If you walk into any apartment in New York right now, odds are you'll find olive oil from Greece in a UV-protected bottle that costs more than your monthly dry cleaning bill, a half-empty jar of tinned fish bought after seeing an Instagram ad (momentarily forgetting that they “hate fishy fish”), and at least three cookbooks with uncracked spines but “great covers.”

We are supposed to like so many things that it’s hard to pinpoint where our taste ends and where influence begins. Cultural capital has taken the fun out of food and in its place, left a hierarchy of whose preferences are cooler and whose orange juice costs more.

Don’t get me wrong—I love knowing all about food and cheese and flavor and I love expensive orange juice.

My passion for these things has shaped pretty much my entire personality and career path, but still, last week, there I was having an existential crisis in the cheese aisle of Eataly. Would the “friend of a friend” whose house I was going to for dinner think my choice of Pecorino was “the vibe” or not?

(Disclaimer: College me would have happily licked Kraft orange powder off the countertop, given the opportunity…)

In the age of too much information and too much access to one another’s inside thoughts, we've all become a little unbearable and a lot pretentious. (I am personally not excused from these accusations. In fact, I might be the captain of the team.)

The Great Food Anxiety & the Psychology of Performative Consumption

Food used to be fun.

Once upon a time, snacks were just snacks and not "small bites featuring heritage grains on a bed of micro something or the other." Dinner parties were about laughing so hard Cab Franc came out of your nose, not about proving you could properly pronounce "bouillabaisse" and how this one fisherman outside of Marseille said your rouille was unmatched.

Lately, we’ve moved from "eating to live" straight past "living to eat" and landed squarely in "curating an eating experience for others to witness and envy."

@justsoiree

POV: It's 2023 and you're at a friend of a friend’s dinner party in TriBeCa. The host—a runner slash party girl slash home chef slash pilo... See more

This isn’t anything new though. We’ve been here before. Victorian dinner parties used to be parades of elaborate dishes that no one actually enjoyed—swan-shaped pastries, aspics containing entire fish, pies of live doves. The difference is that now, instead of impressing the local aristocracy, we're performing for strangers on the internet.

Psychologists call this "conspicuous consumption"—purchasing things not for their intrinsic value but for what they signal about us to others. Research shows that this status-seeking behavior actually reduces our enjoyment. In a 2019 study, participants who were told to document their meals for social media reported significantly less pleasure from eating than those who were simply told to be present with their food. We're literally sacrificing joy at the altar of perception.

The Tyranny of "Good Taste"

The worst part of modern food culture is that so much of it is rooted in race, class, the Western world, and the socioeconomic opportunities afforded to you. The unspoken suggestion that there's a “right way to eat” is defined by people with abundant time, money, and access.

“Good taste" has always been a moving target, designed to separate the "cultured" from the "uncultured." In the 1950s, knowing how to make a proper aspic was high-status cooking. In the 1980s, it was mastering nouvelle cuisine with its tiny portions and elaborate presentation. Today, it's nurturing your sourdough starter or naming your kombucha mother.

What we forget is that the most revered dishes around the world were often born of necessity, not performance, high culture, or "good taste.” Coq au vin was a way to make a tough old rooster edible. Pasta alla carbonara was a simple meal for Italian charcoal workers. Your grandmother's incredible curry probably came from trying to stretch ingredients during lean times.

It’s important to remember that real culinary wisdom is about understanding how to nourish yourself and others, how to transform simple ingredients into something satisfying, and how to create moments of connection around a table.

Eating Like Nobody's Watching

We took something that should be all about sensory joy, community building, and nourishment and turned it into another anxiety-inducing metric of social worth, so how do we get back to enjoying food without the performative pressure?

1. "Good Enough" Cooking: The French may have invented haute cuisine, but they also gave us the concept of "fait à la maison"—homemade doesn't mean perfect, it means made with care.

2. Music: Food tastes better when you're dancing while making it. Science actually backs this up—studies show that pleasant background music enhances flavor perception by up to 10%. The Crooner Classics Spotify playlist has been my most played for the past many many years.

3. Ban Food Shame: Get over it. Sometimes instant mashed potatoes are just fine.

4. Host “Shitty” Dinner Parties: I’ve written a whole newsletter about this!

I know that I’m part of the problem. Food is admittedly one of my favorite fonts of pretension and I’ve scoffed at pre-minced garlic and spent hours researching the "best" fish sauce with the best of them, but that’s not the point. I will always appreciate good ingredients and thoughtful cooking. I'm just proposing that joy and messy imperfection take precedence again. Food is meant to be FUN and the social age has distanced it from its roots in nourishment, connection, and pleasure.

It’s time to bring that back!