The thing I love most about the Food and Wine festival here in Aspen is the famous people I've never heard of and would not know from Adam. It's like going to the Super Bowl with no clue about frozen tundra--you should have stood in bed instead of taking up space in the stands.
A couple years back I was saving a chair at the Hotel Jerome for my fiancée when a woman took the chair for her husband without asking. She said something that indicated her husband was some kind of a big deal in the world of food, but I could not have cared less if he were Wolfgang Puck. It was our chair. I had saved the seat under the universal law found in the Constitution that decrees all men are created equal no matter how nifty you might be with pulled pork and coleslaw.
Turns out the famous guy in question was like Mr. BBQ on PBS. There are many people, many of them fat, to whom this is a very big deal--but to me he was exactly nobody.
Is there a better feeling in the free world than to meet someone who is famous and not give a flying whatever? That's what I call democracy at work, though to this day I remain slightly disturbed by the very idea that our tax dollars on PBS are going into the pocket of Mr. BBQ.
Of all the famous people in the world, alive and dead, is there any group that is famous for less than the ones in white hats and bibs who cook and gesticulate over an open flame?
Like all other famous people in 21st Century America, these famous people at Food and Wine were famous for writing books or better yet being on television. Some of them can cook their asses off, so I'm told, but to be famous in the world of food and wine you also must be able to play to the camera. (Let's face it: after they cook it, you don't get to eat it, so who knows if it's any good?) At the St. Regis Hotel, I made my way to the basement for the presentation by Jean George, a chef of some moment making squab which was no doubt delicious even if it wasn't chicken.
Jean George was in fact charming and eloquent even in his second tongue. Someone asked him where he was going to eat that night and he said he wouldn't know until he felt a "craving." Jean George said cooking and food was all about addressing your cravings at a given moment in time, and it struck me at the Food and Wine festival in Aspen that our biggest cravings as Americans, aside from BBQ, is our unending hunger to inhale fame like pork in a smoker.
We can't get enough, but after awhile aren't we just gluttons for significance food? Fame, like food, is fleeting, even in a country where we like nothing better than to cook our own goose.