A defense of brown food
In an effort to curb my pandemic-born doom-scrolling habit, I recently picked up a watercolor palette and a few sketchbooks. I haven’t really painted since college, but I remembered it being one of those activities during which whatever is currently tumbling around in my brain is momentarily replaced by what can best be described as an optic hum; no thoughts, just color.
While my first few new paintings were of more vibrant subjects — my potted ZZ plant, a Chicago hot dog “dragged through the garden,” a branch packed with juicy oranges — I found myself coming back to the little wells of taupe, tan and beige paint, which I’d use to render variation after variation of bread spread with butter. While I’m not a particularly talented artist, I have spent hours over the last month, losing myself in the intricacies of the color brown.
A piece of white bread, for instance, is never really just white, especially once toasted. The milky cream of the crumb tans to a warm ochre, while the crust deepens from dusty brown to mahogany. When craggy whole grain bread is toasted, the tips tend to almost blacken to a color I can make by mixing “lamp black,” “burnt umber” and just a drop of “Azo green.” The outer edges of a fresh-baked croissant can be rendered by blending the palest yellow with the deepest burnt sienna, letting the darkest strokes pool along the bottom of the pastry.
The other morning, I spread out some of my paintings on my living room rug as the radiator rattled and hissed for the first time since spring. I took a picture of them to send to my mom, which I sent with a text reading: “In my brown period, I guess.”
Scholars have historically sparred a bit over what actually sparked Picasso’s blue period, to which I was referring. Some speculate that it began in Spain in the spring of 1901, while others say it didn’t begin until he arrived in Paris later that year. Many agree that the suicide of Picasso’s friend, Carles Casagemas, was a catalyst for some of the works the artist made during that time period — namely “ La Vie,” “La mort de Casagemas” and “Casagemas in His Coffin” — though there are signs the painter’s mental health had been deteriorating for some time prior.
Regardless, going through a “blue period” has in the ensuing century became a cultural shorthand for experiencing a bout of depression.
And it’s funny, because for a long time I associated brown food, like the beloved toast and butter I’d been dedicatedly painting for the last month, with depression, specifically the kind that tends to kick in when sunlight is in shorter and shorter supply. If I’m being honest, most of my favorite comfort foods are pretty beige: thick congee with shredded chicken, shaved ginger and crispy fried shallots; pillowy dumplings covered in baked apples and too much cinnamon; white rice with soy sauce and a pat of butter; scrambled eggs and refried beans scooped up with pliable flour tortillas.
Having worked in food media on and off for over a decade, I’ve definitely internalized a lot of the pressures surrounding the desire to make food aesthetically pleasing. For a very long time, food that was lauded as popular or appealing on social media, particularly Instagram and Pinterest, all had a very specific look.
Plates were pristinely lit, colorfully garnished and accompanied by accessories — a ramekin of chocolate chips, an errant citrus slice — placed just so. Food trends with high visual impact, like rainbow pastries or dramatic cheese pulls, thrived in this environment. But as Eater’s Bettina Makalintal wrote last month, the types of food posts that are performing well on the platform are steadily changing.
“Instagram food is entering what we’ll call — by the suggestion of my colleague Dayna Evans — its laissez-faire era, a shift in both vibe and aesthetic that’s underpinned by generational changes, a diversification of food creators, and a long-simmering frustration with the platform’s entrenched culture of curation,” she wrote.
She continued: “London-based magazine AnOther has called this shift ‘lo-fi food,’ emphasizing its focus on ‘minimal presentation and big flavour.’ It is food that looks like it will be eaten — and enjoyed.”
That means that there is a lot more tan, taupe and beige food popping up in my Instagram feed as of late.
The phenomenon reminds me of a great quote from an essay Nigella Lawson wrote for The Guardian in 2017.
Of course, Instagram is a visual medium, no less than television, so it’s always going to favour photogenic food, but still, it can make a cook despair. When I post a picture of a stew, I feel I have to remind people – who find the messy brownness unappealing – that 1) stews are brown and 2) brown food tastes the best. It doesn’t really matter to me whether people post pictures of stews on Instagram or Pinterest, but it does worry me if they stop cooking them. Not because it would be a bad thing, but because it would be a sad thing.
It’s the same principle David Chang reinforced through his usage of the phrase “ugly delicious,” which he originally used as a hashtag under dishes that were delicious — “curry on rice” is an example he’s used — but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. When Chang ultimately starred in a Netflix food series, he titled it “Ugly Delicious.”
"It was the whole idea of me finding the food that I'm comfortable making, because the food that I was eating and still loving I was ashamed to actually embrace," he told AOL. "Tie that in with now, when food is more popular than ever before — particularly with social media. Some of the most delicious things, the things that I grew up eating, I'm now more comfortable embracing, and so much of the most delicious stuff falls under 'beauty being in the eye of the beholder.'"
It’s interesting that Chang brought up shame in correlation to these ugly delicious foods; I definitely internalized the idea that “brown food” was inherently unhealthier than more vibrant dishes. Consuming these dishes — or the idea of documenting their consumption — came with its own diet culture-fueled shame that’s taken a long time to reprogram.
Going into a season where it’s easier to feel run down and emotionally low, I’m definitely spending some time interrogating the question of what constitutes healthfulness. Of course sometimes that’s going to be a photogenic bowl of roughage (more on that in a future essay) but other times it's going to be a nourishing bowl of brown food. Perhaps served on top of an entirely different brown food.
In those instances, instead of dismissing the meal as one-note or plain, I’m going to try to appreciate the nuances of flavor, much in the way I’ve learned to appreciate the various shades of brown in my watercolors. I’ll let this brown period be a nourishing one.