Real Food by Martin Parr
My rating: 4/5 cats
i was drawn to this book because it is so beautifully designed; i like its shape, its picnic-blanket cover design, and the fact that it’s squishy.
SQUISH! (definitely time to re-up that manicure…)
and i flipped through it, thinking, “oh, it’s instagram!” and “sheeeeeit—some of my pictures could be in here, why don’t i have a book?”
but we can’t all have books because there’d be no one left to read them!
i’m not sure what the photographer’s intentions were in putting this book together. the introduction is written by british food writer fergus henderson, who comes across a bit snooty, and is displeased by “cucumber abuse,” but he makes some good points nonetheless, albeit sometimes grudgingly:
I suppose it is quite refreshing that, in a day and age when chefs announce that everything they cook is seasonal and local, Martin publishes a book celebrating the opposite. There is a strong spirit of place at work here—not the one I look for, that of seasonality and local growing, but a different approach: the Stars and Stripes adorn a barbecue and a pie, a proud expression of a proud nation. Perhaps Martin is bringing to our notice the fact that there is a culinary history running parallel.
why do i feel like “proud” was not his first word-choice?
still, it’s definitely a celebration of the “real;” the first picture in the book shows dirty kiddie fingernails clutching a giant sugary deepfried treat:
more hendersoning:
There is a distinct danger of creating a kind of Prada food: well looked after, good meat from animals treated well when alive, killed as humanely as possible and then appropriately stored. This goes for fruit and vegetables as well, and all this is good—but it adds up to being expensive. At the same time supermarkets are telling us what to buy: anonymous pink meat in plastic, ‘fresh’ pasta that has a shelf life of two months…We are being sold an ersatz view of the culinary world. Surely we can come to some arrangement to avoid this extreme two-tier food situation?
and this book is a look at food that is very un-prada. good luck finding the provenance of any of these ingredients—ain’t nothing organic or free-range or locally sourced here, unless “plastic wrap” is organic.
and yet—it’s not looking down judgmentally at these less fancy foods—at least, i don’t think it is. it’s hard to say, since the photographer never weighs in and all we have are the pictures to speak for him. i’m choosing to not read it that way, because although many of the pictures are lurid,
frequently unappetizing,
and quite frequently phallic, with a notable preoccupation for sausage, for example:
hellooooo, ladies!
they are not without their appeal.
and this might just be the opinion of someone with a garbage-diet and a deep love of all those better homes and gardens cookbooks from the 60’s and 70’s that i collect for their fascinating evocation-of-period, commitment to canned goods and aspic, and headache-inducing patterned tableware:
(many of which books were lost in the great bedbug invasion of 2015, so i’m going to have to start gathering them all over again. dammit. i miss those books.)
fortunately, some of the pictures in this book reminded me of my dearly departed friends:
it’s not all “bad” foods in here, or as henderson terms it “dour,” slappingly gravity-bound food, because look, vegetables!
thank god i never got a tramp stamp and still have that room available
my editorial filter in selecting these photographs might be skewing it away from the healthy,”good” stuff since my interest lies in food that is fun:
food that is mighty:
worship the mighty poutine!
but there’s plenty here that’s just…sad. to someone of my sensibilities, anyway:
even the “prize-winning” food is pretty depressing:
was the contest for “saddest?”
nope, for “any other vegetable.” naturally.
here’s a fun game to play called “ingredient or intruder?”
none of the food is labeled or identified, so i’m not sure what some of these things are
maybe frog legs?
this is food photojournalism from around the world, but you can pretty easily identify the ones from the u.s.
not only the size of the float (or the person), but that i ♥ bingo watch? dead giveaway
you can just as easily identify which ones are NOT from the u.s.
although this one fooled me until i noted the placemat underneath, and now i’m jealous that our dds don’t have these:
even though that specific picture gets called out sniffily in the intro:
There are some photographs that describe a conflict between the eater and the raw ingredients. A particularly fine example is the éclair on page 35. The creator of this monster must have really hated food to have come up with this processed evil. But hang on there, Fergus! Some young person would be delighted to tuck into this instant diabetes. And with the E-number count, that child would probably glow pleasingly in the dark as a by-product.
aww, he called me young!
some are from neither the u.s. nor from any other country, but direct from the heavens:
It is impressive how many foodstuffs Martin has managed to find that resemble some sort of vomit…
and mmmm—i love me some bread and butter. although sometimes bread is just an excuse to eat a ton of butter
and the last photo in the book:
horrible cannibal birds—nothing realer than that!
bon appétit!
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