Elites and good eating

"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."

I wonder if this is an Anglophone prejudice, though. In England, there has long been a feeling that interest in food is sort of degenerate and Popish. You get redneck-ish French or Spanish farm-workers who are "elitist" about food. I think this has something to do with the Catholic/Protestant divide (importance of the body - that sort of thing - can someone state this better??). It's also that southern climates are simply better at producing a wide variety of foods, especially non-animal-derived foods, than northern climates (Ireland's traditional food culture is even poorer than England's despite being Catholic).

Farmers' markets might be changing things a bit. The farmers at our local market are anything but snobby. Farmers' markets in England tend to be quite cheap, unlike the situation in the USA (am I right here?).

I'd add that every urban aesthete I know loves well-prepared Mac & Cheese and Meatloaf. Admittedly, it may be made with Gruyere instead of Velveeta. But the best cooks I know take special pride in cooking Mac&Cheese and a good Meatloaf.

You railing against fast food and junk is right and proper . This country has allowed with subsidizies and policies to encourage sugar and bleached flour junk to saturate every segment of our tables. We should do everything to stop the supersized culture and encourage more healthy choices.

But there does come a point when it crosses into the 100-mile thing and beyond simply encouraging more homemade food and fresh produce and local production (like butcher shops and bakeries)that your POV seems to veer off into what could be perceived an snobbery. There simply isn't enough "organic" to go around, and it might not be all that and a bag of locally-produced organic 100% natural artisan chips anyway. "Organic" might very well be nothing more than marketing, like "100% natural". Dog poop and uranium are both organic and 100% natural; you wouldn't eat either. Further, I would prefer that my produce be free of bugs, and suspect that pesticide free might not be such a great idea. Modern farming techniques have given us abundance and safety. To pretend otherwise doesn't make much sense. At what point are you making a sensible decision to eat well, and at what point are you trying to be the coolest guy in the room? It's probably a case-by-case line.

I find that there isn't as much difference in taste in many products between Trader Joe's, Costco or the local supermarkets, and they carry many of the same products. And given the choices we all are or will soon be making as oil-driven inflation hikes the price of everything, it might be better to encourage people to buy good fresh tomatoes rather than heirloom organic tomatoes.

In England, there has long been a feeling that interest in food is sort of degenerate and Popish.

Well that explains English food at least.

And I'm not sure Stefanie's explanation gets us there either. Iceberg lettuce and jello salad (preferably with a vegetable imbedded in the jello that it might qualify as "salad") do not a free man make.

There are no free men, because men (be they "conservative" or "liberal") do not want to be free. Freedom requires self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency requires hard work and self-denial. But if we can forget about free men and focus on free markets and the security, safety and warm fuzzies that government can provide then we might begin to understand how dissimilar from Caleb are both the double-cheeseburger eating red stater and the effete sprout chomping hippy and how similar they are to each other. More to Caleb's point, free men (like those who voted for Tippecanoe) can be taught culture, as long as it doesn't look too French, without jeopardizing their freedom (maybe). Effeminate slaves can be taught culture, but that won't make them free.

it might be better to encourage people to buy good fresh tomatoes rather than heirloom organic tomatoes.

I've long said, and I'll say again, that buying fresh and local is more important than buying organic, especially if it has to be shipped in.

@Rod: As I recall from Pollan (don't have him in front of me), he's pretty worried about dietary fat, and is almost eating-disorderish in his preoccupation with "not eating too much." (It's the proverbial French restaurant thing, where the smaller the portions and the more elaborate the "presentation," the "better" the dish. As opposed to casseroles and "potluck church supper" types of cooking.)

That's another thing, about "processed" foods. There is a difference between the example he gives in his book (some kind of disgusting yogurt in a tube, which not even half of people today would recognize as food), and something like sauerkraut, which is definitely a "processed" food. Cheese is "processed" (not to be confused with "pasteurized processed cheese food;" something else altogether.) So I think the dividing lines need to be a bit more clearly drawn.

I like his rule of thumb - "If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it" (which makes sense biologically, too.) However, as I see it, most truly Midwestern *local* and *traditional* eating looks very different from what most "more refined" tastes would consider "good" or "healthful." (Don't make me quote chap&verse; the NY Times food columns strike me this way.) The bit about boiling the dandelion greens is a case in point - as is what to do with lettuce which has bolted (saute it up with bacon, vinegar, and brown sugar) ... and around here, it bolts pretty fast.

All I'm saying is that the "fresh salad; fresh vegetables lightly steamed" and "lean white meat or fish" is simply not how most "traditional" people ate, and outside of coastal CA or FL, probably not even possible in most of the US - IF you are truly eating locally.

Fast food has become a staple in many people's diets. Criticize their food and they think you are criticizing them personally. On the other side, there are cooking styles which serve to primarily showcase the cook's talents. You recognize that food when you think it "interesting". Classic french cooking and whatever the current fad is at your local expensive restaurant typify these styles. Classic french peasant cooking, cassoulet is really just bean soup with "leftovers thrown in", much of the Indian, Chinese and Thai cooking we have fall into those categories. One of the key aspects of these styles of cooking is that the ingredients really matter. The cook is often just staying out of the way of the food.

Why do we politicize food anyway? Last night I had jerked pork with a chayote/mango salad. Tonight I am having ribs I smoked all day with homemade slaw and some new potatoes out of our garden. Was I an elite last night and a redneck today?

Steve

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.

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....

These quotes from Stegall's column irritate me, and this type of thinking, which is often seen, irritates me. Yes, elites can be whiny and precious about fresh, organic food while lacking any appreciation of where it comes from or the effort needed to produce it or the needs of the farmers (often operating on a narrow, narrow economic margin) who grow it. We all need to be more connected to the land and those who cultivate it, and to show much greater respect to both. On the other hand, does the defense of "sun hardened men" and "freemen" have to be done in a tone that paints others as effete, egg-headed, whiny people who can be straigntened out by a little strategically applied "whup-ass"?

It seems that this is another example of the "red/blue", "white collar/blue collar", "elite/ordinary" rhetoric that in my opinion has been so detrimental to our national psyche over the last several years. Being an educated person doesn't mean you should look down your nose at "rednecks"; but being a farmer or blue-collar worker doesn't license one to write off educated people as painty-waste effete phonies, either. Snobbery is not pretty no matter which direction it goes.

In that regard, this article at The Atlantic gives a good view of the tendency for everyone to be a snob now in our culture.

Anyway, think of someone like Wendell Berry, who is a scholar, novelist, essayist, poet, and a "sun-burned, dirty man" who plows his family farm with mules. Isn't some kind of harmony and mutual respect, at least between us, if not always existing in a single person, as with Berry, what we should be aiming for? Or is poetry only for pointy-headed elitists, not "real men"?

John E.

I am sooooooooooooooo stikin jealous.

Be weeks before I get a good 'mater.

Hear hear, Steve and Turmarion. Why make this about judging the worth of other people?

Folks who assume that a critique of food that consists primarily of white flour, some kind of refined sugar and some kind of refined vegetable oil, and maybe a bit of meat cut with soybeans, don't seem to get that "their" food is doing them no favors. No one is attacking people who can't afford better. We are concerned about a system that makes those the most affordable edibles out there. We are a nation of plump people who are undernourished. What does snobbery have to do with that?

So, I am a food snob because I want to buy from farmers who can support their families and who take care of the land and neighbors and wildlife and water around the farm by using minimally-harmful production methods? In fact, my meals are not fancy. Like Rod, I can make a meal of roasted beets.

Tonight we chopped some slow-cooked pork sirloin that went too long in the cooker (note to self, never tell 20 year old son to turn off the cooker and put away the meat "when he goes to bed" as that is often 3 a.m.) and tossed it in with some quinoa (purchased on sale), tomato, scallion, olive oil and lemon juice, all plopped on a few lettuce leaves. Not hardly fancy food. Yummy though.

Food snobs don't know crap.

Except, of course, you are a food snob yourself. There's nothing "real American" about sashimi in Japan and duck made by trained chefs. You are much more Michael Pollan than middle-American redneck.

That's the irony about the assumption about so-called food snobs. People like Pollan and Rod and Alice Waters want people just to have quality, unprocessed food. Killing a duck or raising your own cattle is exactly would they support. Using local ingredients is what they are talking about.

Augustus: I come from a rural small town myself, one in which the main occupations are coal mining and agriculture. You are right that the snobbery of the elite is worse, given especially that they hold the power and that they are often oblvious to the plight of small farmers who are trying to get by. Given this, the psychology of reverse snobbery is understandable and more forgiveable. I was not, in fact, defending elite snobbery.

On the other hand, many rural kids who show a passion for learning are taunted, ostracized, bullied, and accused of being "above their raising". It's not that much differnt from the bright black kid that gets called an oreo. I have known many kids (not necessarily from elite or wealthy families), both growing up and now as a teacher, that experience this--I did myself, to a degree. Thus, while I do not by any means condone elite snobbery, and while I agree with you that it is more pernicious, still I maintain that not all reverse snobbery is a response to elitism. Reverse snobbery can be very ugly. To the extent that the bright kids often are the ones who move off to the city to become lawyers, doctors, jounalists, and what have you, it wouldn't be altogether wrong to say that their negative childhood experiences may be, in part, the genesis of their snobbery. I'm not condoning, just saying.

Once again, just to be clear, I am not debating your general point--elite snobbery is worse, and has a worse effect in that it belittles and attacks those with less power.

My point was to object to the type of rhetoric in Stegall's original column. You mention racism--a good analogy is the type of rhetoric whereby young black men emulate the "gangsta" lifestyle of loudness, crudity, misogyny, and materialism, supposedly as a response to racism by "keepin' it real". If I were black, I would find it offensive to have this type of thing being portrayed as the desirable norm for my culture. Likewise, there is a tendency in some quarters to exalt the "redneck" lifestyle, presented as beer, truck pulls, good ole boys, contempt for "book learning", and such as a more "authentic" version of what it means to be rural. I don't much like that, either, and it seems that Stegall comes close to this type of rhetorical style. All this is the same type of sweeping stereotyping that led to the whole absurd "red vs. blue America" thing, and that often implied or outright proclaimed that only red-state Americans are "real" Americans.

I would close by agreeing with Rombald above. I have known people of non-English European background (Italian, French, &c.) and to them there is no contradiction at all between living a simple life as a farmer or blue-collar worker and taking time and care to prepare really good food. I also notice that in such cultures, though women may do the day-to-day cooking, men often cook as well, to an extent greater than in traditional Anglo-derived cultures. I suspect that in some contries this discussion would never have arisen.

Oh, by the way--sometimes I make coq au vin from Julia Child's cookbook, and sometimes I have a Big Mac and fries!

One question about always assuming the superiority of local food: why choose the poisoned local apple, if there is an option of an organic apple? Why pay the grower who sprayed your own region with toxins? Odd choice.

This morning I picked two eggplant, a bell pepper, and a habanero pepper.

Spicy eggplant Parmesan tonight!

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.

Like the other day, I was on some blog somewhere, and I read that 'organic fruit tea' was a sign of liberal elitism. And owning an iPod.

Oh, wait. That was here. (Well, Erin just said other people would think that, but appeared to believe that was actually rational.)

And, as I said in response, this sort of inanity is the right's doing, and I love it. They can keep calling people 'liberal elite' based on trivial hobbies and unimportant lifestyle choices all they want,and kicking more and more people out of their club.

Meanwhile, real men kill animals with a revolver and eat them uncooked, but not vegetables, which is pansy food unless cooked in butter or boiled to death. Or something.

So, yeah, we've got some sort of wire-crossing inconsistency going on here in the 'idiotic thoughts about what men really are' department WRT to 'hunting your own meat' vs 'growing your own vegetables'. So we'll need Republicans to close their eyes and clap their hands and say they do believe in fairies, and they aren't one of them. (Clap only in a *masculine* fashion, please.) While we quietly change one of those things and say we were always at war with Eurasia.

Next on their exclusion list: Men who don't like beer, and women who bowl. All liberal elitists, and probably homosexual to boot.

Anyway, Rod, you're now officially an effeminate liberal elite. Admiiiit it. Joooooin us. Voooote Democratic in two-thousand eeeeight....

I'm not sure, astorian, that the selective breeding of animals constitutes genetic engineering, any more than irrigation and crop rotation violate the natural law. I would think a smart farmer would breed the two animals which seem to be the healthiest and doing the best out of those in his herd. I'm unaware of a moral obligation of the farmer to only breed his less fit animals. But I agree with you that the breeding of mules is probably nasty and I'm sure it violates some Levitical precept.

I'm not sure, astorian, that the selective breeding of animals constitutes genetic engineering

Why not? With both selective breeding and genetic modification, the hand of man is altering the genetic composition of a given species in order to achieve some defined end.