Food criticism served with a side of snark has a surprisingly long pedigree, one that stretches far beyond the realm of Instagram influencers, Yelp reviews or even newspapers. This kind of critique didn’t begin with the rise of food blogs or viral restaurant fails; it’s been simmering, and sometimes simmering over, for hundreds of years. Take the early 17th century, when the humble salad was unexpectedly sweet — before French haute cuisine banished sugar firmly to the dessert course.
Enter Giacomo Castelveto: an Italian Protestant who found himself exiled in England, where he could only watch with growing horror as his new countrymen boiled and mangled their salads into an absolute mess. In his book “The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy,” he catalogs how Italians eat their produce, but not before taking a few jabs at the English salad. His critique wasn’t just culinary, but cultural, an outsider’s scorn for a practice that seemed — well. Beneath him. As if the very notion of treating vegetables in this way was an affront to his Italian sensibilities.
