modernist art and architecture and post-modernist food? Well, post-modernism has a problem. It can't take itself seriously and no one else can take it seriously.
Listen to the beach while you eat your "Ocean pie" and smell a bit of seaweed. What utter, empty rubbish. HB is the Damien Hirst of cooking. There is no culture there, there is no honest narrative there, nothing but the sensory body with a superficial smear of psychology to Blumenthal's food culture. And such a creature could only get prominence in a relative desert. The celebration of Blumenthal abroad is a wry comment on eating food in Britain. The mocking irony is lost on British food critics.
Scientists hoping to create artificial food life with complex molecules, protein and carbohydrates - shooting different voltages of electricity through strange mixtures in the faint hope that something will form out of nothing. No, sorry, this is not a food culture.
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