Eat your heart out: Stellenbosch in the Cape Winelands is home to many top restaurants where, the writer says, people can seek authentic food experiences as a panacea for the anxieties of ‘modern living’. (Photo by: Peter Adams/Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Food is capable of generating both casual ambivalence and deep wonder. This twinned effect is central to understanding how the act of eating well has been incorporated into regimes of luxury experience, premised upon certain recuperative claims against the world.
We can trace a kind of “high-foodie culture” at work on the South African eating scene. This concept limns a certain kind of pleasure-focused, eating-centred romanticism that is distinct from traditional fine dining, with its roots in a nouvelle cuisine-esque Euro-Continentalist value structure.
High-foodie culture values eating as a technique for living well. It sees food as a means of securing an exclusive well-being premised on authenticity. The idea is that, in seeking out authentic food experiences, we might find a panacea for the anxieties of “modern living”.
In this regard, high-foodie culture is on the same mood board as artisanal bread, reified alcohol trends (gin, recently), beard grooming, gym regimens, skin regimens, magazines without articles in them, Nazi-nostalgia hairstyles on men, the glorifying of stay-at-home womanhood, retro-look Smeg appliances, specialist-knowledge podcasts and influencers who embrace faux pastoral living.
This article is particularised to the Cape Winelands because the area has been leading the charge to be declared the foodie capital of the country.
In the recent Eat Out restaurant guide that celebrated 51 of South Africa’s top eateries, 39 were in the Western Cape. Of those 39 restaurants, 19 were in the Winelands.
These places glorify a kind of Lacanian excessive enjoyment in the name of providing a truer experience of eating. This movement extends from gastronomic multicourse dining experiences — either standalone or moored to wine farms, to on-the-go weekend markets and minimalist burger joints such as Stud, an “intentionally limited” burger stand that boasts of its “single-origin” beef and stays open until 3am on busy nights.
The global age of anxiety, of course, plays a role in this phenomenon. Eating food in regular life generates concerns — should we eat the bread? How much oil is too much oil?
The high-foodie scene and its ability to turn eating into an event allows a space of judgment-free enjoyment for those not cordoned off by cost. We feel free to indulge ourselves because the bread sommelier tells us that the grains that constitute today’s loaf are both ancient and unusual.
A lot of the time, eating is just the practice of biological nourishment. But to be an eating body under particular conditions — in this case, in public — is always to be engaging in multiple social relationships to food, relationships that converge or intertwine in distinct ways.
Many of these relationships are overdetermined, so we are always already conditioned to by the circumstances in which we eat. And yet, while it may be soothing to not engage intellectually with eating, even that shrinking from overthinking it is part of the affective landscape occasioned by eating.
It is thus productive to pay attention to how our eating is riven through with ideologies, atmospheres, assumptions, distractions and other things that shape how we interact with it as a social practice.
Stellenbosch has been a constant in the South African cultural imaginary, as the cultural seat of an economically exclusive flavour of Afrikaner nationalism. Much has been said about the town’s position as the masthead for an ongoing, white-dominated economic elitism, and a perfunctory search on most social media platforms reveals that “Stellenbosch” is short-hand for “white monopoly capital”.
The wine farms and urban spaces in which many high-foodie culture establishments are set are part of a long history of violence and dispossession. This history, with its implications for resource distribution, can be read productively alongside the unusually high proportion of high-end dining establishments and food-related events and activities that structure one’s social and physical engagement with the town.
The streetside cafés, wine farm bistros, weekend markets, restaurants in repurposed post offices or down oak-lined streets are a part of how the town constructs its experience economy.
Incidentally, Stellenbosch is also home to the lower-income fried chicken franchise Hungry Lion, whose headquarters are distinctly removed from the areas where its quick-service outlets are located; Hungry Lion is not part of the culinary story Stellenbosch tells about itself.
In this dichotomy, we can readily witness how scenes of eating are inextricably linked to the inequalities of their settings.
In this regard, what historian Lorenzo Veracini describes as the “settler-colonial present” has found its expression in a banalised imaginary that elides questions about whose land is being romanticised.
This culinary romanticism feeds into a desire to make certain areas desirable to a certain kind of luxury consumer, while being wilfully ignorant of the way others are excluded from this experience.
The consumer is not encouraged to trouble the easy journeying of foodie happiness and settler-colonial logics of ownership or to reckon too strictly with the in-plain-sight legacies of racialised exploitation that many of these spaces traffic in.
Sometimes, the picture is curious. Take the cultural output of Bertus Basson. Basson is an interesting cultural figure because he has fashioned a spot for himself in the vanguard of the Winelands eating scene.
Beyond simply being someone who prepares food for people to consume at a fee, he produces culinary experiences premised on South African heritage fare — he has several restaurants, including De Vrije Burger (such a part of the landscape that it features in Deon Meyer’s recent novel) and Eike by Bertus, which boasts of its farm-to-table bona fides and asks you to imagine that you are participating in a fine-dining experience when you consume the starter of whipped chicken fat on artisanal sourdough.
Basson’s establishments are characterised by their immersion in high-foodie culture, although they are themed differently, and their menus are divergent in concept (if not execution).
One might eat at a burger saloon, a rock ’n roll pizza bar, a small-plates eatery, a nostalgic homespun dinner restaurant or a flagship wine estate restaurant — all bear the guarantee of culinary well-being signalled by their celebrity champion.
Customers at these venues constitute a close public mediated by Basson’s persona — the blurb for Kantien (the pizza bar) tells us “Bertus has poured his personality into Kantien … you’ll feel it in the vibe, see it in the décor, taste it in the menu. It’s rock ’n roll, through and through.”
We are encouraged to see each restaurant as a different zone of the same creative expressivity, undergirded by a distinct Stellenbosch energy conferred (directly) by the setting and (vaguely) by the ingredients.
Further, we are implicitly encouraged to link their selection of restaurant, as an expression of desire and taste, with this same creative expressivity.
I’m singling out Basson not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because his various restaurants easily demonstrate the phenomenon.
I am also not imposing some sort of pious academic judgment — if our foodie fetishism is structured by a sense that the world is irredeemably broken, then the urge to seek out comforts that are indulgent and escapist is not in itself a bad thing.
What is important, ultimately, is that we make visible the understandings behind the solace-structures we visit as we try to make life more bearable.
Iif we think about eating as a form of pleasure-relation that allows us to connect to the world, then it behoves us to ask how and why such pleasure-relations arrange themselves as a kind of consumerism that obscures its elitism by celebrating it as a new kind of authenticity.
Dr Wamuwi Mbao is a lecturer in English studies at Stellenbosch University.