The Booker Prize has spoken, and the verdict is a novel about food. Not a meditation on hunger, not a critique of industrial agriculture, but a 'celebration of culinary richness'. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the publishing houses of London: finally, a prize-winning book that can be safely discussed at dinner parties without offending anyone. This is the triumph of the innocuous.
Let us recall the great Victorian novels, those sprawling moral epics that grappled with faith, industry, and the nature of love. They were not about cooking. They were about living. Today, we have reduced the novel to a lifestyle accessory. The Booker judges have confirmed what we feared: contemporary fiction has become a form of high-end interior decoration.
This is not innovation; it is intellectual surrender. When the most prestigious literary prize in the Anglophone world goes to a book that could be described as 'delicious', we have descended into a cultural cul-de-sac. The novel has abdicated its duty to challenge, to provoke, to disturb. Instead, it offers comfort. It is the literary equivalent of a weighted blanket.
The parallels with the late Roman Empire are striking. As the barbarians gathered at the gates, the Roman elite spent their days discussing recipes and the proper way to season a dormouse. We are now living through our own literary Biedermeier period: a retreat from the grand into the petit, from the political into the gastronomic. The novel about food is the perfect symbol of a civilisation that has lost its nerve. It is safe. It is marketable. It will not make anyone uncomfortable.
And yet, the defenders of this decision will claim that food is universal, that it connects us, that it is a source of joy. To which I say: so is pornography, but we do not give it literary prizes. The Booker Prize is not a competition for Most Likely to Be Enjoyed While Eating. It is supposed to reward literature that pushes boundaries. Pushing boundaries, apparently, now means writing about the colour of a beetroot.
We are witnessing the infantilisation of the reading public. Our literary culture has become a cupboard of sugary treats. The novel has been reduced to a comfort object. No wonder the British publishing industry celebrates: they have found a product that sells without causing the slightest bit of indigestion.
The tragedy is that we deserve better. We are living through an age of profound crisis: ecological collapse, political decay, the erosion of truth itself. And our response is to write a book about soup. The Victorians would have laughed us out of the room. The Romans would have fed us to the lions, after seasoning us.
So here is my modest proposal: let us burn every copy of every food novel and use the heat to warm the hands of the literary critics who have lost their nerve. Let us demand that the novel be dangerous again. Let us remember that the purpose of literature is not to soothe but to awaken. Until that day, the Booker Prize will remain what it has become: a five-star Michelin rating for the soul's descent into mediocrity.
