Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Eva Pentel

NW In your book, there’s a line that claims “modern food is its media”. How has the media transformed foodiness from subculture to mass culture over the last 60 years?

RT A book called The Bad Food Guide from 1967, written by journalist Derek Cooper, opens with the sentence, “Let’s face it, food is not something you talk about”. Cooper’s argument was that to talk about food in the UK was like talking about sex – not discussed publicly, and not part of the way we relate to strangers, or even friends. Then, over the course of 20 years, something shifted. By the 1980s, the word “foodie” was in circulation, mostly used by people writing satirical books and articles about this subculture which were always talking about what restaurants they were going to and which recipes they were cooking. Today, so many of the things satirised then are the default now. That is something that I wanted to understand.

NW You mention the link between recipes and technology – in the 1960s an oven would come with a little pamphlet of recipes. This year, half of the top ten bestselling cookbooks were for air fryers. Is the air fryer as meaningful now as the appliances of the 1950s for the housewife?

RT The air fryer is very useful, for making small portions and cutting bills. But it’s part of a bigger shift away from plumbed or wired-in big-scale kitchen appliances designed to use gas and fire, and towards a plethora of tiny toy machines – your Ninja blender, microwave, air fryer, rice cooker. It’s a symptom of how people are living – you need a portable kitchen in a rental economy – but it’s also due to a slight anxiety about food these days, where people don’t entirely trust themselves to use the big boy equipment, so to speak. The air fryer cookbooks also show how much recipe culture is downwind of the commercial marketisation of products. 

NW I love how you point out that shifts in middle-class tastes that were supposedly responding to new media are connected to broader changes. The middle class, for instance, did start buying olive oil in the aftermath of Elizabeth David’s bestselling A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950). But this was also a moment when, among other things, a wave of Turkish Cypriots were immigrating to the UK.

RT That specific example felt so pertinent to me, because people often cite Elizabeth David’s huge influence on British food culture. That’s true, but at the end of the day, she was not the primary force that got sun-dried tomatoes into Sainsbury’s. It required migration into the UK, and the changing economic circumstances that allowed British people to go on package holidays. It needed the UK to join economic blocs within the EU so that there was freedom to import certain ingredients, and the creation of newspaper supplements that brought foodie dispatches every weekend. These changes are made in a systemic way; the book tries to look beyond food writing and writers as the architects of taste.

NW As you write, online recipe producers like Mob Kitchen know that using words like creamy, crispy and sticky are predisposed to generate clicks. Are those three adjectives eternally appealing, or is there anything specific about them?

RT Texture, maybe even more than taste, is where different food cultures draw apart. There are certain textures in East Asian and Southeast Asian cooking – a kind of bounce you find in fish balls, tapioca, mochi – that are so unfamiliar to a British palette that they take getting used to. Then there’s the pleasingly mucilaginous texture of, let’s say, an okra soup in West Africa. Internet culture has created its own appetites for specific textures, and people in the UK and in the US have a certain desire for things that are crispy, chewy and creamy. But I also think that there’s a certain amount of currency online that comes from these terms being sellable – the words crispy and creamy are not descriptors but search terms for SEO. The more that we use them as a selling point, the stronger the self-reinforcing crave spiral. 

NW Someone told me once that Pizza Express is spiritually connected to divorced dads: it’s child-friendly, but not unsophisticated. Are there specific valences that other institutions have beyond their obvious cultural orientation?

RT Oh, 100%. There’s a psychological entanglement that we have with these restaurants – they are obviously markers of class, but there are so many subdivisions and subsets. As you said, Pizza Express reeks of divorce. In the book, I wrote about the burger chain Wimpy, which has such a specific energy. Lots of Wimpies only exist in southeast and east London, Kent and Essex. As someone from Essex, the mood of those places is depressed. The sense of decline among the white British working class is embedded in the bones of Wimpy. I’m trying to think of what other restaurants have an extremely specific energy. Giraffe is really good for visiting Spanish tourists. Turtle Bay is for kids from rural parts of England who have moved to a big city and want to go out for dinner in groups. 

NW Is there any way of anticipating what comes next in the food world? 

RT On an individual trend level, it’s anyone’s guess. But when I was researching the book, one thing that stood out was that systemic forces are, if not consistent, then certainly cyclical. Wellness drinks represent a revolution in marketing. I don’t know what the next kombucha movement is going to be, but I suspect that it will emerge from the same symbiosis between new companies and small influencers. We’re seeing so much of food culture transition to video. It’s really easy to be declinist about that, and it certainly troubles me, but I think that slowly we will see people using these platforms in exciting ways – even more so if the specific platforms we’re working with right now become redundant. When a specific kind of media becomes the non-dominant media, it’s relieved of the burden of complete representation, and it can play with form again. We’re seeing it with cookbooks becoming weird and narrative and beautiful. As the discourse shifts away from TikTok, the platform will start being used not just for formulaic content, but for artful and thoughtful discussions of where food’s going next. .