I have mentioned in this space many times the half-anger, half-amusement with which I greeted a conservative friend chastising me once in her kitchen that it was all well and good that the Drehers can afford to eat organic and farmer's market food, but that her family didn't have that luxury. The implication being that elitists like me live on a different planet than salt-of-the earth folks like her. She said this in front of a kitchen counter loaded down with Fritos, Doritos, Little Debbie snack cakes and the like -- expensive junk food, in other words. I changed the subject to avoid a social confrontation, but I guarantee you that if my friend and I compared grocery bills, they'd come out to be about the same. It's not how much we spend, but what we spend it on, that makes the difference.
Food snobbery is one of my pet peeves. You get it from pseudo-foodies, who turn up their noses at more proletarian fare, but given where I come from philosophically, and the circles in which I run, I more often encounter its reverse: a knee-jerk condemnation of any attempt to stand athwart the Great American Junk Food Conveyor Belt and say "Stop!" as evidence of snobbery and effete liberalism.
John Schwenkler takes on this particular idiocy in his fine essay in defense of arugula -- a common green known as "rocket" in most of the English-speaking world. Schwenkler writes about being slammed as a liberal pantywaist for defending organic and local agriculture as inherently conservative pursuits. Here's a taste:
Obviously there are many lessons to be drawn from this episode, but focus for a moment on what it reveals about the state of American conservatism. My critic summarized the core thesis of what he called my "gastronomic baloney" with the - clearly absurd, but then again I never said it - claim that "Food choices can make you 'conservative'": but what else did he think that he was assuming when he tried to impugn my conservative credentials by pointing out that steak and fried chicken were notably missing from my weekly menu? Yes, it's true: a graduate student's paycheck doesn't come to much, and so we end up eating a lot of beets and wilted chard in my house. And what of it? The past seven years have seen professed "conservatives" plunge our nation into an unnecessary war, institute a domestic surveillance program and vastly expand the size of the federal government, and demand that the taxpayers foot the bill for a $700 billion handout to Wall Street: do they really need to dictate the contents of my refrigerator as well?But it's not just conservatives who trade on this sort of vapid identitarianism in the ways they define their political coalitions. Like the rise of the arugula meme, my critic's strange obsession with barbecue sauce was just another instance of the countless ways in which our politicking manages to proceed by way of signaling rather than substance: hence John McCain, despite being a child of privilege married to a billionaire heiress, gets to pass himself off as a man of the people; the ethanol-subsidizing Barack Obama is embraced by the Slow Food crowd as the one who will save America from high fructose corn syrup; and National Review editor Jonah Goldberg can joke about the creeping liberal totalitarianism of Whole Foods despite the fact that the corporation's founder is, you know, a libertarian. Going on about bean sprouts and yogurt is little different than saying "hope," "change," "maverick," or - more recently - "Main Street": in each case there is plenty of sound and fury, but what is actually signified has far more to do with membership on a team than a robust set of political commitments. The politics of meaninglessness has been with us for quite a while now - it was pretty much inevitable that our food choices would get caught up in it, too.
Read the whole thing. How strange this whole controversy must seem to Europeans.
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Rod,
When you get upset at the person who tries to lay claim to salt-of-the-earth values and uses it to bash you, maybe you should re-think they way you assume that salt-of-the-earth folks are on the right side of the aisle. When I grew up, salt of the earth seemed to mean honest. Now, it seems to mean politically conservative. People like you have helped this along. That's part of the reason why liberals didn't like Palin's supposed salt of the earth shoved in our face. Salt of the earth doesn't mean conservative...either in politics or in food.
Re: Anonymous's remarks about Italy, where there is supposedly little overweight or obesity:
From the 2001 study, "Prevalence of overweight and obesity in a rural southern Italy population and relationships with total and cardiovascular mortality: the Ventimiglia di Sicilia project:"
In the whole population (panel A) we observed that only in the third decade of life (20-29 y) was the percentage of subjects with normal weight higher than 50%. The prevalence of obesity increased with age until the sixth decade of life (50-59 y) and then declined. In males, with the exclusion of the third decade of life, there was a very high prevalence of overweight in all classes of age (>50%), whereas the prevalence of obesity was about 20-25% (panel B). By contrast, in females there was a large prevalence of obesity. After 40 y, but in particular in postmenopausal ages, more than 80% of women in this population were overweight or obese (panel C).
(Link: http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v25/n2/full/0801321a.html)
I don't think we should assume that all obesity is the same, based on physical outward appearance. Some fat people are quite healthy and well-nourished (i.e. they eat a healthful diet consistent with their genetic requirements.) Others are quite unhealthy.
Stefanie,
Sorry, I think Anonymous was me. For some reason my computer no longer automatically enters my name, and I sometimes forget to type it in.
I blame the two-income family for much of the loss in basic culinary knowledge; most decent home-cooked meals are not difficult to cook but require that someone be present to monitor them. I am fortunate in that I work from home so it's easy enough to pop a roast in the oven or make a pot of soup while I work.
As I said, I'm single and live alone. It's not just time, because I waste enough time watching TV or doing other things that I could easily make the time to cook if I wanted to. The truth is, I just don't want to. When I first started living alone, in graduate school, I used to make an effort to cook for myself. Eventually I just got bored with it. Why? Because, to be honest, I just don't care enough about what I eat to want to go to the bother of thinking about what I want to make, making a list of ingredients, going to the grocery store, bringing the home, finding a place to put them, and then having to take the time to prepare them. Honestly, making a cup of Minute Rice is more work in the kitchen than I really feel like doing.
Of course, the fact that, where I live now, I have a serious bug problem in my kitchen doesn't give me any encouragement to want to spend any time there and makes it difficult to prepare food there. I have trouble keeping the bugs out of my cereal, even in closed plastic containers.
After living alone for over 20 years, I've just basically outsourced all my food preparation, either to restaurants, or fast food, or frozen stuff (but even taking the time to heat a frozen dinner is more work than I really feel like doing in the kitchen) or, for lunch, to the campus dining halls (which are nice, because I can have a salad and vegetable with lunch every day and not having to worry about preparing them). A lot of times I just have cereal for dinner.
And since I not only live alone but almost always eat alone, I'm afraid cooking is just more trouble for me than it's worth. But I think the real foundation for my disinterest and unwillingness to make an effort is that, as I said, I just don't really care about what I eat.
When I was growing up, my mother was the queen of opening cans, defrosting, and using boxed mixes, though she occasionally made a meatloaf or something like that. She told me that when she and my father were first married, she used to put a lot of time and effort into preparing interesting things for dinner. After awhile, he essentially told her that, while he appreciated the thought and the effort, he was a meatloaf-and-potatoes kind of guy and he'd really be happier if she didn't knock herself out in the kitchen. So, after that, she didn't.
Lisa,
I have a friend who has a son with type 1 diabetes, and she has told me that the hospitals give out that info assuming that you are eating those foods already, and they will be most successful if they can keep you as close to the diet you already had as possible. Then when they run into someone with a healthy diet, they don't know what to do. But then, she is also a parent educator, and has told me some really weird stories of people mis-handling their child's diabetes, so many that I am willing to believe there are people dumb enough to feed their kids that way. My sympathy to you on having to deal with all that, and good for you for breastfeeding your child.
I didn't mean to sound as though I was slamming working mothers. I'm a working mother myself, although I am fortunate that I only work part-time and from my home. I used to work outside of the home, also only part-time, but when you added up commuting time and dropping off/picking up children I was gone 25 hours rather than 15. And the quality of our meals suffered as a result, not because I was an evil selfish working woman but for the reasons I outlined -- I simply didn't get home in time to have anything cooked in time for a reasonable dinner hour (my children are little so we have to eat early before they get too tired). Once again, I was fortunate in that I only worked 3 days a week so on my days off I could prep and/or pre-cook the following days meals but it was a LOT of effort and I realized how a family where both parents work full-time might feel that slow food is an impossibility most of the time.
My own mother worked, by the way; since my father was culinarily challenged she had to make everything in the morning for him to reheat at night (she worked evening shift), hence her fondness for tuna-noodle casserole.
This is not an indictment of two-income families; it is simply a fact. Just like the fact that women working full-time are going to have a lot harder time breastfeeding an infant; mind you, it CAN be done if one is particularly dedicated to pumping and is fortunate enough to work for a company that allows breaks and privacy, but for many working women it will just be well nigh impossible. Not slamming anyone, just stating that there are trade offs to everything and depending upon your situation, paying the rent might be more important than roasting a free range chicken.
We could get into a long discussion about *why* two incomes are necessary but that is a different subject altogether.
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