White Whine by Streeter Seidell

Author:Streeter Seidell [Seidell, Streeter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-5714-9
Publisher: Adams Media
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Everyday Gourmand

Thanks to a surplus of disposable income and the spread of Top Chef –style programming, everybody alive in the United States today knows what an “amuse bouche” is. We can now rattle off hundreds of words and phrases that up until a decade ago were only understood by a handful of gourmet chefs. Indeed, fine dining has become a commodity in America and, as a result, a select group of amateur gourmands has coalesced around one aim: to criticize and complain about any and all food ever served or bought at a store. So not only are we lucky enough to be living in a country that is absolutely stuffed with food, but we’re so well off that if that food isn’t up to snuff, we can — and almost always will — complain about it!

Grocery stores are berated for running out of some exotic Indian grain or stocking the “wrong” kind of seedless grapes. Produce is criticized for being too small, too big, too bitter, or too sweet. Fine dining restaurants are subjected to some of the worst criticism for failing to deliver a flawless meal every single time. Even crazier is when the not-fine dining restaurants — of the Subway-McDonald’s variety — are given no slack for their food. There is something borderline insane about people who hold a meal at McDonald’s to the same standard they would hold a restaurant like Per Se. And yet, here we are.

And while I can understand how people expect the best out of every meal — even a meal at McDonald’s, which is little more than poison masquerading as fast food — the one type of gourmet White Whiner I have no sympathy for is the linguistically accurate foodie. Like Henry Higgins, these foodies are obsessed with pronouncing every foreign food, ingredient, and preparation in its linguistically true, native form. If you can complain about an avocado pit being too big, I’m not going to ride you too hard; but if you insist on pronouncing the word avocado “like the Aztecs would,” it will take every ounce of my will to not bean you in the eye with the “ayyvo-kaydu” pit.

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