Universal Basic Brunch
The most exciting meal of the day doesn't have to be an enemy of the people!
Welcome to my newest venture - Tastemaker! I have always wanted to write about food - something my partner Sam and I are both equally enamoured with - and its intersections with culture and politics. This is hopefully going to be a little joint passion project (mostly for me, but I’m sure he will contribute some recipes and reviews at some point). Bon appétit!
Dinner is, naturally, my favourite time of day, but I hold a special place in my heart for brunch. The indulgent joy of combining two meals, transgressing the natural order of things and creating something new, is something that I don’t think will ever lose its novelty. It can be anything: your own personal configuration of little bits and pieces; a big plate of something that is not quite breakfast, not quite lunch; sweet, savoury, a boozy affair with cocktails that render you entirely good-for-nothing by 5pm. Such is the naughtiness and exciting decadence that a portmanteau meal and its room for interpretation brings.
Breakfast does what it says on the tin. It breaks your nightly fast. It is the same in the Spanish noun ‘desayuno,’ and its verb, ‘desayunar’ - the prefix de-, to denote the removal or undoing of something, is present in English as it is in the Romance languages, and the words ‘ayuno’/‘ayunar’ mean ‘fast’ or ‘to fast.’ We’re defasting. However, the French ‘déjeuner’ (same etymology, and ‘jeûner’ also means to fast) means lunch. In France, you have a ‘petit déjeuner’ before the bigger ‘déjeuner.’ What happened in France that meant lunch is effectively eaten twice, just with the first one being smaller? Was breakfast considered an extension of lunch, just eaten in two sittings? Did France do brunch before all of us? What do they know that we don’t?
The English word brunch first entered circulation in the late 19th century, in an open letter by Guy Beringer urging people to catch on: it is, he argues, a perfect ‘happy medium’ between the drab brown meat pies and veg typically served as an early Sunday dinner in Victorian England, and the ‘excessive daintiness’ of a paltry breakfast, which he considered ‘a form of effeminacy, and as such is to be deprecated.’ How far brunch has come since then! Part of me feels that Beringer would be mortified at how brunch has become a signifier for the nouveau riche, for the liberals, and - crucially - for the ladies.
In a 2021 article for Jacobin, Alex Yablon dissects brunch as a metonym for a certain sneering liberalism that fundamentally does not change anything meaningful for anyone. Though the cringe democrat sloganeering of the young, liberal, moneyed classes who use words like ‘adulting’ and ‘doggo’ largely died down once their electoral goal of voting Trump out was achieved, along with most of their political activism, the negative connotations of brunching that Yablon examines remain. He also notes the disdain for it from none other than the left’s darling chef, Anthony Bourdain (albeit more from a practical than an ideological angle). To the chefs and to the servers, brunch ‘out’ presents both logistical and situational nightmares, especially when alcohol is involved: not many things sound more unbearable than bringing plates of pancakes and bottomless mimosas to rowdy and belligerent customers before midday. The term ‘emotional labour’ is wildly overused and often disemboweled of its original context in current discourse, but if there is a job that requires it, it’s this: emotional and affective labour are skills which are exhausting to master, yet demanded of food service workers with very little recompense. But, as Yablon says, ‘another brunch is possible.’ Universal Basic Brunch. Nationalise Brunch. A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of brunch. Is it all a pipe dream?
Of course, there are eminently more important issues at hand, which I will also talk about until the cows come home given the chance, but these are beyond the scope of a piece about brunch in a newsletter about food. I don’t want to insinuate at all that the only reason anyone has a problem with the concept of brunch is because it is considered a typically feminine activity, especially considering the issues outlined above, but I do think it’s part of it. The blokes do not simply ‘go out for brunch.’ In her delicious essay about dinner parties and the politics of conviviality, which is what got me thinking about my love of all meals big and small in the first place,
notes how men have historically benefited from the dinner party as a place to congregate, to bond, and perhaps most significantly, to discuss. Did the oft-mentioned ‘marketplace of ideas’ start at the dinner table, rather than in the sea lion cave? Probably. But, as Helena notes, the dinner party is an arena to which the average woman was not invited until relatively recently. Even when they were, or when the space was specifically for women, the nourishment on offer to them was not usually as satiating as that offered to the boys, as illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s uninspiring prunes and custard. Working class women’s access to this was, of course, exponentially more restricted and in the form of domestic servitude, their meal options exponentially less satisfying. Do we, as a result of our inability to imagine women having voracious appetites for food or for intellectual debate on any end of the class spectrum, decry brunch with the girlies as a shallow encapsulation of neoliberalism on the grounds that it represents middle-class Karens and Beckys consuming and gossiping with their bitch friends - all while men get a carte blanche to do so without criticism? Would anyone sneer at a lively all-male dinner club or drinking society in the same way?Like Sarah Manavis at the New Statesman, I have never been massively convinced by blanket calls of misogyny to stifle critique when people interrogate ‘effeminate’-coded purchasing trends or behaviours. Engaging in these against your will because you feel your hand has been forced is one thing, but gaining social capital from doing exactly what is expected of you while crying about how everyone hates you for being soooo pretty and an it-girl who engages with all of the hottest new fads is another. Men calling you a dumb bitch for liking pink or looking feminine or owning a Stanley cup is fundamentally not the same as other women interrogating who your audience is, what you are performing for them, and how you benefit from it: one is out of a hatred of women, while the other is out of a hatred of obligation and conformity. More bluntly, I’d be willing to bet that trans people, butch women and outwardly gender non-conforming individuals suffer far more under these sorts of gendered demands than feminine cis women do because men think pink is gay or whatever. But I digress. Acting like the consumption habits of women, LGBT+ people and people of colour are always synonymous with cartoonishly evil girlboss-style neoliberalism and its unfettered decadence is a pitfall from the left that plays into the hands of the right, especially those with genuinely malicious intentions who couch their hatred of women and minorities in the language of opposing consumerism and identity politics. The commonly cited statistic that women constitute 70-80% of consumer purchasing may well stand, but it isn’t all just Shein hauls, marg towers and avocado toast: the invisible feminised labour undertaken primarily by working class women, of childcare, grocery shopping, cooking, remains invisible when we fail to realise that the pressure and responsibility to buy products to carry out these duties disproportionately falls on them. We need to find a better way of talking about the establishment’s cynical weaponisation of identity politics and their subsequent subsumption into capitalist cultural hegemony without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
More to the point, when it comes to women and food, I have to refrain from unwarranted judgement. Buying fifteen different colours of Stanley cups or raiding your local Sephora are wholly unnecessary exercises. Nourishing yourself is not. When the world is constantly whispering in your ear to eat less, to skip lunch, to choose the soy milk instead of oat because the protein content is higher and the calories are lower, constructing habits around eating plentifully and with abandon, and thus living plentifully and with abandon, is nothing short of a miracle. Whether it’s boomerangs of Slug & Lettuce with the girlies or sending off your application for Masterchef, I want women to have all of it, unashamedly.
As Yablon argues, brunch doesn’t even have to be a frivolous affair. Abolish Restaurants, a pamphlet by an anonymous worker under the pseudonym ‘Prole’, illustrates how the invention of the restaurant marked the transition from feudalism, where meals were provided through ‘a direct relationship of domination (between a lord and his servants)’, to the ability to sustain oneself outside of the home through an ‘open market.’ The restaurant, and especially fine dining, are arguably some of capitalism’s most indulgent manifestations: a basic human need is commodified, aestheticised, served by people whose wage slavery does not allow them to enjoy the fruits of their own labour, and consumed at prices dictated by market value in the same way that the value of art is dictated by what (usually very rich) people are willing to pay for it. And people are willing to pay a lot - often for things that do not taste good (think caviar or 24ct gold flakes), but function as a status signifier. On a personal level, I have never seen the appeal of a lot of fine dining. Plating morsels that look like a snack in a gimmicky environment where they light shit on fire is fine, I guess, but it will never taste as good as a crab meat curry and sticky rice from a Thai joint with about three tables, plastic chairs and no toilet.* It will never feel like home. It will never feel lived-in. A sterile, liminal space, existing mostly for profit and class signalling.
However, as Prole identifies, less highbrow restaurant work is also rife with exploitation. Just like any other business in the hospitality industry (and many non-hospitality businesses too), Prole’s central point is that ‘a restaurant is a boring, uncomfortable, stressful, repetitive, alienating, hierarchical machine for pumping out surplus value,’ and after working on and off for two years as a Food and Beverage Assistant at a conference centre, I know they’re right. I also know that it is something I had the luxury to quit as I was at university and it wasn’t my sole income, and worse, that it is a kind of exploitation I am undoubtedly complicit in as a regular restaurant-goer, regardless of how well I tip or how undemanding I am as a customer. This is why it rubs salt in the wound for working class people and exasperated leftists when neoliberals like Hillary Clinton and her fanclub act as if going for brunch is simply something everyone can afford to do, in order to forget about their woes, to ignore the state of the world. Of course they would say that. They’re the kind of people who love offering empty words of empowerment with one hand while plucking cheap labour from socioeconomically disenfranchised people with the other. It rankles. It stinks. But that doesn’t mean serving others, cooking for others, engaging in the act of love that this entails, won’t exist in a post-capitalist world, and to think otherwise shows a lack of imagination. Everyone should experience the joys of brunch.
Brunch Man Beringer himself lays out numerous reasons why brunch is and should be a pursuit centred around people, rather than the airs and graces of refined cuisine or joyless Puritan meat-and-two-veg. By having a later morning meal, early rising is made redundant, meaning you can go out for drinks the night before and enjoy more time with your friends, before debriefing on the previous night’s shenanigans together over a full meal that isn’t just a soggy bowl of cereal. He notes: ’Eggs and bacon are adapted to solitude; they are consoling, but not exhilarating. They do not stimulate conversation. Brunch, on the contrary, is cheerful, sociable, and inciting.’ He likens the obligation to leave Saturday night drinks early in fear of repercussions the next day to the last train home, saying it would be so empty it wouldn’t need to run, and tired ‘workers’ - our senses of responsibility and conscientiousness - could receive a ‘much-needed holiday’ on Saturday night and Sunday morning, only to be renewed during the working week. It is only meant as a metaphor, but I think there’s a certain socialist undertone which rings true in a literal sense too: a creeping expectation to let your professional obligations bleed into your personal life is a recipe for misery, and the more workers and unions can demand and enforce this separation, the happier everyone will be. Nowhere in Beringer’s conception of brunch is there a requirement for an upmarket setting or being waited on, either. The only stipulation is that it is an affair for more than one person. No one is stopping you from getting the girls together and pitching in to cook a spread. In fact, you don’t even have to cook, if you stock up on croissants with slathers of butter and jam, fruit, bagels, avocado, even smoked salmon if you’re feeling particularly fancy. You truly do not have to rely on someone else’s labour to eat well and have a gorgeous time with people who love you. As for me, I’m not cooking, as I am privileged enough to have a resident chef (partner) who does it for me.
Over the last six and a half years, I’ve learned how healing the practice of brunch can be. Before my relationship, I tended to skip breakfast altogether during the week, and on weekends you would rarely see me before midday, at which point I would probably make myself an anaemic-looking peace of toast while questioning if there was any point in anything. It was a matter of keeping myself alive, rather than enjoying myself, because at the root of it I probably didn’t feel like I deserved to. But having somebody who makes you want to wake up, who makes your first meal of the with or even for you, who is willing to make it a long, drawn out affair, not only opens your eyes to the love inscribed in their most infinitesimal acts, but to the love shown to you by others, too. Now I have brunch with my parents and with my friends, and I always kick myself at how blind and closed-off I was to it before. It is the non-verbal equivalent of saying: look, there is a life out there, a life that is worth living and tasting and filling up on. You should want the world. I love you.
‘The world would be kinder and more charitable if my brief were successful,’ says Beringer. I think he’s right. But only if we can all join in.
*The restaurant I’m thinking of here is Nora Thai in Melbourne - hugely recommend if you live nearby!
yessss
ooooooo feeling this a lot, especially "look, there is a life out there, a life that is worth living and tasting and filling up on. You should want the world. I love you." i've felt conflicted about my dedication to cooking as it seems like i am conforming to expectations placed on me as a woman. but i love to eat!! especially good, hearty, tasty meals after i've slept in on the weekends!!!! and cooking my little meals obviously offers that path for me every time. so yay brunch!