Gourmet Food?

by Mark R. Vogel

What exactly is "gourmet" food? By the book, gourmet food is characterized by high quality, accurate preparation, and artistic presentation. Let's tease apart that definition.

High quality. Hmmmm. So if my hamburger meat comes from 100% USDA prime chuck, from a steer that grazed in a pristine meadow, is my burger gourmet? No, not yet. It has to be prepared with utmost dexterity.

OK, so if I season it perfectly, and flawlessly sear it to precisely medium-rare, is it gourmet yet?

Oops. Almost forgot. Artful plate presentation. OK, so then I position it on beautiful china on a bed of decorative greens, maybe with some edible flowers around the edge of the plate. Now, is my burger gourmet food? Of course not. But why? We followed all of the criteria?

Because hamburger meat, regardless of quality, preparation, or presentation, is a common item. I submit that what deems a food as "gourmet" is more related to its availability, price, public perception, and clever marketing techniques.

In essence, gourmet food has less to do with the food itself and more to do with the sometimes arbitrary forces in the external environment.

Many foods are indigenous to circumscribed areas of the globe and/or are only in season during specific times of the year. Thus, no matter where you are, there will always be some foods that are unobtainable.

Moreover, these elusive victuals are less likely to be embraced by the general population since they rarely become a dietary staple. They are prone to be conceptualized as "gourmet" because of their limited accessibility and foreign origins. Yet in their native lands, they may be a simple and unexalted food.

Take the grain quinoa for example. Unless you're a foodie, or of Latin descent, you probably never heard of it.

Quinoa is a highly nutritious and tasty grain that has been grown in South America for thousands of years. In fact, it has always been a subsistence crop for poor, rural Andean families.

Astute purveyors have touted it as a "super-grain," and market it as a gourmet item with a considerably inflated price. In America, it is usually only found in extravagant restaurants. This would be like some local villager in Tibet paying over $100 for a meal that included hot dogs.

Undoubtedly, price is a clear differentiation between pedestrian and gourmet food. Sometimes the price is arbitrarily inflated because the item is being marketed as "gourmet", as in the previous quinoa example.

Other times the price is high for legitimate reasons, e.g., white truffles. White truffles are rare, in season for only three months, are in high demand, cannot be cultivated, and are labor intensive to harvest.

But the reasons a food is expensive are superfluous. The high price, justified or not, immediately separates it from the common man and hence, the common palate.

If potatoes suddenly cost $200 an ounce, (like fresh white truffles), they would be elevated to "gourmet" status and would only be found in the most expensive restaurants.