Food wanking exposed as Heston Blumenthal relocates down-under

If you watched that Heston Blumenthal television show on Christmas cooking recently you will understand what Tim Stanley is writing about in this morning's London Daily Telegraph. 

Blumenthal is to food what Damien Hirst is to art. Original, yes. Thrilling, from time to time. But also way overpriced, overhyped and with a disregard for tradition that has driven his metier to the brink of absurdity. Where Hirst was happy merely for us to observe a shark in formaldehyde, Blumenthal would probably expect us to eat it. The Fat Duck tasting menu includes snail porridge, a fungus called botrytis cinerea and the promise of verjus in egg. The dish entitled Sound of the Sea apparently consists of seafood mixed with edible sand, backed by an iPod hidden in a conch shell relaying the sound of breaking waves. Total price of the menu: £220 per person, excluding a 12.5 per cent service charge.
This is bourgeois decadence.

The Tim Stanley criticism was by way of bidding the showman-television-chef farewell from his Fat Duck restaurant in England for a six month stint in Australia.

Soon it will be Melbourne's turn to experience "something innately offensive about fine ingredients reduced to a microdot on a plate that costs as much as the annual personal income in Zimbabwe."

It’s a sign that a society has taken a turn for the worst – like the cocaine craze of the Eighties.

How wonderfully put.