Beautiful Delicious
Enjoyment in crisis and becoming a “Check, Please! Arizona” stan
This essay contains the word ‘delicious’ twenty-one times. Usually, I would Ctrl-F and interrogate each usage, weeding those suckers out. Show the people the food, I’d think. Don’t say the pasta was DeLiCiOuS, tell them how the sauce coated your fork and dripped down your chin. Finally, when the offending word was only used once or twice, I’d be satisfied with my reserve, my specificity, my ability to write beyond “delicious.”
It was late and I scrolled the PBS app for something lo-fi to watch before bed. I turned on “Check, Please! Arizona” and was instantly charmed. The host, Mark Tarbell, is an award-winning chef and restaurant owner, and every episode he’s joined by three Arizonans sharing one of their favorite local restaurants. They sit at a round table set with water glasses, ornately folded mauve napkins, and a bowl of grapes too perfect to be real, describing the food and comparing notes.
When a lovely man described the creme anglaise as “a white chocolate soup” I cringed. When the sweet as a button lady said she liked the soup because it tasted good I got a tickly feeling trying to suppress a laugh. Episode after episode, everyone gushed and glowed and enthused, and well, it made me a tad unsettled as ‘delicious’ went flying hither and thither. Michael, who’s watched every food documentary in the book along with me, and I exchanged looks. What was going on here that made me feel equal parts adoration and aversion? What was this earnestness, this innocence? Why were they just enjoying the food?!
I felt both validation – see how difficult it is to talk about food in a nuanced way – and self-loathing at my writerly opinions verging on pretension. When I write an early draft, ‘delicious’ becomes a placeholder waiting for something more thorough or specific or…though I hate to say it…clever. I’m not trying to be clever, but why else do I banish “delicious” to the basement even when it’s an adequate description? My problem is more with adjectives in general, and perhaps the mild horrification I felt watching “Check, Please! Arizona” for the first time was to do with the gleeful and unconscious use of them throughout the show. Tasty. Yummy. Crispy. Delightful. Moist. And yes, delicious, always delicious, like a jolly specter over the set.
Watching myself watch the show, I saw my aged face, my crone self. I’m a hundred and three in food writer years. Even though I only started focusing on publishing food writing in 2023, I’ve been obsessed with food media since middle school. I watched the Food Network religiously, although I avoided the ‘ladies cooking’ shows because I found them boring. “Good Eats” hosted by Alton Brown was my favorite and possibly set me down a path of identifying as an alternative food writer – someone who wanted more than the next delicious recipe and toes the line between earnest and self-important.
If my food writer self is aging, the part of me that loves delicious food is an enduring babe in arms. Feed me something delicious. Give me the newest snack that’s actually good, not just a gimmick. Let me eat dessert every day and have a glass of wine and a small dish of olives and a slice of good bread. Then tuck me into bed where I dream of pastries and roasted gochujang cabbage and stinky cheese and more olives. Delicious dreams, you’ll whisper as you tiptoe out of the room.
Then I wake up and it’s 2025 and I’m almost crying in the checkout line where all the food magazines have dripping steaks like centerfolds on their covers. Critical thought is needed. Heads out of the sand now, please! In Helene Cixous: A Politics of Writing, Morag Shiach writes, “Innocence is not to be confused with ignorance, nor with moral purity.” “Check, Please! Arizona” is an innocent show, but the people on it are very knowledgeable about food, their preferences, their taste, and are generous enough to put their thoughts into words publicly. I am so used to food media that has at least the appearance of critical thought, usually by way of high production value and pontificating experts. But most mainstream food media still serves (intentionally or not) to uphold the US food system that thrives on keeping eaters ignorant of how the steak got on their plate.
Watching “Check, Please! Arizona,” I first felt like a spectator from a different planet. I know too much: The vast vast majority of meat Americans eat comes from an animal that lived a miserable life. Sugar is a legacy of slavery. Companies grow rich by selling foods packed with additives that are banned in other countries. The food media I’m most interested in knows all this and more, and casts a critical eye on convenience and enjoyment as a higher priority than human, animal, and planetary welfare. We are all on the same planet, and remembering that is vital.
Perhaps another reason I avoid using “delicious” is that earnest enjoyment feels out of place in a crisis. Is enjoyment for the ignorant? But I don’t believe the answer for those invested in changing, resisting, and criticising the food system is to be endlessly displeased. The problem isn’t that humans are obsessed with what’s delicious, the problem is the companies making bank manipulating this fact. Another problem is the cultural indoctrination that humans are entitled to do whatever they want to animals and the planet for more delicious food right now. No one is entitled to consume only delicious food. But there is a much wider range of what’s delicious than multinational food corporations would have us think. Enjoyment is worth holding onto and expanding.
I’ll still say that calling something delicious isn’t that interesting, unless it’s paired with a tone, a look, a smile, a light in the eye. Saying the lasagna was delicious while leaning into the table and rolling one’s eyes in pleasure is specific, is interesting, and shows the limits of a word – or how a word can have its meaning expanded again and again when people bring genuine emotion. The show also expands the potential of four strangers at a table. Their earnest appreciation is a balm to my soul as I’m always trying to get things right. “Check, Please! Arizona” won me as a lifelong fan by sitting me down, holding my hand, and telling me that sometimes it’s alright to call food delicious.
Friday chat
A reminder that today at noon PST/3pm EST I’ll open a chat for paid subscribers where I open my notebook / bookmarks to ANNOTATE and DIVULGE. Consider it a behind the scenes peek as well as an invitation to chat!
The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and shorter updates on food, climate, and labor. Rooted in the Sonoran Desert.