So The New Yorker showed up last night and on page 53 is a cartoon showing two Zen Buddhist monks, one wearing a fake arrow through his head and a funny nose and glasses. He says to the other monk, who is serious and dour, “Tell me the truth — have I ever made tea come out of your nose?”
I sent it along to many of my friends, with the predictable, self-congratulatory guffawing that one might expect would accompany an out of context New Yorker cartoon. Still, I couldn’t stop reading it and re-reading it and laughing myself silly in a slightly hysterical manner.
“Isn’t this funny–?” I wrote to my friends, several of whom are devout Buddhists with serious practices. “I mean, isn’t this really funny?”
Mostly they agreed, but when I wouldn’t just let it go and get on with my day, they got worried, and frankly, so did I. But for some reason, it hit home, and not because I’m a Buddhist in the way that so many of us claim to be: the sorta-kinda-urban-trendy-Buddhist-until-someone-cuts-me-off-in-traffic-and-then-they’re-an-asshole way, no matter how many Made in China Tibetan trinkets we buy from Anthropologie.
Anyway, I realized that over the last few weeks, I’ve been caught up in a culinary swirl of what Jim Harrison, in The Raw and the Cooked, called a “sump of neuroticism.” The food world has absolutely always been a fount of indiscrete in-fighting and cat-calling and judgement-passing, way back to the days when Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher supposedly got a colleague dumped from a high-profile Time-Life project because they didn’t like him. And, as I wrote in a recent post, it was Nika Hazelton who said, back in a 1968, Nora Ephron-authored New York Magazine article called Critics in the World of the Rising Souffle that ours “is a world of self-generating hysteria.” Indeed. And it doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
In the last few weeks, there have been public battles over the validity of the locavore movement, and what, exactly, the word itself means: some say that you’re not a true locavore unless you only eat food that’s grown in your relatively immediate vicinity (10 miles? 20 miles? 50 miles?), which is fine, assuming you live in California. Others insist they’re locavores, except when they eat Prosciutto di Parma, or Thai fish sauce, or Burgundian Epoisses. It’s like me saying I’m a vegetarian, except for the small porcine fixation that drags me into the gutter every once in a while.
On the flipside, Ruth Reichl is now topping the masthead of a digitized luxury foods magazine/catalog featuring the work of some well-known writers and journalists (myself among them) side-by-side with click-and-purchase items like white asparagus and ramps and pastured beef from the other side of the country for sums that would make Cartier blush. The press ranted and shouted, even as those complaining likely eat those very foods at high-end restaurants for those very prices, without ever batting an eyelash or thinking twice about it. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
The politics of food is always relative: Not long ago, I was at a cocktail party and walked headlong into an award-winning food politics expert who was nibbling on a previously frozen pig in a blanket while drinking a longneck Bud. Recently, I spent an hour or so watching a panel discussion between Alice Waters, Duff Goldman, and Anthony Bourdain that made my hair go straight up, until, silly me, I realized that Alice and Anthony were basically saying the same thing, albeit differently (very differently): That food is — and should be — important to each of us. That it’s a deeply personal thing. That it’s important to make good choices ethically and culturally and environmentally. But that it’s also about pure pleasure and great flavor and authenticity: if it wasn’t, Alice wouldn’t have opened Chez Panisse for the reasons she did, back in 1971, after falling in love with France.
But, to mangle Bourdain’s message, there are a whole lot of people out there whose idea of a great meal is the $1.99 dinner at Popeye’s because great is also a relative term: for them, great means it’s filling and it’s what they can afford. Our society, comprised of haves and have-mores (as George Bush II once so sensitively called them), has created a food system designed to really only feed rich people (like you and me) high quality, expensive, pristine, lush, organic, well-made, thoughtful products. I don’t have to like Popeyes. I don’t have to eat Popeyes. But should I really pass judgement on the working mother of four who can’t possibly feed her children dinner any other way? I can’t. Would it be better to let them go to sleep hungry? Do I want to see her making better, smarter, healthier choices? Absolutely. The question is, Does she have any?
The key — and we all know this — is to make that high quality, pristine, lush food — the healthy, delicious, unprocessed stuff, unfettered by the likes of Monsanto — available to the masses, and then, to get the masses to eat it … assuming they even know how to cook it, and that’s an even bigger issue. The fact that the average person in this country doesn’t know how to cook themselves a beet, or a piece of fish, is a very serious bit of business. If we don’t rant and rave about that fact with the same kind of fervor that we attach to organics and locavorism, we’re sunk like the Titanic.
All of this said, and given the politicizing-by-necessity, and the factions, and the throw-downs; given the accusations and frequency of hyperbolic bullying and one-upsmanship (“You’re not a locavore; I’m a locavore because absolutely everything I eat is produced three miles away, whether it’s good or it’s dreck”); given the vast qualitative impasse between those that have and those that don’t; given all that, it’s very easy to get so serious that we wind up stumbling around in the dark. We forget what’s also important, and we lose the delicious lightness that makes food — whether it’s a hotdog at my local drive-in (not organic, pretty definitely not pastured) or a plate of fried chicken at The Old Country Store in Lorman, Mississippi or the oysters and pearls at The French Laundry — pleasurable in that almost corporeal way that found the mayor of repressed Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, in the movie Chocolat, rolling around in the window of the chocolaterie, passed out amidst the sweetness of life.
Food is a serious subject; it’s fraught, from almost every angle. But unless we haul ourselves back from the brink a little bit and balance politics with the lessons of culinary pleasure, we’ll find ourselves like the monks in the New Yorker cartoon: at risk of losing our humanity. And if we do, everything we eat — organic, local, high-end, low-end, conventional, processed — will be exactly the same: fuel.
Thanks for this, Elissa. Ignorance is always the enemy, and fighting that fight doesn’t make us jerks. I love this quote from an upcoming Edible Seattle story: “You can have a LEED building but if you don’t have LEED occupants and a LEED janitor, how do you keep it going?” I’d rather listen to Seattle Housing Authority folks working to solve that food ignorance than chef panels–more exciting, less infuriating. She’s helping transform the city’s biggest, oldest, saddest low income housing, and helping residents demand efficient garden space as part of the coming dense/LEED-certified new development.
Your quote is exactly my point. Tonight I drove past a
New building in town with a sign on it that says We Build Green!
Wonderful—but putting non green tenants into a green building doesn’t work without education. Producing gorgeous and lush local food and expecting non-cooks to know what to do with it because it’s lush is similarly short-sighted. But you’re right: ignorance is the enemy. And fighting it does not make us jerks. It’s how we fight it, I think.
Amen, Sister Elissa. And let’s not forget that the list of outside-the-locavore range for most of us includes such kitchen staples as tea, coffee, salt, spices, vanilla, chocolate and cooking oils. We can certainly make some wiser choices–and we should–but for crying out loud, let’s ease up on the self-righteous localer-than-thou intonations. They don’t win any converts.
Great piece, Elissa.
I DARE anyone in Zone 2 to honestly say they only eat food grown or produced in a 3-mile radius. Summer, OK; it’s possible. September through June? Not possible uniess one’s diet is potatoes, beets, kale, lentils, game, grass-fed beef and pork, eggs and beer. Sounds good, right? But not for every meal, every day for 9 months.
really great piece, elissa.
i cannot strive toward being a locavore; right now, i do my best to afford as much organic as i can. also, my dietary needs limit me: 80% of what i eat must be plant-based. fresh produce and low-fat dairy are my staples, and i buy them at costco. and *only* because i have a car. if i didn’t care about my diet, or didn’t need to be careful what i consumed, the mcdonald’s $1 menu would be my go-to lunch near work. but mcds is a block away, and so is costco. easy choice.
and you cannot be a locavore and drink coffee unless you live in another country. i think there are locavores who are closet rule-breakers
This is a beautiful, thought-provoking piece. I have to think about it a lot before I make an intelligent comment.
I won’t be shelling out $64 anytime soon for American wagyu beef sliders, but I’d pay a lot more than that to sit around with you and Francis Lam and “shoot the breeze.” It would be much more nourishing!
Great piece! I read it on the bus on the way home from work last night, thought about it while I ate dinner, and it was the first thing on my mind this morning when I woke up this morning (after thinking bad thoughts about my alarm clock, that is). But, like Victoria, I still need to mull it all over.
A few immediate thoughts:
This reminds me of an experience I had a month or so ago here in San Francisco where I live. A friend suggested we try a restaurant that opened recently that claims to source all (or most?) of it’s food from within a 100 mile radius. I was a little suspicious and wondered how good the place would be if that was their only claim–and it turns out my suspicions were right: the locally sourced produce and fish and meat they served–the same fish, meat, produce every other restaurant in the city serves, since it simply makes sense to buy local and fresh–wasn’t well prepared. The meal was a disappointment. “Local” didn’t trump poorly prepared food–especially when I could get a memorable and amazing meal down the street at a place using ingredients from similar sources.
GiltTaste: I’ll be curious to see how they do. I’ve enjoyed the articles, but I’m not their target audience for the products they sell. When I visit the site and consider the concept–high-quality content funded by sales of products, not ads–I’m taken back to 1999/2000, the peak of the dot-com era here in San Francisco. I worked briefly in the editorial department at the now defunct site Pets.com (remember the sock puppet?)…and the business model was pretty much the same: quality content written by industry experts that’s loosely linked to the products for sale on the site will draw traffic and keep people on the site long enough to get them to buy stuff. It didn’t work…for a number of reasons…and I wonder if it will work for gilttaste.
Great article. I do not buy the argument that a working mother of 4 has to feed her kids the $1.99 Popeye’s meal, though. The $10 could certainly provide pasta and broccoli, or homemade tacos, which would certainly be a nutritional step up. The fact is, we’re collectively just a bunch of lazy slobs when it comes to cooking. There’s really no excuse, since the advent of cooking TV shows, for someone to “not know” how to cook. Even if you’re illiterate you can watch Rachel Ray and figure out how to make a simple soup and bread.
I remember hearing Tony Bourdain say on one of his shows, something like “if you’re too damned lazy to peel a clove of garlic, you don’t deserve garlic.” This is symbolic of everything wrong with our modern attitude toward cooking, that we’re too damned lazy to peel a clove of garlic. (Of course, he shamed me into it. But that he had to even say it….)
As for eating local, I think that’s a pipe dream, and i live in California. We have a garden, and I won’t buy produce shipped from south of CA, but that’s about it. Eventually Peak Oil will make eating locally mandatory; until then, eat, drink, and be merry, and try to keep the local farms going as much as possible.
Thank you very much for a great piece of writing.
Food is so fraught. What is on the plate represents a small microcosm of our values-economic, social, health, environmental. For some of us, food is a major past time. At the end of the day, though, it is just fuel. Whether it is fuel that kills us, or fuel that makes us (and our planet) healthier is determined by how educated we are about what we are eating and why we are eating it.
I couldn’t agree more that the biggest obstacle to getting the “masses” to eat fresh, healthy, non mass-produced food is education. People need to be taught how to cook at a very basic level, from a young age. Since people are not cooking at home anymore, children are not learning rudimentary lessons about how to cook for themselves. I’m not sure where this education should happen–I guess schools, although given the economic climate, that seems unrealistic. I’m half inclined to say that every decent cook in America should start offering free in-home cooking classes to their local communities.
Loved the piece. I worked on a small goat farm for about 3 1/2 years, making and selling cheese, and that gave me plenty of time (at markets especially) to think about local food and who it’s grown/produced for. One day I made a comment to my boss about how distasteful it was to me that the only people at the farmer’s market were wealthy. Her response was, “Well, they’re the people that buy our cheese.” Really really sad but very true. Recently more markets have made local food accessible to those who can’t typically afford that sort of thing–accepting food stamps. But the prices of the goods haven’t gone down.
Great food for thought. Thanks again.
Thanks so much for your note Meg.
I really enjoyed reading this piece – it was very thought- (and red Ross rage) provoking. What annoys me about militant locavorism is the apparent disregard for far away communities who rely on our purchasing their products. What would happen to Caribbean fruit and sugar producers if the whole of Europe and the US stopped importing their fruits? Probably civil war. As an example one quarter of Haiti’s tiny GDP depends on exporting goods such as sugar and coffee (though I did see this on Wikipedia… Perhaps not perfectly accurate!).
Whereas I agree that we should definitely be more aware of where our food comes from, and buy local-ish when it’s in season, food that can be shipped via sea and road (as Haitian coffee, Indian tea and Italian oilve oil can) is not nearly as big a threat to the environment as air-freighted goods, so it makes sense to keep consuming these types of foods over, say, winter strawberries. You can still support your local economy by purchasing meat and seasonal veg without labelling yourself (and thereby setting yourself up to fail!).
As a response to Meg, my dad was a sheep farmer and produced beautiful lamb which he sold via a cooperative. I don’t know where his meat was sold, but he didn’t make much money from it. Instead, my parents were contrived to buy from powerful discount supermarkets (like Asda – the British Walmart) who were the very people beating the prices down in the meat market. Thankfully, though, they were able to grow most of their veg which was beyond delicious.
Finally, I found the end of the post particularly enlightening: you’re right, Elissa, without passion and pleasure, food just becomes a political vehicle for locavores, or indeed anyone who pigeonholes themselves in a food rut.
I think sometimes we get caught up with the you should/you need to type thinking and forget our humanity. Yes, in a perfect world everyone eats like a local princess – and coffee grows in our backyards. We all know how to cook and have the desire and means to do so.
And then we wake up. Not everyone has the means (or energy) to eat well all the time.
Thank you for talking about this subject. Too often food is about the food (to sound a little crazy 😛 ) and not about the people it fuels.
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