What makes a dish Queer?
Gay dishes, Culinary Campness, Cooking in the climate crisis, Recipes for the future, Japan’s female freedivers, Public picnics, and more!
Hello everyone,
Happy Pride Month!
This has been a whirlwind of a month between travels, Food and Wine Aspen, upcoming PRIDE events, and still trying to maintain some sense of normality.
For fans of Midnight Margaritas, Nicole Kidman, and Sandra Bullock we have a Practical Magic 2 in the making! Very exciting news. And if you think about it, the perfect Pride Month gift.
This week on Drink Seco:
Gay Dishes
Notes on Culinary Camp
Is it gay to…
An Appetite for Change
Recipes for the Future
The Secrets of Japan’s Ama Freedivers
The “Loneliest Generation” Is Transforming the Dinner Party
Picnic Season
Gay Dishes:
It’s Pride Month so of course this issue will begin with some queer news and culture.
Eater Mag published an article asking Queer chefs what the Gayest Dish on their menu is.
“For some, what makes a dish queer is its refusal to adhere to tradition, doing something that challenges diners while still nurturing them. For others, its flamboyant colors or a fun name, bringing joy to the moment of ordering and service. Sometimes it’s just the fact that a queer person conceived of it, using their lifetime of influences and sensibilities to craft something new. There’s no one answer, just as there’s no one way for queerness to manifest. Queerness is what you make it. Even if what you’re making is aspic.”
Queerness is not just an identity, it’s a culture, it’s a way of living and thinking, a space of possibility.
Anyway, here are some of the gayest dishes the chefs shared that I liked:
“At this moment, I would say the gayest thing would be our cocktail One of Your Girls. It’s a IYKYK reference to Troye Sivan’s song. Besides the name being a nod to maybe the sexiest music video to exist, it also supports Supergay Vodka out of New York. It is lavender colored and has edible glitter in it. It’s easy to drink, colorful, and fun.” — Max Ritcey, owner of Ritcey East, Watertown, Massachusetts
“The gayest thing on our menu would be Love Advice. We list it with our desserts and it’s a pretty popular menu item: A guest asks us or shares something that’s been going on for them in the love department and then we give them our best love advice. Obviously everyone needs love advice, not just queer people, but listing it on a menu in the first place is pretty damn gay.” — Halo Perez-Gallardo, co-founder, chef, and creative director of Lil Deb’s Oasis, Hudson, New York
“…The first time I thought of a food as queer wasn’t until 2019 when I got invited to participate in Queer Soup Night. And it made so much sense. Soup is nourishing and nurturing, a comfort food that you cook for a loved one in the intimacy of your home, a hug in edible form… As cliched as it is to say, it’s a labor of love, and when diners tell us that this soup warmed their bodies and their hearts, I am reminded of the power of food as a path to connection.” — C-Y Chia, chef and founder of the former Lion Dance Cafe, Oakland, California
“…When we talk about gay food, I think we are prioritizing the wisdom of joy over the traditions of fear we have inherited in many cooking settings and in society. I feel joyful when I make any form of jellied meat. The just-strong enough wobble of aspic holding together a terrine of head cheese is my poetic resistance against the homogenized nature of our country’s greater food culture, which parallels the political ambience of misogyny and bodily fear, and that, to me, is gay as hell.” — Shaina Loew-Banayan, chef and owner of Cafe Mutton, Hudson, New York
Notes on Culinary Camp:
No, not Camp as in tents and fires…
You’re probably familiar with Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” The term camp is hard to define, but according to Sontag, the essence of camp is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” It produces aesthetic for aesthetic’s sake, rather than for beauty. Moreover, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.” It’s “a private code, a badge of identity,” whose contours are both obvious and indefinable, but can be characterized as a fascination with tackiness, naivete, and decadence.
You may not, on the other hand, have heard of Culinary Camp.
Kyle Fitzpatrick writes “Culinary camp often manifests as the over-the-top embrace, and subversion, of heterosexual domesticity. Poking fun at mainstream culture is a coping mechanism, linking a near-secret language to otherwise accessible cultural creations”
Another way to look the intertwined relationship between gender, identity, and food. There’s a long history of Culinary Camp reimagining and changing the hyper-feminized images of home cooking. Often these societal changes to gender norms start with humour and play.
“That’s what queer food camp does: It mashes up classic archetypes — hamburgers and housewives — with otherworldly disruptions, most notably sex.”
Is it gay to…
Eat soup? Lick an ice cream? Drink a fruity cocktail? Earlier this year right-wing pundit Jesse Watters shared on Fox News that eating soup in public “isn’t manly” and that grown men (referring to Joe Biden) “should not be licking ice cream in public.” Frankly absurd statements.
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”, you’ve probably heard this a few times in your life. “In a society concerned with categorizing and being categorized, what you eat begins to say a lot about you. We link diets to class, to race, and to the idea of adherence to good taste. As sexual orientation evolved into a category of identity, what queer people ate became its own category of note.”
As we saw with ‘the gayest dishes on the menu’ there are lots of ways to think about what Queer food means. There’s also the other side of this, that certain foods or drinks become stereotyped. Something I’m very familiar with in hospitality where cocktails are still imbued with stereotypes and identities.
“Studies show men will avoid everything from yogurt to rosé to “products with rounded edges” because they are associated with femininity, and for a man to do a womanly thing could give someone the wrong idea. Because to come off as queer is still the “wrong idea.”
Eater Mag explored the idea “that food can turn you gay [which] speaks to the depth of how food is coded.” Jaya Saxena takes us through the history of ‘queer coded’ or ‘feminine’ foods and how we socially police each other to uphold these myths and gendered stereotypes. Specifically, what these ‘identity markers’ say about the current state of identity politics and fear-mongering.
Just as our associations of what is masculine, feminine, gay, straight, and trans have fluctuated, so do those very categories. “As soon as you realize that our bodies are changeable, you start to ruminate on the incredible fineness of our ideas of gender,” she says. “What makes you a man? Is it just that you don’t have tits?”
Food is a portal for these thoughts and fears because eating is the first way many of us understand our bodies and brains as sites of change… Little changes open the door to bigger ones. If you suddenly like olives today, maybe tomorrow you’ll suddenly like something else.
An Appetite for Change:
I recently finished reading The Alternatives by Irish author Caoilinn Hughes. The novel is about four distant Irish sisters each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. When one of the sisters (a Geologist) decides to abandon her life, burdened by the climate and existential grief, it brings them all together again and forces them to confront their relationships and their work.
A really beautiful, intriguing book. It has got me thinking. One of the sisters, a chef, was writing a cookbook about cooking in the face of growing food insecurity, in a post-Brexit setting, and in the face of the climate crisis. It’s prompted me to go on a bit of a search for where I can similar cookbooks in the real world.
In previous editions of this newsletter, I have written about the climate crisis and what that means for wine growers. I think we have less of an understanding of how our food consumption and access to ingredients will change on a personal and daily level.
The WIRE shone the light on the emerging genre at the end of last year. While sustainable diets have been around for ages, and we are certainly becoming more conscious of our animal product consumption, cookbooks that tackles the climate crisis signal a new appetite for change.
“In 2016, the term “climatarian” entered the Cambridge Dictionary—referring to a person who bases their diet on the lowest possible carbon footprint. In 2020, a survey by the global market research company YouGov found that 1 in 5 US millennials had changed their diets to help the climate. If you consider a climate cookbook to be one that was written, at least in part, to address the dietary changes necessitated by the climate crisis, you can see a whisper of a subgenre beginning to emerge.”
“Cookbooks about sustainable ways of eating are nothing new, even if they haven’t used the climate label. M.F.K. Fisher’s World War II-era book How to Cook a Wolf found beauty in cooking what you have and wasting nothing. The comforting recipes in the Moosewood Cookbook helped American vegetarianism unfurl its wings in the 1970s. Eating locally and seasonally is familiar, too. Edna Lewis spread it out on a Virginia table in The Taste of Country Cooking, and Alice Waters turned it into a prix fixe menu and various cookbooks at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.
But until recently, if you wanted to read about food and climate change, you had to turn to the nonfiction shelves.”
Eating in the climate crisis doesn’t only look like cutting down the carbon footprint of our food or eating organically but shifting back to growing and eating foods seasonally and regionally again, and drastically cutting down our food waste.
Biodiversity is also essential “Hunt also makes the case for putting biodiversity on the plate. “Biodiversity has always felt like one of the key elements of this whole situation that we’re in,” he said. Today, nearly half of all the calories people eat around the world come from just three plants: wheat, rice, and maize. “That kind of monoculture is very fragile,” he explained. “People often don’t realize that our food is linked to biodiversity, and the diversity of the food that we eat can support biodiversity in general.”
Importantly, these books also discuss how sustainable diets will be regionally specific and look very different across the world.
A big issue climate cookbook authors will face is in light of this. How do you sell books to such small audiences?
Recipes for the Future:
Perhaps the future of climate recipes and cookbooks will look more like Caroline Saunder’s Substack Pale Blue Tart. Saunders shares weekly recipes, tips, and stories about how dessert can be a climate solution.
I enjoyed this edition of her newsletter about ice cream. Caroline writes:
“Every summer, as I begin my annual season of soft-serve worship and door-to-door waffle-cone evangelism, I wonder: What would the future of food look like if you projected it onto an ice cream cone? If lower-carbon, plant-based ingredients made sundaes that can keep up with dairy? If vanilla ice cream were a tool to fight food waste—an edible mad-lib for fridge odds-and-ends? If climate-adapted flavors were as common on menus as strawberry and double-fudge chunk?”
She goes on to share a few delicious looking sustainable ice-creams from different chefs doing interesting work such as The Bird Seed Ice cream, Apricot sorbet with coconut water and jasmine, Maple miso ice cream, Canelé conelé, Crispy sourdough crunch ice cream, Knotweed sorbet.
The Secrets of Japan’s Ama Freedivers:
On a very different note, I was fascinated by this article in the Financial Times. A few months ago FT had a piece on Sweden’s Oyster Driving Queen (a title I could only dream of having.) This month David Coggins wrote about the ‘Ama’ the female freedivers who have sought pearls, lobsters, abalone and more for 3,000 years.
The word most like derives from a common root with the Japanese word for sea, umi – a commonly encountered explanation is that it derives from a contraction of ama-bito, written in sinograms as [海人], with the meaning “sea person”.
The group has an average age around 70; the eldest is an 88 year old, and some members began as young as 15. These women can all stay underwater for up to two minutes, and traditional went diving with only loincloth (although in recent years they’ve accepted the wetsuit). The Ama search for pearls, seaweed, and food to sell at the market, diving 30 ft underwater.
The Ama remain a fixture in the Japanese imagination, symbolising resilience and the sea, surrounded by a slightly mystical air.
Unfortunately, “the Ama find less food than they used to. Their numbers are also declining; currently, there are about 1,200 in Japan, down from an estimated 6,000 at the end of the second world war.”
A beautiful tradition threatened by climate change and our environmental destruction.
The “Loneliest Generation” Is Transforming the Dinner Party:
It is not new news that we are facing a loneliness epidemic. Last newsletter I wrote the disappearance of third places. This week I saw an interesting article in Bon Appetite about the rise in dinner party events and the Gen Zers who are in search of meaningful friendship.
“The Girls NYC, which describes itself as “an exclusive social group for NYC women in their early 20s looking to make meaningful friendships.” It’s one of many such collectives that have sprung up around the country dedicated to connecting people in real life over a meal in the hopes of making new friends.
Skip the Small Talk, with outposts from Providence to San Francisco, hosts regular mixers at local breweries and bars. Los Angeles’s Bestie Brunch gathers women for a Champagne and mimosa brunch to meet new friends. In Boston, the Aperitivo Society hosts themed multi course dinners (oysters and wine! a Beantown bean bash!), often bringing in brand or chef collaborators, for a dozen people or less at a time, while the Dinner Party Project in Orlando brings eight strangers together over cocktails, an ornate tablescape, and a four-course meal prepared by a private chef.”
It’s not only Gen Z who are struggling to make new friends or are feeling disconnected. Summer is the perfect time to step out of your shell and find new friends. Cooking and eating together provide the perfect setting for connection and friendship. And worst comes to worst, at least you’ll have good food.
Picnic Season:
It’s dinner party season, it’s picnic season, it’s the season for enjoying the sunshine and making new friends.
The other week thousands of people flocked to the Champs-Élysées for a giant free picnic. “About 273,000 people applied to take part in “le grand pique-nique”, with 4,400 selected to sit with up to six guests each on a 216 meter-long red-and-white checked picnic blanket, described by organisers as “the world’s largest tablecloth”.
That’s all for this week!
Happy Pride!
Carlie xx