The Fact of Tides: My Road Food Rant Redux

Of course I won’t look at it—

Susan just rolled her eyes.

And mostly, I haven’t.

There’s no WiFi in this lovely house we’ve rented, perched high above Atkins Bay in Maine. My cell phone works whimsically — I have to stand on one foot, in one spot in the living room, and I might get a bar or two, but only in the morning, which was just long enough yesterday for me to receive another notification that someone was attempting to post a comment on this blog, under the apparently incendiary piece I wrote about the deplorable quality of food that one finds while traveling in this country. I’ve released a few of the more benign comments posted by more moderate folks, but I draw the line at being called an arrogant food elitist liberal prick. Call me crazy.

It used to be that if I had something to say that could be politicized in any way, I’d post it on my page at HuffingtonPost.com, where that kind of thing is expected. But because the act of driving (or taking the train) from point A to point B and stopping for something to eat and finding dreck is simply a part of life in this country — this act knows no political party; it’s ubiquitous — I decided to write about it here instead. The comments ranged from blithe agreement to angry diffidence, to raging, hilarious ignorance. Of the best:

Mmmmmmm. All this hand-wringing elitism is making me hungry. A bunch of affluent pricks with food allergies (a delightfully American condition) is complaining about the dreadful state of travel food? Get real.

It took a little quiet time and a gin cocktail or two sucked down while staring at Atkins Bay before I finally got my head around the multi-layered ignorance of the comment. I’ve spent four days here watching the tide; there’s no argument or discussion about whether it goes in or out. It just does, as it has for millennia. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, a Conservative or Liberal, or rich or poor: the tide goes in and it goes out. We can try to politicize it, but it — the fact of tides — just is what it is.

Likewise, when anyone (rich or poor, regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on) travels in this country, they’re faced with the fact that the food available on the road is of abysmal quality; it’s cheaply produced, and cheaply sold so — theoretically — everyone can afford it. It doesn’t matter who we are, what we earn, or who we vote for. What this commenter neglected to say, of course, spoke volumes: do they agree that the quality of food on the road is bad, and that American travelers are essentially sitting ducks, no different then, say, school children who are fed HFCS-laden snacks because the manufacturer is subsidizing that school’s lunch program? Or do they actually believe that the quality of food on the road is good (or at least acceptable) and it’s only affluent, pompous schmucks like me who have the chutzpah to complain about it because we’re expecting heritage pork on an artisanal, gluten-free roll instead?

Either way, what does resonate loudly is the fundamental irony of this person’s elitist comment: those of us who believe, with every fiber of our beings, that everyone should have access to good quality food, devoid of the very chemicals that have screwed with our systems and resulted in millions of people with bizarre, Earl Butz-ian food allergies that never existed until forty years ago — we’re very definitely not the elitists. That title should be reserved for those like my commenter, who arrogantly and inadvertently implies the very sad truth behind how we got where we are in this country, food and health-wise: it’s somebody else’s problem. It’s okay, this commenter is saying, to feed the less affluent crap, because they deserve nothing better, and should expect nothing better. Let them eat cake, as it were.

A few years ago, I watched a panel discussion between Anthony Bourdain, Alice Waters, and poor Duff Goldman (who couldn’t get a word in edge-wise); what started as a reasonably polite conversation turned into a throwdown of monumental proportion. Poison-dipped arrows were fired from every direction, and by the end of the conversation, three things were abundantly clear: Bourdain angrily had no time or patience for prissy, holier-than-thou Berkeley organic Free Speech foodists while the line outside Popeye’s in Oakland on $1.99 Friday was stretching around the block. Waters, for her part, hung the success or failure of modern society on the ideals of food justice and equality for everyone, even while precious few (I am admittedly one of those few) can actually afford to eat at her restaurant. At the end of the day, they were saying the exact same thing, but in very different ways: real food needs to be made available to everyone. It needs to be affordable. It needs to not be infused with the artificially-fabricated, chemical lusciousness that scientists have determined we, as humans, crave. It needs to not spark a deadly cycle that results in our bodies identifying those chemically delicious compounds as foreign matter and responding with illnesses ranging from diabetes to those uniquely American food allergies about which my commenter speaks so compassionately. Like the fact of tides, the democratization — the availability — of real food is not meant for debate: this is an ethical, moral issue, plain and simple, with roots as ancient as loaves and fishes. And we are never, ever going to move this conversation forward and find answers to this universal, politically blind problem unless we sit down together and stop throwing rocks.

But if you do have to go down the political road, so be it: don’t be so concerned about who I marry, or whether or not I pray (or to whom), or my right to a safe abortion, and then blithely look the other way while the only food I have access to is going to kill me, my family, my children, and yours.  You don’t get to have it both ways.

Now tell me who’s the elitist.