There are pretentious words that have always been pretentious. Others, however, had to start from the bottom: travel a path that took them from the shadows to the light, from clay to gold. The word gastronomy is one of those. Its origin was modest, almost crude: γαστρος, gastros, is the belly, and νόμος, nomos, is the rule, knowledge. Knowing about the belly is not great knowledge and anyone can claim it; at least, about his own. We are what we eat, said some wise man in low hours; We are, above all, eaters. If we do something in life, it is that: when a man or woman turns 50, he or she has already eaten, roughly speaking, about 32,500 main snacks and at least as many between breakfasts, snacks, various snacks and other chuminadas. The standard fifty-something is someone who has eaten 65,000 meals: enough experience for you to begin to know them. And yet the aforementioned will not be a gourmet.
Because the word gastronomy earned its prestige and even got another wise man—in his lower years—to say that feeding is not the same as eating. He thus created the most clear-cut difference: those who eat to live, those who live to eat. Or, without going that far: those who “know how to eat” and all the rest.
We can imagine times when everyone ate the same: in the caves, that mammoth or rat, still raw. And yet, even there, some boss would begin to grab the most desired portion, the fattest. From then on, the privilege was to eat and the best privilege was to eat better: the powerful could swallow the most desired pieces, the most grandiose delicacies.
At the service of these gentlemen—and ladies—gastronomy began to be organized: the skill of refining any meal. It existed since the Romans, but—in the West—it was consolidated in France in the 18th century. It was practiced by kings and nobles who competed for great chefs. The revolution of 1789 had, among many others, the effect of leaving them on the streets: those chefs no longer had marquises and duchesses to serve and began to cook their delicacies in public halls—which came to be called restaurants.
It was a triumphant invention. And then gastronomy, like so many things, stopped being a matter of blood and became a matter of money. The burden of proof was reversed: you no longer ate better because you had more power; You had it because you ate better—and that’s how you showed it. That’s right, still: luxurious food—“gastronomic”—is a fairly easy token of distinction. Almost no one calls gastronomy that fabulous stew that grandmother knows how to make; they would call it if it were sold, garnished with ginger and petunia flowers, deconstructed and in funny portions and on a square plate and in a shiny room. Lately, any society trying to gentrify shapes its ways of eating fit.
“Many understand ‘gastronomy’ as a form of pleasure and social affirmation. Eating, for them, is one of the most common ways of showing wealth, creating complicities: for a nouveau riche it is easier to ‘know about food’ than, say, art or literature—and eventually more enjoyable and cheaper and easier to display. ”, wrote an almost contemporary author.
Eating “gastronomic” food, in effect, has become something different from eating. Knowing how to eat is knowing how to be, knowing how to be, knowing how to show yourself. And gastronomy occupies such a place in the social imagination that chefs went from stuffed workers to shining stars: they show themselves in all media, they explain the world, they sell any vegetable, they pocket fortunes. And millions watch them create their works in contests and classes on TV: cooking has stopped producing smells and flavors and textures to focus on producing images. It’s another sequel to this flat world. Millions of onlookers and, meanwhile, the “best restaurants” never cost less than a gazillion euros: in terms of cost, they remain the preserve of a few.
This is what gastronomy is like now. It would be good to strip it of its class component, to accept that some tripe, a well-made choripán or a carbonara are as gastronomic as a caviar foam, and that expensive products or expensive labor are not needed where there is cheap good hand and affection. And that eating should not be for people to watch you eat or for you to say oh, how cool I am, how I eat, but for eating — and enjoying it. We do few things more; few, with so much pleasure; few, now, with a rowdy partner.
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