A Challenge for the Food World to Change

Bill Penzeys hopes the movie, Pig, will show the way.

Nicolas Cage and co-star, Pig. Courtesy of Neon

A friend and I were having a discussion about the movie, Pig, starring Nicholas Cage that was released to admiring reviews last March. If you haven’t already seen it, a quick synopsis would be: Once an award-winning chef in Portland, OR, Rob retreats to live in the woods and hunt for truffles with his prized pig and only companion. The pig is stolen, Rob returns to the Portland restaurant scene to look for her. Much heartbreak circling around loss—both personal and in the current food world culture—ensues. The link to the trailer does not do this remarkable film justice. It’s currently available on AppleTV and, like everything else in the world, Amazon.

My friend and I had different takes on the movie—he was uplifted, I was riled up by my own experiences in the cooking profession. A few days later he sent me a piece from the e-newsletter of Bill Penzeys. Penzeys, the owner of Penzeys Spices, is very famous for speaking his mind on many, many subjects, almost all of which seems to get him into trouble. Apparently a lot of people are appalled by Penzeys mixing commerce with advocacy, political views, and his free speech rights with the genteel spice trade.

Penzeys jars crowd my spice shelves but I never saw Bill’s e-newsletter or the company’s catalogue before. Upon reading what he wrote about Pig, though, I decided he’s the man I’d love to sit next to at dinner. He is unafraid of anyone or anything when speaking his mind, an admirable trait these days and one that gives me great hope and comfort.

Bill has graciously given permission to republish his piece here. Its subject reflects on what I struggle with in being a food writer, which is often evident in many of the stories I write about in America Eats!, chiefly the injury that occurs when the false narrative presented by star chefs, social media, and myriad food blogs supersedes the vitality of home cooking in our everyday life. On the face of it, Bill is deciphering Pig. What he really is doing is issuing a challenge for the food world to make a sea change by affirming the primacy of home cooking to a magnanimous society. I’ve bolded the section that is, for me, the heart of the matter:

I don’t want to give anything away about this film, but as you can already guess it might have something to do with where cooking lives and how the want of humanity can leave us broken and how its return can restore us again. There is violence in this film, not just for the sake of violence, but I think to make its small moments of humanity stand out all the more. And compared to the Vietnam or Afghanistan wars, not much violence at all.

With Pig the audience is never too far from one of those little moments of humanity. One of my favorites that might be missed is in Cage’s character washing his hands. Part of cooking encompasses the science of taking care of others and hand washing is where that begins. But somehow between the direction and the acting and the cinematography they capture something more than that here. In Judaism and Islam there is the ritual of hand washing before prayer that in turn makes more sacred the act of prayer that follows. To see a film named Pig encompass that ritual to showcase cooking as sacred, for me hit all the right notes. Pig is a really well-made film.

Part of the journey of the movie Pig takes us to one of those award-winning restaurants where cooking has been stripped of its humanity. Beautiful writing and acting unfold there. I loved this for two reasons. One, I always use Curry and honey on the liver I put into my holiday stuffing. Liver isn’t high on the list of those I cook for, but it comes with the turkey and it’s tradition to use it. Liver does have that taste, but I’ve found sautéing it with our Curry and a bit of honey transforms it into something most everyone doesn’t need to pick around. So a tip of the hat to Pig flavor-wise.

And two, that scene is so well done there’s no way it isn’t going to be seen by all those involved in keeping those types of restaurants in the limelight. At some point we have to come to grips with the reality that the cooking media world didn’t abandon the humanity and wisdom at the heart of cooking by random chance. Those who spent so heavily to replace cooking’s basic human kindness with young male celebrity chefs [see note] didn’t do so out of a love of cooking, but in an effort to make us all better consumers.

As this morning’s letter showed, part of the turning point in the Vietnam War was veterans throwing their medals, uniforms and awards into bonfires. Pig leaves me hopeful that it won’t be long before everyone who's ever won a James Beard award or its like are throwing those symbols into bonfires as well. Voices from outside that world can only do so much. Once those on the inside truly come to fully understand “We don’t get a lot of things to truly care about” then real change will be possible. The pinnacle of cooking has always been its humanity. We need to get back to showing it that way.

Bill

Note: I would augment Bill’s comment here to include many women in food media who are just as culpable.

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