Javier Pérez Escohotado: “Grandmothers didn’t just make homemade stews, they also lived through May 1968 and took off their bras on the beach”
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Javier Pérez Escohotado has one goal: “To provoke a critical reflection on the current state of gastronomy, to dismantle its dogmas and to question the uniform thinking that dominates culinary discourse,” he says bluntly. This former professor at the Pompeu Fabra and Ramon Llull universities, a philologist and writer, from the perspective of Cultural History, has dedicated recent years to dissecting the discourses surrounding haute cuisine and contemporary gastronomic narrative. With a career that ranges from historical research to literary criticism, Pérez Escohotado has built a work that addresses the dominant trends in Spanish cuisine, as well as opening new spaces, which are relevant for a reflection that is becoming increasingly necessary.
His most recent book, El giro gastronómico (Editorial Trea) , is a continuation of his previous work in Crítica de la razón gastronómico and El mono gastronómico . In it he addresses the process through which the gastronomic bubble of the nineties has led to a uniform way of thinking, where the supposed “cuisine of freedom” and “cuisine of the brave” have served to cover up the sale and domestication of the history of eating. “We all move and live at an extraordinary speed and we don’t have time to sit down and think,” he explains one morning in mid-February on the phone from Sant Cugat del Vallès (Barcelona). “We cannot excuse ourselves by saying that things happen so quickly that we cannot express an opinion,” he continues.
For Pérez Escohotado, the turning point in Spanish gastronomy came with the phenomenon of Ferran Adrià , who revolutionised haute cuisine with his experiments, but over time has evolved more into a media figure and a museum. “Adrià has left gastronomy,” he says, implying that his role as an influential chef has disappeared. In 1987 he won his first star and in 2011 he had closed elBulli. “He has always been an excellent salesman and continues to be so, but in reality he has abandoned the kitchen.” Since 2010, Adrià has moved from the kitchen to the museum and, as he expresses in several of the texts in the book, he has turned his legacy into a personal brand.
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In The Gastronomic Turn, the author describes a uniform way of thinking about gastronomy, which, backed by the media and institutions, has distorted culinary creativity and turned it into what in economics is called “disruptive innovation”, into a marketing product, and has disseminated “ideas about creativity that are not really creativity”. In this sense, Pérez Escohotado highlights that avant-garde cuisine has been co-opted by a narrative that has been described as artistic, but which has to do, above all, with the commercial, where originality is reduced to form, visual presentation and the application of commercial techniques on traditional products. They have stolen from us the material, the real part of gastronomy.
Regarding creativity in the kitchen, Escohotado is blunt: “The concept of creativity, even the word itself, has been replaced by the term innovation, which is nothing more than a trompe l'oeil, a mask to justify the commercialization of gastronomy.” For him, cooking has become a succession of artifices that seek to dazzle diners without a true culinary evolution. In reality, “the process, the formal preparation, is worked on, but the material part of the product is sacrificed, disguised or takes second place, in favor of artifice,” he reflects in the chapter dedicated to gastronomy as Cultural and Intangible Heritage, a topic that he addresses under the expression of 'anthropological lyricism': “It is not about transforming a tortilla into foam, but rather understanding cooking as a cultural fact that connects with our history and our communities.”
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One of the fundamental contributions of The Gastronomic Turn is the analysis of gastronomy as symbolic capital, for which he adapts the methodology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Pérez Escohotado maintains that haute cuisine has become a cultural asset that grants prestige and social differentiation, beyond its nutritional function. “All cooking and all gastronomy depend on those who can afford a meal,” he explains. “Avant-garde cuisine is not a culinary revolution, but a form of exclusion disguised as creativity.” And he insists that, in the end, what is done is to consume gastronomy as a fashion with a certain cachet. “The cultural capital of the middle classes, perhaps the well-off, could be identified with a behavior that feeds on the new, the novelty or the vaporously novel,” he writes. “If these classes use gastronomy as a distinction, the most popular classes rely on a cuisine of necessity, in which the essence is valued more than the form, that is, more the meaning than the signifier.”
Another of the main themes of reflection in El giro gastronómico is the relationship between cooking and food waste. “There is a gastronomy of necessity in society as opposed to a need for gastronomy,” he says at the beginning of his work. Escohotado questions the appropriation of the concept of sustainability by a certain gastronomic industry, denouncing that Zero Waste has been turned into a marketing label rather than a real practice. “Now they sell us the need to recover cooking from leftovers as if it were a novelty, when offal and waste have been part of our culinary tradition,” he points out.
The concept of “resistance cooking” that she proposes in her book responds to the need to rescue food as a cultural and social act, far from the impositions of the market. “Food is a celebration, it is excess, it is sharing,” she says. “We cannot reduce it to a marketing exercise or a succession of recipes that, on the other hand, do not teach us how to eat.”
One of the most provocative aspects of the book is its criticism of the figure of “the grandmother” as an emblem of traditional cooking. “The grandmother has become an entelechy,” says Escohotado. “As if grandmothers had only made homemade stews and jars of jam, ignoring that they were also women who worked, who lived through May 1968 or who took off their bras on the beach.” For the author, this idealization responds to a commercial strategy that seeks to provide authenticity to contemporary gastronomy without a true reflection on its history and evolution. With a direct style and a sense of humor, The Gastronomic Turn . From the Avant-garde to Waste , uncovers and lays bare many issues that have been little or not at all discussed until now.
EL PAÍS