Just when did food flacks throughout the land decide that American cooks and diners craved nothing more than to be welcomed into a club of sophisticated evildoers? Candy ads promise to bring your guiltiest fantasies to life. Cookbook introductions and jacket blurbs prate that the contents will range “from slightly naughty to wickedly decadent” or hail “the world’s most sinfully seductive chocolate mousse.” Recipe writers dream up handles like “Chocolate Exquisite Pain” for creations said to belong to the “Marquis de Sade school of desserts.” Nothing, one might gather, is worth eating unless it’s going to ravish the eater into a delirium filled with Swinburnian raptures and roses of vice.
This kind of drivel was not always with us. Cookbooks and other culinary detritus of the 20th century only rarely show language like wicked and sinful used as inviting come-ons until roughly the late 1970s. After about 1980 the floodgates rapidly swung wide, and we’ve been awash in self-congratulatory infamy ever since.
Some of us are old enough to remember just the same sort of titillating, mock-lascivious verbal games being played with sex. That brand of nonsense went out of business a good 30 years ago; after the 1960s nobody could pretend that squealing “How naughty!” or “Utterly wicked!” made sex any sexier. But millions of people shortly began carrying on as if it made food sexier—especially sweet things, and most especially chocolate.
Not by accident, most of the squealers were women. (Still are.) The psychosexual histrionics that they started parading were one way of dealing with an unholy alliance that arose at this time between two kinds of bullying diet-mongers: the already ubiquitous weight-loss hucksters and the New Nutritional Ministry of Fear.
Oh, what a time it was. From around 1980 until maybe the mid-1990s, the already ghastly pressures related to fitting into a smaller-size dress were augmented by an incessant barrage of nutribabble designed to strike terror into unbelievers. Some of the din has died down, but we’re left with many unpleasant reverberations. Among them is the language that champions of sweet things retreated into as a defense mechanism. Hardly any mainstream member of the food-writing profession dared to suggest that demonizing almost every existing feature of the American table might be seriously wacko. But the dessert-and-candy loyalists continued to flourish through the worst of it. Somehow they turned the tables on the demonizers—not by facing up to them, but by flinging themselves down in disarming mock-postures of abject sexual surrender accompanied by playful simpers of “Guilt!” and “Sin!”
Those mantras become more routine every year and now seem to be part of our general mental wallpaper. When a dessert named Chocolate Decadence appeared on the scene around 1980, the name carried a little frisson of daring. Today supermarket ice cream may be advertised as decadent, and last year the usually levelheaded New York Times reporter Amanda Hesser bestowed the following encomium on an unorthodox chocolate dessert in the apparent belief that decadence refers to nothing much more than richness or extreme sensuous impact: “The dish was coarse and masculine. And it had decadence, yet it wasn’t dripping with it.”
HELP! Let’s rescue at least one word’s honest meaning from the funny farm. Decadent comes from the same Latin root as decay, and its extended sense is something like “indicative of moral or sociocultural rot.” By my lights, the most sinful, wicked, obscene, outrageous, guilty, naughty, depraved, and genuinely decadent spectacle in turn-of-the-century Foodieland is the mass delusion that epithets of this ilk have anything to do with pleasurable eating.
Here are multitudes who go to bed after a gentle nightcap of news headlines that make Sweeney Todd look like Goody Two-shoes, cheerfully assuming that sin, wickedness, pain, and degradation deserve to be invoked every day as certifiers of gastronomic delight. Is this sick, or what? It amounts to thinking that the ultimate token of enjoying food is to work up a smirky pretense that there’s something morally wrong about either the food or the enjoyment. I submit that we ought to be expressing our pleasure in food by saying, in plain words, “This is good, and I love it.”
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