- I used to think Matcha was really fancy.
- What? (Sabrina laughs)
- [Melissa] Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring
this video.
Hey there, Melissa here.
Unlike many other people love me some food
and cooking videos on YouTube.
Some of my favorite-
Who is clipping their toenails?
(people laughing)
Some of my favorites are the ones where they take
these common ingredients and transform them
into something really fancy.
To name a few.
We got gourmet-
I mean can I say this one anymore?
"Gourmet Makes", "Worth It", "Binging With Babish",
"Josh Weissman But Better".
But I did notice something.
It does seem like their go-to strategy for transforming
something common into something fancy is to just replace
all the cheap ingredients with really expensive ingredients.
I mean they make these videos for the people
and I love watching them but it just seems really
out of touch with the normal person who thinks that
like going to whole foods is fancy.
Like let alone a boutique grocery store.
Who's got time?
The answer is not many people.
And it got me thinking why don't we consider affordable
foods fancy?
Why do we have this association between food
and class at all?
In my humble opinion if it tastes good in my tummy
then it's good.
So in this video we're gonna try to figure out
where that notion came from and see if we can throw it
in the trash where it belongs.
I guess our first step here is reading.
(upbeat music)
So I read a passage of this book "Distinction"
by Pierre Bourdieu for a class when I was in university
and it's about the way that our tastes are formed.
So I thought it'd be a good starting point
for this research.
And indeed it was.
Okay, I did a little reading and I found something
interesting about what influences our perceptions
of fanciness or our taste for fanciness.
First off, I should note that fanciness is more than
just a big price tag on an ingredient.
There's a lot of factors that influences our perceptions
of fanciness and unsurprisingly one of those factors
is social class.
There's this NPR article that makes an example of something
that I'm quite familiar with.
Being brown.
And that is spices.
Not too many spices because spicy food makes my stomach hurt
and my mouth burn and that's not the most pleasant feeling
but that's not what we're talking about today.
You know how the Europeans did a whole lot of colonization.
Basically, that gave them an infinite access to spices.
Don't you think it's kind of funny that despite all
of that British food is kind of bland.
Here's why.
So Indian food like many other cuisines builds flavor
by layering a rich array of spices.
In contrast, European cuisine focuses more on balancing
the contrast of a small set of complimentary flavors
or usually highlighting the core flavor
of a main ingredient.
But it wasn't always that way.
The forme of cury, no, not like the dish.
It comes from the French verb for cooking
is a collection of 14th century English recipes
made from nine manuscripts.
The most famous credited to King Richard
the second's head chef.
Recipes feature spices that were incredibly valuable
for Europeans at the time but then colonization.
As Europeans pillaged their colonies of resources
spices flowed into the continent with unprecedented supply.
Suddenly the middle classes could afford to season
their food and spices no longer signified wealth.
So in the mid 1600s the elite moved to what we now recognize
as the modern minimalist form of European cuisine.
So what that spicy story illustrates is a key idea
in Bourdieu's book "Distinction" and it set out intimately
social class and tastes and influence each other
and specifically how social class gets to somewhat
unfairly dictate the standards.
You see because we live in a capitalist society
Bourdieu believes that taste forms in direct relation
to capital, specifically economic, what you have,
cultural, what you know and social, who you know.
And it also means that those who are rich in these forms
of capital are often seem to have more legitimate tastes.
They get to build the ideal and define what is fancy.
Kind of like how upper-class Europeans got to take the spice
out of their food.
But I have such a hard time believing that what I think
of as fancy is a simple art.
Well, a rich person said so.
Like I get Michelin stars and I get that sometimes
I find things fancy because their price tag tells me so
but I used to think Matcha was really fancy and I don't ever
remember high society telling me to think that.
I have to believe that there's more to our perceptions
of fanciness than...
We live in a society.
So I'm gonna call Sabrina not only because y'all
are complaining when she's not around but also because
we went to the same high school, we grew up in the same town
and we have similar backgrounds.
So it'll be interesting to see if there's any differences
between what she thinks is fancy and what I think is fancy.
- Hi.
- Yo. (laughing)
So Sabrina what did you think is fancy?
- Okay, yeah.
The fanciest food I can think of is like really nice sushi
and the reason I think it's fancy is because I don't know
where to get fish like that.
- What do you think is fancy?
- Okay, well I used to think Marcha was really fancy.
- Why? (Sabrina laughs)
I don't mean to like just completely dunk on your perception
of fanciness.
When I was younger my family would always make these trips
to, it was called The Pacific Mall.
I would be like, "Oh, gonna get some bubble tea,
gonna probably get a pirated DVD".
It was actually like the inverse.
Matcha and like Asian drinks in general just felt
the opposite of fancy.
It was a luxury in the sense that I couldn't do it
super often.
We had to go out of our way to get it but it didn't feel
fancy hoity-toity, you know.
- Can you talk about macrons because apparently
you don't think they're fancy.
- I hate them so much. (Sabrina laughs)
I don't hate them because I don't like the way they taste.
My mum is a chef.
For me growing up whenever my mom is in a real baking mood,
just open the fridge and there'll be like 50
and if we opened up the chest freezer there'd be 50 more.
It made me detest them.
- I mean, I get.
I can't have too many of them.
They're sweet but that's a lot.
- And I still can't think of a properly fancy food
because for me a fancy food is one that you can't make
at home and my parents are both like obsessed with cooking.
The only thing that I genuinely can't figure out how to make
at home is sushi because I can't get the ingredients.
- That's really interesting.
Thank you for chatting with me.
- Bye. - Bye.
So I talked to Sabrina.
I realized that I think I may have oversimplified
Bourdieu's thesis about taste and capital and all of that
because capital is more than just money.
It's everything that you have access to.
Sabrina doesn't find macaroons fancy but I did.
Kind of like how Indians never built this idea
of fanciness around spices 'cause it was always accessible.
From that point of view it seems like fanciness
is actually about availability specifically where something
lands on the spectrum between easily available versus
impossible to access.
And when it comes down to food there are two
determining factors.
One rarity of ingredients and two difficulty of creation.
So first, rare ingredients.
These ingredients are either geographically inaccessible
or difficult to mass produce.
On one end of the spectrum we have corn.
In 2019 US farmers planted 91.7 million acres of corn,
the equivalent of 69 million football fields.
This vast supply means that you can get a pound of corn
for less than $5.
On the other hand, truffles cost at least $250 per pound
and that's because they need to be handpicked
and only grow in specific climates during small windows
of time.
Sure, there are times when ingredients can move across
the spectrum like Sabrina said when she was a kid
she would have to travel really far to go get Boba.
Now, there's something like 150 Boba shops
in the Toronto area.
On the other hand, we have the difficulty of creation.
Anyone can slap together a decent peanut butter
and jelly sandwich but chefs can spend a lifetime
building their craft, learning how to transform
an ingredient common or not into something spectacular.
It's simply a factor of time.
The time you spend learning, honing and executing
but it means that theoretically with enough time
anyone can make something fancy.
Okay, so with that in mind let's see if you can transform
some common ingredients and turn them into something fancy.
Let's go make a shopping list.
(jazz music)
So when planning my list I had a couple of goals in mind.
Spend less than $20, buy as many versatile ingredients
and three try to buy as many vegetables as I could.
Got my list, let's go shopping, shall we?
(car door closes)
I'm trying to make this dish vegetarian and I realized that
meat doesn't always need to be the star of a dish.
And I also thought it would be more cost-effective
to stick to vegetables, but you'll probably notice
in my shopping cart here that there aren't many
fresh green vegetables.
I mean sure, I've got my frozen peas but I sort
of instinctively went for starchy vegetables
'cause I thought that you could get more for less.
There's many factors that influence the price
of an ingredient but I'm not gonna get into that here.
But it did get me thinking about the affordability
of fresh vegetables and if you like me are curious about
the affordability of eating vegetarian or just how to get
the most bang for your buck at the grocery store
there's this video by Trace Dominguez that you check out.
I just got home. (slow music)
(Melissa groans)
So I've got my groceries here.
I ended up spending 20 bucks on grocery.
First, let me say I still have no idea what I'm making.
So I'll figure that out later but it didn't get any leafy
green vegetables but I did get carrots.
I got a head of garlic an onion, some mushrooms, potatoes,
ginger, I got a bag of frozen peas, lemons, a single lemon
and some sardines and lentils.
I don't know if I'm gonna use everything.
Yes, that's what I got.
I assumed that it have the basics at home.
So I've got salt, pepper, obviously oil.
Like is said, I don't know what I'm making
but maybe with some creativity.
Once I read a couple of books.
Let's just go cook, bye.
(jazz music)
Gourmet.
Hello again.
Full disclosure, that scene that you just saw
I ended up shooting that in two days because I'm an idiot
and decided that it would be super smart to start filming
at 11:00 PM but I mean looking back I think that I did
a pretty good job of transforming those 3.99 frozen peas
into something that I would eat at a restaurant
and pay like $20 minimum for.
I basically did just puree, peas and carrots and essentially
made baby food.
I could've stopped my cooking process with just the cooked
vegetables 'cause they tasted really good but I just wanted
to be really extra and make it as fancy and extravagant
as I could.
So I thought pureeing it would be a good idea
so I could just like paint on the plate.
I think that that cooking experiment really summarizes
what I learned throughout this video.
Do all fancy dishes need equally fancy
or expensive ingredients?
No.
(Melissa mumbles)
Well, maybe it really depends on what you mean
when you say fancy.
If you're allowing wealth to dominate your perceptions
of fanciness and what you value in the world
maybe you need to rethink that.
If you go back to the book "Distinction" Bourdieu called it
a form of symbolic violence and basically what he means
by that is that if we keep playing by the rules
set by the wealthy and give them the permission to keep
making the rules or actively participating and supporting
a system that disadvantages those with less wealth.
I'm not saying here that we need to throw out all
of our perceptions of fanciness but instead what
I'm suggesting is that maybe we think of fanciness
as a synonym for special.
You can attribute all the value that you give to fancy food
in recognition of how hard it was to make,
how much history shaped the dish, how hard it was to get
those ingredients all the way down the supply chain.
and sure the price tag of an ingredient may fluctuate
in size, but in this way it isn't the basis
of our perceptions.
So we can have fancy food at home, fancy street food,
fancy baby food I guess.
And I guess what I'm getting at here is that when you strip
away all of these artificial ideas and perceptions
of what fanciness is guess we come down and realize that
anyone can cook it.
This whole video is me summarizing the plot of Ratatouille
my favorite musical.
Hey there, I hope you liked that video and if you did please
stick around because you're thanking Skillshare
for sponsoring this video.
Sponsors are what makes these videos possible
so thank you Skillshare.
If you don't know Skillshare is an online learning community
with thousands of classes covering just about any skill
from entrepreneurship to graphic design to cooking.
And I think one big obstacle for people with cooking
is confidence.
It can be really stressful keeping track of things like
ingredients, instructions and making sure nothing burns.
So I really recommend Kenny Monroe's "Think Like a Chef",
a beginner's guide to cooking with confidence.
But Skillshare is more than just cooking.
They're always launching new classes that Sabrina, Taha
and I are using to keep our videos skills sharp
and you can join us too for less than $10 a month
with an annual subscription.
But, this is the juicy part.
The first 1000 of y'all to join Skillshare's
learning community using the link in the description
will get a free trial to premium membership.
So whether you want to explore a new skill
or deepen an existing passion or just get lost in
creativity, get started with Skillshare.