When I first heard about Zoe’s new blog venture it was in the very same breath that I heard of its demise as well. Oh, how disappointed I was.
Enticed by Zoe’s recollection of setting up the site, I was all set to read more of the humour that I had so grown to enjoy at CrazyBrave applied to all things culinary. But then she told of how, in the middle of writing a post about substituting ingredients in a recipe for muesli bars, she was overcome by a moment of extreme self-consciousness, at which point she declared the blog had folded before it even began.
The cause of Zoe’s doubt was an ingredient so utterly pretentious that its name could not be uttered without rousing every latent fear she had concerning accusations of food-related onanism—the likes of which, no doubt, had not been bandied about since the heady days of the Culture Wars, when aficionados of lattes and those purporting to represent lovers of meat pies faced off over barricades built by the Murdoch Press Corps.
It is only since Progressive Dinner Party has gone ahead anyway that I’ve figured out that the fly in the ointment, or the affected berry in the muesli so to speak, was the goji berry, alleged purveyor of every health benefit imaginable.
Before I knew about the inhibiting effects of the goji berry, however, I got to thinking about the notion of pretentious ingredients. What makes a foodstuff pretentious? What makes a foodstuff down-to-earth, the proverbial humble pie? Who is qualified to declare such things?
