Originally published in Might Magazine's Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp.
With little or no warning the most unlikely food will leap suddenly into our culinary awareness and run amok. Who can forget the advent of the sun dried tomato? Today you can't even go into a humble bagel shop without being confronted by the odd cultural aberration sold over-the-counter as "sun dried tomato schmear." Where did these fancy tomatoes come from? Who knows. Who cares. Today they're everywhere and they're tasty so why worry. On the other hand, though, are pine nuts. Almost entirely tasteless, they rose from total obscurity to colonize nearly every salad, pasta, and desert dished out in the mid 80s. And while the sundried tomato and the pine nut both made a significant impact on the American palate, they can't even begin to compete with the deep, market penetration enjoyed by pesto. The great, green plague has left behind its oily residue in every pizza parlor and family-style dining establishment in the most remote and unlikely locations.
And yet, these food trends are more than just one more effect of modern marketing skills and the insatiability of consumer culture. The fact is that throughout all of history random foods have appeared on a regular basis in an attempt to sate our collective appetite. In most cases a trendy food will disappear, but occasionally the food will go mainstream, wind its way into daily life until it finally ends up on its own shelf in your corner store. For instance, in 1804 an exotic, tropical aphrodisiac hit the streets of New York City -- the banana. After enjoying its brief heyday as powerful erotic stimulant, the banana is now just another fruit, easily mushed up and served to mewling babies.
Not just any food can become popular. It requires much more than raw newness or novelty value to enthrall the hungry masses. Rather, a trendy food must have prestige. It must be thought of as a food of the rich, the powerful, and in some cases, a food of the gods. In many instances, before becoming trendy a specific food is prohibitively expensive. The banana was naturally difficult, and therefore expensive, to import, while the pine nut was nearly impossible, and therefore costly, to extract from its protective shell. In both cases, improved technology made it possible for the common man to gain easy access to these formerly exotic foods and thus a trend was born.
Ignoring the obvious illogic that an inexpensive and widely accessible food could somehow be considered an elite food, people relish trendy foods for their former glory. The consumption of these foods allows us to believe, however erroneously, that we really can have access to the same lifestyle as that of the of the rich and famous. The consumption of an exotic food is often felt to have the power to transform one into a superior creature. Certainly this is what Eve was hoping for when she bit into that apple. It was obviously what Tantalus was aiming for when he snuck some ambrosia down from Mount Olympus. And I'm sure that's what all those eager echinacea consumers are thinking when they empty those little liquid vials down their gullets.
But no matter how strong the mystery and allure of a food, it can't become a trend until it's easily accessible. Ambrosia was destined to be a flop because there was no convenient way to get past Zeus' lightning bolt embargo. Accessibility is both a precondition for, as well as the hallmark of, a trendy food. Today there is only one food, and one food alone which has descended from five star delicacy to the lowest common denominator. Permeating every corner of the dining world, no matter where you are, is the Caesar salad.
I can count on one hand the restaurants I've been to in the last two years which have not had some form of Caesar salad on the menu. It seems that every time I eat out with a party of four or more at least one person at the table orders a Caesar salad. Within a three block radius of my house alone there are at least four separate purveyors of Caesar salad -- and I do not live in a tony neighborhood. Finally, as if I am not already deluged by this item, my favorite coffee stand now confronts me every morning with dozens of Caesar salads all lined up in pert plastic containers ready for the devouring needs of an anonymous lunch mob.
The first time I was really struck by the extent to which Caesar salad had infiltrated American cuisine was in Mobile, Alabama. My boyfriend and I spent five weeks driving across the country having a wide variety of mechanical work done on a 1977 Cadillac. Now, I am not a healthy eater by anyone's standards, but ten days waiting for a new brake line in a region which considers french fries to be a vegetable was more than I could take. A diet of nothing but fried potatoes, fried corn balls, fried eggs and fried clams had, please forgive me, fried my system. My body was begging me for at least one essential mineral or vitamin. Owing, no doubt, to my horrendous diet, I was almost entirely insane by the time the mechanic tried to convince us that it would take at least three days for the part to arrive. At the time it seemed only natural to threaten him with grotesque forms of bodily harm if he couldn't fix it sooner. I was reworking Dan White's Twinkie Defense to fit my cause when Eric finally managed to drag me away from the mechanic's garage and sit me down inside the strip mall's nearby Denny's. Before I knew what was happening, there was a plate of leafy green Caesar salad sitting in front of me. Eric hadn't even cracked open the infamous Denny's pictorial menu, so confident was he that they offered a Caesar salad. Three days and five salads later, the Caddy's brake line was installed and we back on the road.
What agency lies behind these food trends? Certainly not advertising. It's almost beyond imagining that you can get anywhere in this world without advertising, but there isn't exactly a Caesar Salad Chefs Association adamantly pushing their drippy greens into our faces at half time. Whatever causes a given food to attain supremacy over another will most likely remain one of life's great mysteries. However, the explanation which lies behind the phenomenon of food trends themselves is more easily ascertained: that odd and unfamiliar forms of sustenance consistently consume the public imagination can be traced directly to our most primal fear -- the fear of death.
Humanity has a long, rich history of attempting to circumvent death and gain immortality through food. At the most basic level, we seek to avoid the necessarily mundane fates of daily life by eating rare and unusual foods. But on the mythic level, the consumption of an exotic food is a desperate grasp at everlasting, eternal Life itself. Eve tried for a touch of divinity with the apple while Ponce de Leon went after the Fountain of Youth, the Catholics use crackers and Jim Jones tried it with Kool Aid.
Ponce never did find that fountain, and so far the apple quite lived up to its vaunted reputation. All in all most of these attempts to eat our way out of our dreary existences aren't even harmful enough to cause indigestion. Caesar salad may have indirectly saved that mechanic's life in Alabama but its long term effects pose a dire hazard for our culture. The issue isn't a health issue, it's a moral issue. Caesar salad is unique amongst food trends in that what lies at the heart of its current popularity and accessibility is deceit. False promises of the good life or immortality are disappointing, yes, but they can be regulated. The kind of deception exhibited by Caesar salad is highly elusive and far more dangerous than that.
To begin with, the Caesar salad of popularity is not in fact real Caesar salad. Real Caesar salad requires above all the three following ingredients: romaine lettuce, anchovies and raw egg. Done in by salmonella and squeamishness, only the most circumspect and unlawful restaurants still craft their Caesars with raw egg. Anchovies, something of a farce to begin with harkening back as they do to the eating of live goldfish and the French, can still be found in chic restaurants despite the fact that most people are too plebeian to actually enjoy them. And while an absence of egg and anchovies is an unpleasant reality, there are places which dare to serve this faux Caesar dressing over, not romaine, but iceberg.
The tragic truth is that Caesar salad as served by the vast majority of establishments is entirely inauthentic. And no effort is made to hide this. In fact, its popularity and accessibility is inversely proportional to its authenticity. It is this unusual relationship between consumption and inauthenticity, the inherent deceitfulness of these so-called Caesar salads which bodes ill.
Inauthenticity and the degradation of the esthetic are commonplace in this historical epoch and really, it hardly seems worth mentioning were it not for the fact that behind the beguiling facade of these salad imposters lurks a much darker truth than soggy lettuce. The proliferation of qualitatively diverse "Caesar" salads is part of a deadly phenomenon which in Kierkegaardian terms is known as leveling. Kierkegaard was obsessed by the dissolution of qualitative distinction and his 1846 essay "The Present Age" he links the indecisive, passionless, ambivalent, uncommitted nature of his generational peers to their lack of qualitative differentiating power. It seems as if he is speaking directly to our culture when he states that "an age without passion has no values." One cannot doubt that qualitative distinction has been discarded when the collective cultural voice places a garden fresh salad replete with a still-warm-from-the-chicken raw egg in the same linguistic category as the iceberg pot found at the feet of the golden arches. Partaking of the Platonic ideal to differing degrees these two forms of Caesar salad have nothing in common except a name. When we reference them both with the identical term we drag down the better salad to the level of the bad salad, abandoning our values along with our senses.
Iceberg lettuce hidden by that which is deceitfully referred to as Caesar Salad Dressing does not a Caesar salad make; it is merely the idea of a Caesar salad, an empty signifier to that which once had specific qualities, relevance and import. When you abandon the raw egg, the primordial fish, the substantial lettuce you are left not merely with a disgusting, tasteless salad but with the end of participatory culture, ethical deliberation, and impassioned existence. One salad is as good as the next, one president is a bad as the next, all choices are equal, all decisions meaningless. An imposter Caesar may allude to a rich and worthwhile life but this allusion is an illusion: you are no closer to living the good life than the Gauls were.
© 1998, Heidi Pollock
Return to clips.