Allan S Weiss’ has strived to publish a culinary/gastronomic alphabet at Cabinet a few years back. I was just having a read through their sold out issues and upon stumbling the piece I was quite intrigued by the Junk Food section. It’s very well worth pondering more on the point he is making whether junk food could ever inspire the so-called haute cuisine. Although, it’s not quite clear why we should thrive for this kind of anticipation, it’s made me wonder why the phenomena of junk food has found more space in art (Warhol, pop-art, Oldenburg, etc..) or cinema or literature than the ‘art of making food’ itself.
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Junk food. Cultural studies has motivatedvast amounts of writing on fast food andjunk food conceived as a major sociologicalphenomenon; they are occasionallyalso considered in culinary terms, either asa counter-ideal opposed to the heightsof “transcendental” cuisine, or as a meansto argue for the total subjectivization ornonhierarchization of culinary values. However—while usually avoiding arguments onthese matters, since they originate in a verydifferent, indeed antithetical universe ofvalues from my own—I still await the wordof a great chef who claims any inspirationwhatsoever from such food. Furthermore,in response to criticisms of hierarchicalæsthetic judgments, quite frankly, I havenever yet heard anybody say, “Hey, let’sgo out for an awful meal.” The notion of“taste,” when practically utilized in regardto food, almost always implies good taste.I wish to insist that this position is not at alla manifestation of culinary snobbism, sincethe very poorest of peasant foods—in factmuch less expensive, more nourishing, andsimpler than fast food, and still just as ubiquitousand widely appreciated—have inspiredhaute cuisine from its inception. Consider onion soup, cabbage soup, and that provençalgarlic soup whose name so poeticallyindicates a zero-degree of the culinary arts,aïgo bouïllido, “boiled water.”
From “Ingestion: A personal gastronomic alphabet, part II”, Cabinet, Issue 2
Locus Solus 