Elites and good eating

Caleb Stegall has some typically interesting remarks in his review of Michael Pollan's food journalism. This especially caught my eye:

Simultaneously exploited and neglected in this debate are the virtues of the actual philistines. Conservatives defiantly celebrating their double-whopper and fries and liberals pacing the isle of Whole Foods in search of the perfect dinner party. Pollan's work has the virtue of refusing both of these easy outs, but then he can't he bring himself to tell the whole story.

Pollan's sensibility is that of the kitchen lover--an admirable thing to be sure--but it's a love that tends to go unconsummated in an age of gentile decadence. He frets continuously over the ethics of killing a chicken for dinner. He admits he is uncomfortable with the conservative culture of the farm. His tentative solutions tend towards state intervention rather than true laissez faire.

Honest redneckery comes by dint of sweat on the brow, clods underfoot, and mud on the frock. Down at the feed store, the sun-burned, dirty men I talk to would be more likely to open up a can of whup-ass on Pollan's hand-wringing self than celebrate his latest gourmand achievement.

This uniquely American disconnect is illustrated well by a short anecdote Pollan relates. In Martin Van Buren's reelection campaign of 1840, his opponent William Henry Harrison effectively ridiculed Van Buren for bringing a personal French Chef to the White House. Harrison, as he let it be known, preferred "raw beef and salt." The lesson, as Van Buren and Rod Dreher both learned, is that "to savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery."

To bridge this chasm requires a firm recognition that self-provisioning is dirty work done by sun hardened men who obtain not the rarefied sophistication of the credentialed witch-doctors and their organic brews but membership in the rarefied league of freemen who can pretty much tell anyone and everyone, as circumstances may require, to go to hell without concern for the consequences (taxman excepted).

I hear this, but where are these freemen? As I told Caleb in an e-mail yesterday, it's a peculiar and frustrating irony to find that the people who seem to care most about eating the old-fashioned way -- as opposed to filling up on processed food that Caleb calls "foodshit" -- are sophisticated urbanite foodies. My family back in Louisiana, bless 'em, thinks I'm some sort of weirdo food snob, and the stuff I'm concerned with about food and agriculture to be irrelevant to real life. As Caleb avers, in my writing about crunchy-con topics, I quite often run into real class-based anger, as if criticizing bad food was an elitist offense.

I well remember growing up, how the damn dirty hippies opened up a health food store for a while in town. It's the kind of place I'd frequent now, if it were still there, but back then, they might as well have been selling pot brownies and the collected works of V.I. Lenin. Really, there was such a sense that those folks were cultural aliens, and some sort of non-specific threat to us good, solid, sensible people. Now, there was no reason at all to have concluded this, but that was just the vibe in that time and place.

There is no real reason why it should fall to Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and people like that to advance the case for real food, grown or raised the old-fashioned way on small farms or in backyard gardens. Real food isn't necessarily fancy food. Caleb is certainly right that a real turn back to good eating and sensible agricultural practices will come when a real interest in food culture becomes mainstream, and not just the province of people like Michael Pollan and me. Still, if not for people like Pollan, where would we be? Who would be the champions of traditional farmers (and cultural conservatives) like Joel Salatin and Robert Hutchins, spreading the word about the great work they do, and why it's important?