Shit-eating
by Eda Günaydın
I see us eating well without living well. Most people in my social circle readily identify as ‘foodies’, having grown up consuming a steady diet of MasterChef and aesthetically busted avocado on toast. At a friend’s most recent birthday party, we twenty-somethings gathered in a circle to feast on ‘nduja and organic honey; we scooped up the latter with tiny spoons after gently cracking through the raw honeycomb’s wooden frame, which oozed and spilled out in pornographic slow motion. None of us will ever own a home. My friend’s flat was a nearly-condemned building in Chippendale with black mould climbing up the walls, rented out primarily to students precisely because of their low standards and its proximity to Sydney University. The following week, the kitchen shelves fell from the wall in one piece, shattering all their glassware into all their food.
When I indulge in something cutting-edge with brioche or fennel or goat’s cheese or edible flowers, it’s most often eaten at home. But I’m not wrapped in a dressing gown, with freshly moisturised legs, splayed across my chaise lounge. Instead, I’m in my pyjamas, bra-less and with my skin broken out, because I am too tired to have cooked anything. In these moments, it usually means that I have finished my ‘work-done-at-work’, and now upon arriving home have to complete the work which is supposed to be more leisurely because it’s ‘work-done-at-home’.
When I was fifteen, I watched episodes of MasterChef sitting in front of a bowl of Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese I had microwaved myself for dinner. Call me aspirational. It’s easy, I think, and tempting, to congratulate the increased accessibility of being able to self-identify as a foodie—after all, the existence of things like degustations at different price points make a formerly bourgeois experience accessible to youths and the middle class. We could interpret this as a sign of upward mobility, into a class we may in fact never succeed at entering. But it’s also one that we probably should not aspire to enter.
Another term for this argument is the ‘Charcuterie Discourse’, so-called (by me) following a recent protracted Twitter argument between different factions of the left regarding whether charcuterie is bourgeois and anti-communist, and whether we all should or should not get to eat it. The negative argument is as follows: rich people can afford to eat it and you don’t want to be rich, do you? That’s a shootable offence. The affirmative argument tries a different tack: taste is not classed, smoked meats are delightful regardless of who you are, and we should all want them for our comrades. If everyone got to be middle class and enjoy middle class-coded treats, then that would mean there was no such thing as class because we would all be able to access luxury. To that I will say: charcuterie is in fact Islamophobic. Think about it. And then invest in my halal charcuterie start-up.
I think about this particular instantiation of foodie culture as an Australian export, dispersed via the soft power of MasterChef Australia. Have you ever watched any other MasterChef series? They prepare sandwiches. They prepare eggs. Eggs made of eggs, and not a nine-component dessert crafted to look like an egg. Not the simulacra of an egg, but an actual egg. How embarrassing.
There is no more ham-heavy, charcuterie-oriented land than Spain, where I lived for six months in 2014. And yet, Spanish people my age thought the notion of queuing to eat someplace special rather offensive—they usually preferred to go to the taperia closest to their flat, with the cheapest tinto, where they would smoke and share basic bitch tortilla de patatas and montaditos on sad white bread. During my time in Spain, I stopped drinking coffee wholesale, unable to stomach the torrefacto beans. There was also the question of the coffee making itself: staff would turn on the milk wand on a several-thousand-euro espresso machine, letting it sputter, positively shouting and spewing into the jug in agony, while they walked away, pottered, and laconically returned later; what you got after this inexpert ordeal was burnt shit.
In Australia, gourmet culture manifests in a strange winner-takes-all: one place will have a queue wrapped down the street, while its next-door neighbour will quietly go under. When I was 21, I worked at a café on King Street in Newtown called Tango Flavours, which was run by an Argentinian family. Four weeks after opening, they suddenly stopped giving me shifts; I had two other jobs so I never followed up, figuring they were experiencing teething pains. Two weeks later, the café’s doors were shuttered, replaced by a Lentil As Anything.
Learning to make coffee as a barista in Australia, we were directed never to let the wand produce any sound other than that of paper tearing: crisp, clean, quiet, and intentional. This was supposed to introduce the smallest possible bubbles of air into the milk and help to generate a foam that looked like wet paint, rather than dish soap. Australia has a coffee culture, I would try to explain to European friends my age: we had single-handedly managed to drive Starbucks out of the continent. They thought largely that I was a snob, I think, and obnoxious, until the day I heard from another Australian that an Australian café—as it was described on the website—was operating in Malasaña, the hip part of Madrid. There, I had my first cup of Spanish coffee that didn’t make me want to kill myself. Which was funny, because I always want to kill myself, in a way that has no relation to whether I do or do not have access to brunch.
All of this is not to say that other cultures in other countries don’t enjoy brunch. But I do think they don’t do brunch the way Australians do it. Here’s how I would describe it if I were a semiotician, you were uninitiated, and this was an important topic:
What is commonly dubbed ‘doing brunch’—rather than ‘having brunch’—involves visiting a café some time before two in the afternoon on a weekend. These cafes are typically located on the main streets in the suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West, Melbourne’s Inner North, or in the alleyways of Adelaide and Hobart CBDs. At brunch, customers order a combination of food and drinks chosen from a menu.
Drinks typically include coffee—namely cold brew or espresso, with or without frothed milk; loose leaf rather than bagged tea; blended ice drinks; fresh or ‘cold-pressed’ juice and smoothies, offering a variety of combinations of fruit, vegetable, seed, or other ‘health food’ and ‘superfood’ ingredients. Meals include quintessential breakfast fare, usually featuring a selection of several types of bread (most notably sourdough), combined with egg (customers are given the option of choosing how their egg is prepared: either poached, fried, or scrambled), and a ‘protein’ (typically smoked salmon, ham, bacon, poached chicken, haloumi, or mushroom).
Of course, there are many other permutations available to the brunch customer, but I have briefly surveyed the conventional location, drink, and meal options. This is in order to make a broader point not just about variety, but choice. A core component of brunch is that the customer is empowered to choose how they consume—would they like to sit inside or outside? What type of bread? How would you like your eggs prepared? How would you like your coffee: cold brew, three quarters full, extra hot, double shot, decaf? Menus list food offerings not as a metonym for all the ingredients a dish contains, like ‘cheeseburger’. Instead, they list out each ingredient, optimising the control the customer has over their consumption (see Figure 1). If a name is given to the menu item, the emphasis is on humour, such as a pun like ‘Eggscellent Delight’, rather than on symbolic efficiency. This breakdown in signification suggests that brunch is filled with new meanings beyond the literal, and which evacuate the possibility of viewing it as a source of ’'unhealthy’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘generic’ or ‘fast’ food.
Figure 1: A page off a menu at my local brunch spot, ‘Jakey Boy’ café on Norton St, Leichhardt.
In addition to being endlessly customisable according to the whims of each customer, brunch is also bountiful. Food is plated in such a way as to emphasise quantity—either in intentionally over-large servings, as share-plates, or on platters which maximise the food’s surface area. This emphasis on bounty is exhibited by the recent addition of the ‘bottomless’ beverage—bottomless sparkling water, bottomless mimosas, bottomless sangrias. It is rather interesting that the phrase ‘bottomless beverage’ dominates, rather than a pre-existing phrase which captures the same idea: ‘free refills’. I argue that the latter term is more readily connected to the experience of having fast food.
On a basic level, both fast food and brunch are similar experiences: both entail eating food that one has purchased. On an ideological level however, brunch emerges as the antithesis of fast food. I say this for the following four reasons:
Brunch is slow: customers are able to take their time, choose exactly what they would like, and, after the dining experience, spend added hours at the café—whether this means drinking, chatting, reading a book or working on their laptop.
One does not serve themselves brunch: at a fast food restaurant, the customer has to wait in line to order, choosing from a menu so fixed that one could eat the same meal at any one of hundreds of other restaurants across the globe; if they want another drink, they must stand up and refill it themselves. By contrast, table service at brunch is most common and encouraged: the customer is waited on and has their refuse cleaned up on their behalf by waitstaff. In addition, chain restaurants are rarely part of the brunch experience¹, as customers place a high premium on one-of-a-kind experiences: local venues serving local ingredients.
While the meaning associated with fast food is that it is unhealthy, brunch is viewed as a nutritional and nourishing meal.
Finally, fast food is conceptualised as being for the poor—blue-collar workers, single parents, broke students. By contrast, being able to afford brunch suggests the comfort of your class status. This functions in two ways: first, if you can afford to pay the financial cost (which is accepted as being high almost to the point of it being a joke, if one looks at the discourse surrounding the ‘smashed avo’), and second, if you can afford to while away hours on a weekend.
Another facet of brunch is that it is visually stunning. Emphasis is placed on the aesthetic value of the food and drinks. For example, lattes with the more complex art (say, a swan rather than a floret) are more highly prized, despite this feature not altering the taste of the beverage. Attention is paid to plating, and ingredients whose value stems either from their novelty or appearance are used, such as edible flowers, brightly coloured berries and spices like turmeric². This visual appeal and emphasis of brunch means that it is the most frequently photographed meal—pictures of plates are regularly shared on social media, suggesting that the experience of brunch enjoys a second life in the digital realm as a source of social capital. There is a whole industry of influencers whose job it is to spruik the art of brunch, ranking individual cafés. Indeed, the highest searched phrase which follows the coinage ‘Instagrammable’—that is, worthy of photographing and placing on Instagram—according to Google auto-complete, is ‘Instagrammable cafes near me.’
Brunch’s connection to choice, plenitude and health suggest that late capitalist society values brunch as a luxury or leisure activity. Therefore, the concept of brunch plays a vital role in reproducing class due to its associations with bourgeois lifestyle and taste, an argument that is only reinforced when one considers brunch’s associations with time and money. Brunch’s typical placement on a weekend also explicates who it is intended ‘for’—individuals who do not engage in work on a weekend are most often members of the white-collar and affluent classes, served by waitstaff who are required to work on the weekends. The use of brunch to paint an image of one’s lifestyle suggests it is a conspicuous consumption activity, rather than one used to generate sociality or community. As with other acts of conspicuous leisure, such as long games of cricket played by the English upper classes on a Sunday, these factors suggest that brunch is used to maintain and reproduce the leisure classes.
End of thought experiment.
I think most of what I’ve written is correct, from the point of view of ideology. I’ve written it as if I were an academic, because that’s what I’m trying to be. But here’s the negative argument now: although brunch is a bourgeois cultural activity, I and others like me who might partake in it—young creative and knowledge workers—are not bourgeois. We are role-playing to cover up for the fact that we are not bourgeois.
I don’t know about you, but what I do with all the time I save, or serotonin I generate, is either experience my leisure time in the form of a commodity, or use it to work and produce commodities. When I worked at Tango Flavours, I was an exploited casual, just as I was at all the other cafés that made me wear silly uniforms, and who gave me no breaks and paid me no super. And I continue to be an exploited casual now, even though I no longer work in hospitality. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t work on a weekend; didn’t feel surveilled at work; didn’t not own the fruits of my labour; didn’t feel so precarious it made me mentally ill.
For some of us, eating something not-shit has become such an unwavering desire that it risks rising to the level of pathology: have you ever watched a friend, or been that friend, who scrolls online dining listings with urgency, unable to bring themselves to eat anywhere that does not have a four-point-something rating based on at least ten reviews? Are you okay? I’m not. Carbonated wine doesn’t cure my depression; table service or customisable burgers at McDonald’s don’t cure my depression; and superfoods certainly don’t cure my depression, but they probably, at least a little, make me more depressed in their failure to make me less depressed.
Don’t get me wrong. My disposable income is higher than it was, and my earnings place me in the top 20 per cent in the world: I don’t need to shoplift brie anymore, I can just put it straight into my basket. I stand here as a beneficiary of neoliberalism: on the receiving end, sometimes, of an UberEats delivery from a gig worker who hates me, or a meal served on a board rather than a plate by a bored waiter who makes no penalty rates. But I’m not having a good time; neither of us are.
¹ Chain restaurants rarely survive Australian café culture. See the mass closures of Starbucks and Gloria Jean’s, for example.
² Turmeric lattes have been popular for a few years in the brunch scene. Of course, turmeric blended with milk has been a traditional (and, before their popularisation in the west, viewed negatively as an inexpensive and unsophisticated) ‘home remedy’ among non-white cultures for some time.
Eda Günaydın is a Turkish-Australian writer and researcher, whose writing explores class, class mobility and diaspora. You can find her work in the Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, and others.
