Fat, or what the real world already knows about food.

I was reading this Bruni review today in the NYT, in which Bruni pretends he's never eaten any real food. Newsflash, dude: while the elevated ranks of restauranteurs, the people who supposedly define what good food is, were busy making little swirls of sauce on a plate with squirt bottles and dusting cylindrical piles of watercress with fish eggs, the rest of the world was still eating whole pigs, bacon, pie crust made with lard, and bone marrow. Real food exists outside of the realm of the gourmand. All sorts of food just keeps on keeping on all over the world, and it's good. It doesn't take Thomas keller deciding to bastardize and sell it for it to be good, it just takes putting it in your mouth. There might be a little less foie gras and truffle oil in it before it goes in someone's mouth, but maybe that's not a bad thing, mmkay? How long before they're serving gravy burgers in NY? Chefs are "discovering" all the stuff everybody eats and claiming it as their own, just like Columbus "discovered" the New World. It's all so...colonial. I have no problem with food migrating out of different venues, or even with chefs making traditional recipes their own, but it seems silly to pretend it's all new and different when it's just the same food that people have been eating since back before they invented Crisco.