The recipe may be in Jefferson’s handwriting, but Jefferson did not work in his own kitchen. It includes Jefferson’s handwritten recipe for Biscuit de Savoie, a cake created in 1358 in honour of the Holy Roman Emperor. But, there, historical tourism nuts can purchase Dining at Monticello (2005), a 200-page tome that catalogues the foods and wines that Jefferson brought back to the US when he served as minister to France. West may or may not have visited Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical plantation Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
So, when West tsks about French-ass restaurants, he reminds us that such covert forces of class allegiance persist, and that they need critiquing. There’s powerful evidence that French food still aligns with class – which in the US can never be separated from race.
But West was, in essence, exposing a politics of food consumption that, in tying French food to class status in the US, and concerning itself only with dominant Eurocentric and colonial foodways, silences the labours of indigenous chefs, chefs of colour and queer chefs. The implicit logic of those meme-makers and critics, bent on turning his rap into a joke on its creator, suggests they took West at face value, as if he were merely complaining that an American Black man in a French restaurant doesn’t belong or is somehow out of place. He is, after all, a contemporary cultural provocateur. ‘The Association of French Bakers does not exist,’ wrote Alexander Aciman in Time. Marx’s letter, posted on Medium, went viral, and was picked up by Time magazine and USA Today, and prompted subsequent apologies for mistaking Marx’s parody for fact. The memes caught the attention of W David Marx, a former editor at The Harvard Lampoon, who in 2013 wrote a satirical response on behalf of a fictitious ‘Association of French Bakers’ chiding West for failing to consider the time it takes to achieve excellence in boulangerie. Others set him alongside Napoleon Bonaparte or the Pillsbury Doughboy. The best of the memes superimpose West’s face over a croissant, or over concertgoers waving at him from the foot of a stage, pastries in hand. To wit: ‘In a French-ass restaurant/Hurry up with my damn croissants.’Įxpediency in service is only what a deity might expect – though many people on the internet could relate. The food rap that made the most impact on US popular culture, as measured by thousands of memes and tweets, comes from West’s track ‘I Am a God (Feat. There’s Grey Poupon (‘Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy, this is pure luxury/I give ’em Grey Poupon on a DJ Mustard, ah!’) Nobu restaurant and Whole Foods grocery (‘Huh? I swear my whole collection’s so cruise/I might walk in Nobu wit’ no shoes/“He just walked in Nobu like it was Whole Foods”’) also fast-food outlets (‘Beggars can’t be choosers, bitch, this ain’t Chipotle’ and ‘Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A’). Many of them namecheck brands West admires. As Food Studies professors, we became interested in what he was trying to express through these references. In his catalogue of 11 studio albums, West includes more than 140 references to foods, drinks, cooking and eating. That said, amid all the ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirts and public performances of mental breakdown, West’s canny affinity for using food as a symbol for status in the United States has gone largely unnoticed. Who can forget him interrupting Taylor Swift’s 2009 MTV Video Music Awards win with the now memetic phrase ‘Imma let you finish’, after which President Obama deemed him a ‘jackass’? Or West piping up in 2018 to claim that 400 years of slavery was a ‘choice’ that Black people made or his assertion two years later that Harriet Tubman ‘never actually freed the slaves’ or his recently proclaimed appreciation for Adolf Hitler? What follows here isn’t a redemption arc: you can have great cultural insight and still be a bigot.
Nothing if not complex, he has won 21 Grammy awards for his music performances and productions while maintaining an ever-growing, and increasingly horrifying, hall of shame. Fresh off a public breakdown after making antisemitic Tweets and threats, divorcing a Kardashian, and earning 60,000 votes standing for the US presidency, Ye ( né Kanye West) is an intriguing figure in global pop culture.
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