Ugly Delicious, a new documentary series premiering on Netflix later this month, follows chef David Chang, left, as he explores how food is used ‘to break down cultural barriers’ and ‘uncover shared experiences.’Netflix
About a third of the way into the first episode of Rotten, the new food documentary series from Netflix, the narrator uses a phrase to explain the dilution of mass-marketed honey with syrups – a step producers are apparently taking in order to respond to the rising demand for honey produced by health-food crazes that (erroneously) suggest it's a healthier alternative to white sugar – that is ripped from an episode of CSI, rather than the pages of Bon Appétit: "It's straight out of the drug-dealer playbook."
But that crime-procedural tic is not accidental: Rotten, which covers such pertinent but not-necessarily-mainstream-hipster-foodie-friendly topics as peanut allergies, unfair labour practices and overfishing, has been framed as a "true crime" series – not your average food porn. Food politics and socioeconomics are not exactly untrod territory for food documentaries – Food, Inc., anyone? – but Rotten's release last month marked a sharp shift in tone for food documentaries and showed what happens when streaming services with bottomless appetites for content meet audiences hungry for just about anything food-related.
Previously, the buzziest food docs and their star personalities have driven the conversation – if they haven't been the conversation themselves. For Rotten, the series' format – "true crime" – reflects the zeitgeist in a peculiar hall-of-mirrors way. The current culture is obsessed with such shows as Making a Murderer, The Keepers and The Confession Tapes which seem to dominate Netflix (to say nothing of true crime's ascendancy in other forms such as podcasting). So why not mash viewers' other current obsession – anything and everything to do with food – with our desire to play armchair detective?
With Rotten, we have important conversations being consciously structured in a way that is palatable to media consumers in 2018: as crime procedural. It sometimes feels a bit shoehorned and hackneyed, but if you liked The Keepers, you might like this – Rotten is technically about food, but because of its presentation of the topics at hand, it's more or less subject-matter agnostic.
The result might be getting more people on board with conversations about food that transcend knowing which Instagram filter best suits your free-range burger. As the glut of new series proves, food culture can be any culture you want it to be.
Rotten isn't the only doc representing a shift toward this more varied presentation of information relating to food. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste, the Anthony Bourdain-produced documentary that premiered last year, uses the celebrity chef's star power – and the star power of a coterie of his famous pals, including Massimo Bottura, Sean Brock and Danny Bowien – to underline the problem of food waste around the world (in Canada, for instance, we waste around 40 per cent of our food a year).
And in Ugly Delicious, the new documentary series set to premiere on Netflix later this month, star chef David Chang – the Momofuku mastermind – "travels the world with writers and chefs, activists and artists, who use food as a vehicle to break down cultural barriers, tackle misconceptions and uncover shared experiences."
In both instances, we have star chefs lending their brand-name power to documentaries that plainly state, "There's more to food than the Food Network stars who cook it." This is a massive move away from the most popular on-screen food media, and the most pervasive food conversations, that have dominated the past decade or so, which largely focused on chefs as rock stars and food as cultural cachet, rather than turning a lens toward the more troubling and thought-provoking elements of food and eating over all.
Consider Chef's Table, the two-season Netflix program that lovingly (and almost pornographically) profiled a single chef each episode. There, between slow-mo close-ups of delicate quenelles being spooned onto plates and thoughtful culinary masterminds gazing off into the middle distance, there was little room to discuss food politics or policy; rather, the show focused sharply on the inspirations, innovations and culinary CVs of particular chefs, to frankly lionizing effect.
Bourdain, meanwhile, became a star not because of his cooking, but because of his personality, his stardom beginning with his book Kitchen Confidential and then cemented by TV hosting gigs on No Reservations, The Layover and finally the Emmy-nominated CNN series Parts Unknown.
Chang, who hosts and produces Ugly Delicious, was the chef behind Momofuku first, but arguably made his name in more high-minded food forums – the conversation-driving ones, rather than the practical ones – with Lucky Peach, the offbeat, award-winning food and food-culture periodical that folded in 2017.
The elements of food that have more to do with agriculture, mass production, politics and policy have always been there, but they are considerably less sexy as storytelling devices than a chef who thinks he or she is an artist and revolutionary.
Yes, it's still important to consider who's telling these stories. Sure, we can commend Bourdain, Chang and company for leveraging their star power to advance important conversations, but even if you quickly scan this piece for proper nouns, you'll note that it's the same largely male cohort that has been tasked (or which tasked itself) with advancing the conversation.
Just as it took the framing of chefs as rock stars to get people on board with food in the first place, for better or for worse, leveraging those rock stars to get people on board with what food should actually entail isn't such a bad idea. And, fingers crossed, once these conversations prove themselves palatable to a mass market, it just might open the door for some new voices.
This is all a happy shift that signals two things: first, that the producers of food media are no longer assuming ubiquitous, blind, trendy, rampant foodiesm is a strong-enough draw for films and documentaries, and are consciously structuring their information to appeal to the largest quotient of people, as is the case with Rotten; and second, that the audiences who were previously sucked into the snowballing of early-aughts foodie culture have now accumulated enough intellectual nuance about the food world that conversations such as those presented in Wasted and Ugly Delicious are (forgive me) appetizing and easy to digest.
What the current glut of food documentaries and series proves, in its own backward way, is that the conversation has shifted from celebrity chefdom and heavy-handed moralizing toward a more complex look at the political and socioeconomic issues that plague our global food systems. Hope you're hungry.