Cooking has become the last true art

Why is it that TV cookery shows have become so popular? That recipe websites like Epicurious proliferate? That turning out palatable meals has ceased to be a woman's preserve and now draws men as well?

To make the question still more pointed, how come the culinary arts have grown in prominence, while other contemporary art forms are receding?

Consider modern classical music. One long-suffering audience member said it reminded him of a bus crash. Though read any of the top music reviewers, and you'll find them exulting over this tuneless mess.

Or take modern art. For a mere $140 million, you can buy a painting by Jackson Pollock called "No. 5." I forget if this is the one that hung upside down in a New York gallery.

But if you laid a piece of canvass on the floor of a chicken coop for three months, "No. 5" is what it would look like.

So too modern sculpture. I still recall the horror of local citizens in Kingston, Ont., many years ago, when the city commissioned a centre piece for MacDonald Park and the "artist" erected two huge sewage culverts with sludge spilling out.

The eyesore was improved one night when a bunch of engineering students from Queen's University temporarily transformed the culverts into perfect representations of a Coke and Pepsi can. But the sculptor insisted on returning to his vision of a bombed-out septic field.

You find modernity's palsied hand in updates of the Bible. Thus "Mary was with child" is rendered as "Mary had fallen pregnant," while "through a glass darkly" becomes "puzzling reflections in a mirror."

And what purblind revisionist struck out "It ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women" and gave us "Sarah ceased having her monthly periods"? (Hat-tip to the Rev. Dr. Peter Mullen, who nailed this miserable practice in Britain's Telegraph newspaper).

And while we're on the subject of contemporary poetry, can any of it keep pace with this sort of thing? (From Kipling, on the creed of Afghan warriors): "Four things greater than all things are, women and horses and power and war."

The problem with all these avantgarde monstrosities is that a form of elitism has taken over. The views of ordinary folks are discarded, in favour of appeals to a chichi minority. Values like beauty and harmony have become passé. Melody is dismissed as an affliction of the masses.

In his book on art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe perfectly captured the sterility of this project: "In the beginning we got rid of - realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether. Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture."

Very well then. So why hasn't this happened to modern cookery? You could argue that momentarily it did, with the nouvelle cuisine movement and its emphasis on gauzy presentation rather than flavour or nourishment.

But thankfully that didn't last. Most top-ranked restaurants today are serving down-to-earth food. Indeed they display a healthy contempt for elevated views about diet.

In Britain, traditional country recipes are returning. You can eat pigeon pie or rabbit stew in any decent pub.

European countries have wild game festivals in the Fall. B.C. chefs are stressing the culinary delights of free range pork and fresh caught salmon.

And cardiac-implicated butter remains the fat of choice. Hyper-tensing salt is scattered liberally. Infanticidal veal adorns the plate.

These all, in one respect or another, tread on politically incorrect territory. One imagines vegans shrinking at this glorying in the virtues of meat.

The public health lobby is probably appalled at the thought of all that cholesterol being dished out. And the animal rights types must be incensed.

Yet strikingly, unlike the salons of art and literature, cookery has ignored the refined and high-minded. And while the world's great symphony orchestras are headed for the poorhouse, victims of an epic failure to understand their audience, restaurants are booming.

So how did this happen? I suppose one answer might be that food is so central to the human condition, faddists daren't mess with it. Though I wouldn't put it past them.

But it's not just eating in restaurants that's thriving. Home cooking has become a defining hobby of the Baby Boom generation. Forget bowling or ballroom dancing; we're in the kitchen slinging food.

And that, I think, explains why cookery has flourished. It doesn't depend on corporate sponsors or rich benefactors, as most classical art now does.

It is by nature, and by breadth of ownership, a labour of the common man and not of the elite.