I hate your face, I hate your ugly-ass kid that you had because your life is empty and meaningless, and most of all I hate your fucking food. Cook Suck is a guy who’s with me 100% on that last one – except he’s taken it to a whole ‘nother level, starting a devastating website aptly titled cooksuck.com with which to brandish his tongs of food superiority. The premise is simple but wouldn’t work if “Cooky” wasn’t as handy with culinary character assassination as his many diatribes will attest: people anonymously submit food porn to the site and he judges it – and, subsequently, the submitters – accordingly. Usually this gets completely out of hand and becomes personal, even though Cooky probably does not know these people at all. Aggressive contemporary social tutoring emerges: “Girls [generally] like it when you say cunt because it shows you’re not some fucking nancy boy who thinks they’re hot shit with their moronic concepts of feminism or manners taken straight from a how-to pick up lift-out from a Zoo magazine.” In Cook Suck’s derision of your fucking food there is revelation, and I emailed him about it. He’s cloaked in a dissection of half-charred anonymity so I wondered how he’d prefer to communicate.
He wrote:
“somewhere between”
“and”
“but for ease, probably email. i’m based in sydney.”
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Hello Cook Suck. How much of your anonymity are you willing to shed in order to tell me about the man behind the suck?
At the end of the day I’m just some cunt with a blog on the internet. I don’t work in the food industry. I barely even cook; all I eat at home is cheese, bread, cured meats although I do make a cracking beetroot hummus. I used to have a drinking problem but now I’m just a straight up alcoholic. I’m cool with that. I’ll have my moment of clarity soon enough.
Why did you start cooksuck.com?
It’s not the food I hate; it’s the delusions of grandeur and it never ends – it just keeps happening. Always the same fucking excuses, “Oh, I’m pregnant. I’m a student. We’re in love” – no, fuck off arsehole. I particularly hate “man feast” style images that lazy fat arseholes use to project some sort of superior masculinity. Always something fucking lame like chopped up sausages and something ridiculous like paprika and grated cheese in a massive omelette with a beer as opposed to something that actually could be construed as masculine like cold smoking a skirt of beef in tobacco and blood while drinking whiskey from bottle, naked, screaming, on fire. Whatever, I don’t know.
Why do you think people are so obsessed with posting pictures of their goddamn food on the internet?
Shit people cook and eat shit food – it really is as simple as that. People also like to project a part of themselves via what they eat, obviously. When I see a girl post a picture of some bullshit celery and a muesli bar combo with an #omnomnom hashtag I see a desperate loser with zero self-esteem who probably sleeps with guys who wear sandals in public. When I see a disgusting curry and sliced bread combo at a desk I see a pretend-man who argues with strangers via YouTube comments.
Your site is like the Is Anyone Up? of the food world. How does it mostly work? Do people submit their horrid dishes and those of others, or do you stumble over most of them?
I used to passionately hunt them down but now I get them all sent in. If you think I’m nasty you should see some of the shit people want me to say about their friends/lovers.
Has anyone ever gotten mad with you about what you’ve written about their eating habits and, subsequently, their lives? You can be pretty scathing.
Always. And the thing is, the kind of people that can’t cook are the kind of people that get fucking upset about being told they can’t cook. That’s why they can’t cook – they surround themselves with other losers that give them this inflated sense of self-worth and they just plug through life, oblivious to their mediocrity. It happens with everything – hacks attract other hacks. Look at music, art, film – all of these scenes are filled with massive pockets of people with shit output encouraging other people with shit output and they are so fucking precious about what they do and seem so impervious to the truth. Criticism is always seen as such a bad thing and people always feel the need to sugar coat everything – bah, fuck off. Make the mistakes, get better and improve, you pedestrian nothing cunts.
At what point did it become clear that people were actually enjoying your site?
It’s weird because I didn’t really notice that people were enjoying it because every fuckhead wants to tell me what I’m doing wrong, or how I’m not funny, or too mean, or how I could do things in a better way which is funny because I could have sworn doing things exactly how I want to do them is the best way to do things. Look, I could have had some daily shit food image blog style site where people rate and comment on things, like 9gag or whatever, but I don’t want to do that. I like writing and I like doing it exactly how I do it. I always get these shit hot writers trying to tell me not to use the word “that” in certain contexts, or hassling me about abbreviations or other writing crimes I’m supposed to have committed which is funny because my writing is how I pay my rent and your writing is spent on emailing strangers on the internet.
It seems you’ve monetised it a bit. You have ads around and are selling that cool “Black Snag” tee of yours. Can you quit your day job and just wail on everyone’s dinner yet?
Not really. I’m currently writing a sit-com which consumes most of my time.
What is the absolute worst food pic you’ve been assaulted with and why?
The disgusting food irks me but what absolutely infuriates me is the delusions of grandeur or sheer stupidity.
I mean look at that – are you fucking serious bitch? You do realise shitty dry parmesan costs more than that bullshit pedestrian tasty cheese you buy from the supermarket?
What kind of food do you yourself enjoy and why?
I moved from Brisbane to Sydney a year or so ago and have fallen in love with the food culture here. Brisbane is a fucking wasteland for dining (actually it’s a fucking wasteland full stop) – it’s actually embarrassing. I’m massive on brunch and there are some great places here – Reuben Hills, Room 10 Espresso, Grounds of Alexandria, Wilbur’s Place – the list is honestly endless and there are new places popping up all the time. Anything salty, pickled, serious, hearty but neat and tidy – I’m massive on Eastern European and coffee – I’m one of those fuckheads that wakes up in the morning with a thirst for actual specific origins of coffee. Yes, I make myself sick – it’s as grown up as I will probably ever get. I like good, no mucking about and affordable pub food – Cricketers Arms in Surry do it exactly right for me. Good food and dining is about honesty to me – I’ll happily eat an on-special pub steak if it’s presenting itself as an on-special pub steak and I’ll enjoy it just as much as dropping a few hundred on degustation and wine. That’s why I hate shit like McDonalds and Grill’d – they masquerade themselves as being this fancy bullshit when they are fucking shithouse burgers consumed by lazy drones with no respect for themselves and no desire to exit their shitty bubble of a life.
Have you ever thought about making a sister site called “Cook Shit,” where people submit pics of the shits they did afterwards?
No. A friend and I made a blog called coolblogideas.tumblr.com which isn’t doing so well.
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There is a curious lack of dessert on Cook Suck’s site so I figured we could embody that concept in a topical way here to top things off. So I sent him what I legitimately had for late lunch that day. Seasonal tin-wrapped salmon in a delicate olive oil blend on a bed of mi goreng:
“It’s almost poetic. It speaks for itself sorry, I can’t force these things,” he wrote back, before linking to this. “I respect mi goreng. If food was sex mi goreng would be my hand.”
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Follow Toby on Twitter @jane_tobes.