Ancient and Future Gold
All art is attempted time travel. Artists seek to create portals through which observers can approach primal virtue. If one is able to reach back far enough, perhaps he can enter the Garden before it closes. Perhaps he can bring back an apple.
From the Renaissance to the Reformation, the recovery of long-lost gold is the epic quest of every generation. Of course, not every generation believes the gold is in the past; some believe it lies only in the future. Such is our day. The Bible teaches that both the past and the future are swallowed up by the eternal present tense. God is not the God of history, nor is He the God who is becoming. He is the God who was and is and is to come. The Christian does not believe that he will return to Eden when he dies. Eden itself has died and is reborn in the New Jerusalem. In that way, I will eat the fruit of Eden, but not by going back to Eden. I will eat the fruit of our parent’s first abode by going back and forward simultaneously. Eden is only accessible in the way she will be in the New Jerusalem. In this sense, both conservatism and progress are required.
The error of conservatism, devoid of progress, is that it romanticizes the past and the conservative is then relegated to living life in a ghost world. The Bible warns against this in the book of Ecclesiastes:
Ecclesiastes 7:10 Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
The error of progressivism, devoid of conservation, is that it romanticizes the future and the progressive is then relegated to living life in a ghost world. The Bible warns against this as well in the book of Matthew:
Matthew 634 Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
William Butler Yeats wrote a poem entitled Sailing to Byzantium. It is written from the perspective of an old man who is approaching death and so he is determined to go backward to some idyllic moment in space and time: Byzantium. In order to do this, the reader understands, he is going forward into death.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
The Bible trains us to have the perspective of Janus, with a face in each direction.
This brings us to a brief observation about food criticism. In the documentary, City of God, about the life of LA Times food critic, Jonathan Gold, the title is drawing on the writer’s last name and his status as a kind of native son of Los Angeles. Gold, the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, wrote a weekly column called “Counter Intelligence.” In it, he reviewed obscure restaurants around LA and beyond. As his work gained attention, the focus of his writing began to cross state and national lines, even migrating beyond the genre of food criticism to cover the early days of rap for the likes of Rolling Stone and Spin.
When Gold wrote about food he not only brought the reader into the present tense with him, but he brought the reader into an appreciation of all of the past that is required in the formation of the present. One did not simply imagine oneself seated at the bar with him, but traveling into the history of young Italian-Americans developing their kitchen chops in Korean neighborhoods. Listen to him riff on a visit to a new bar called Bäco Mercat in 2012, six years before he died. Centeno is the chef/owner.
But above all, Centeno is smart, working flavors and combinations with a deftness you wouldn't necessarily expect in a bar. If the local convergence of haute cuisine and pub food has a birthdate, it may well have come during Centeno's tenure at Opus in Koreatown, where he began serving endless, open-ended tasting menus at only $10 a course — it's where a lot of young Angelenos first discovered that fine dining could have a lot in common with izakaya. His Lazy Ox is still the sharpest of the gastropubs: He understands that Angelenos grow up eating Mexican, Japanese and Middle Eastern food, which all taste basically awesome when filtered through French technique
At other times, Gold will explain things like the complexities that exist in the ancestral map of a Chinese-American family in order to explain why the Hunan-Shanxi fusion focus in the menu works so well. The act of criticism is always historical, because it necessitates the accomplishment of a thing that is completed. Without the past tense, there would be no food criticism. There would be no food. In the early moments of Genesis, we see the very first restauranteur and food critic, God, not only getting the place ready for the meal, but judging for Himself how good it is when it is completed. All art is done in imitation of God making and critiquing.
Worthwhile food criticism will always talk about two things: family and history. This makes it, by its very nature, a product of conservatism. Progressives who hate the past and despise the traditional family will never have good restaurants. When traditions are revered and preserved and given new bodies within which to live, gastronomy becomes progressive in an historically-rooted manner. The best food, as with the best criticism, will be both. When we mine for gold from the past, we do necessary work. When we bring the ancient gold with us into the present, we do good work.
