This was a cute read. I'll admit it, I'm definitely one of the snobs who would rather spend a few extra bucks on fair trade coffee and free range chicken. What I liked about this article is the supposed culinary creativity it takes to eat poor quality. Like a burrito simply being last nights leftovers, etc.
Anyway, buy locally grown.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/op...gewanted=print
July 22, 2005
Don't Get Fresh With Me!
By JULIE POWELL
SOME are depressed by the sun deprivation of winter; my anxiety peaks instead at the height of summer. This isn't some sort of seasonal affective disorder-in-reverse. My worsening temper can be calibrated precisely not to the longer days but rather to another unrelenting symbol of the season: the blossoming farmers' market I walk through in Manhattan's Union Square. I confess that half an hour browsing in that utopia of produce - or the new Whole Foods Market at the square's south end - often leaves me longing for the antiseptic but nonjudgmental aisles of low-end supermarkets like Key Food or Western Beef.
Don't get me wrong: I love a big, ugly tomato as much as the next girl. I buy my fair share of pencil-thin asparagus and micro-greens, and I'm sure if ever I were to stand in an orchard and taste a peach picked during one of its two days of succulent perfection, I would find it one of life's greatest joys. Perhaps one day I will - if I move to California, where life is apparently just one great organic cornucopia. But even in that exceedingly unlikely event, I'll remain a bit suspicious of this cult of garden-freshness.
Through the work of passionate chefs and food advocates like Alice Waters, our anxieties about Frankenfood and rampant obesity have been transformed into a positive movement of pleasurable eating, based on a menu of local, organic foods and a strong support of sustainable agriculture. This style of cuisine, which first cropped up in California and has spread like kudzu across the nation, has caused the proliferation of "seasonal menus" in restaurants from Washington State to Palm Beach, Fla.
The key principle of the movement is to "treat fine ingredients with respect." A worthy goal, surely, as is providing healthful food for children and resistance to genetic engineering, antibiotics and hormones. It seems churlish and wrong-headed to mock this dedication; it's like sneering at puppies or true love or democracy. And yet, as admirable as these efforts are, there remains buried in this philosophy two things that just get my hackles up.
The first and most dangerous aspect is the temptation of economic elitism. Of course, food has always been about class. In his classic meditation "The Physiology of Taste," first published in 1825, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested a series of three "gastronomical tests," menus designed to expose the culinary sensitivity - or lack thereof - of one's dining companions. These are organized according to economic status: you can expect your wealthy friends ("Presumed income: 30,000 francs and more") to salivate at the sight of "a seven-pound fowl, stuffed round as a ball with Périgord truffles"; while your stevedore buddies will be perfectly satisfied by good sauerkraut.
This sort of garden-variety condescension is eternal, and relatively harmless. What makes the snobbery of the organic movement more insidious is that it equates privilege not only with good taste, but also with good ethics. Eat wild Brazil nuts and save the rainforest. Buy more expensive organic fruit for your children and fight the national epidemic of childhood obesity. Support a local farmer and give economic power to responsible stewards of sustainable agriculture. There's nothing wrong with any of these choices, but they do require time and money.
When you wed money to decency, you come perilously close to equating penury with immorality. The milk at Whole Foods is hormone-free; the milk at Western Beef is presumably full of the stuff - and substantially less expensive. The chicken at Whole Foods is organic and cage-free; the chicken at Western Beef is not. Is the woman who buys her children's food at the place where they take her food stamps therefore a bad mother?
"That's not cooking, that's shopping." This epigram has been attributed to Julia Child and several other chefs of an older generation, in reference to the tenets of California Cuisine. It is sometimes used - often pronounced in a snooty French accent or Childean warble - by devotees of the organic movement (like Doug Hamilton, writer and director of the documentary "Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution") to mock these fusty old-school cooks. For the newer generation, a love for traditional fine cuisine is cast as fussy and snobbish, while spending lots of money is, curiously, considered egalitarian and wise.
I object to this equation. Shopping is the province of the privileged; fine cooking is not. Indeed, great cuisine arose from privation. The techniques of smoking, drying, salting and roasting were all developed to preserve foods past the "perfect peach" stage, past the day the vegetable was harvested or the animal butchered, to save for a time of less bounty. Preserved foodstuffs led directly the development of culinary traditions, as people who wanted nothing more than to feed themselves well and with pleasure taught themselves how best to combine ingredients artfully, to create something more than the sum of its parts. (Not to mention that salted fish and smoked meats made possible the ocean voyages that, for instance, introduced Europeans to California.) Classic French sauces were conceived to ennoble less-than-prime beef. A burrito is nothing more than a delicious disguise for inelegant leftovers.
Cooking is one of the few actions that verifiably separates us from other animals, and its universality brings us together. This is a sentiment that's been treasured since the dawn of cuisine by people who value the art of eating. And it's not only the ingredients - be they delicate heirloom tomatoes or the stalwart hothouse kind - that we share when we eat well together. There is also the love and creativity and work we combine them with - those human qualities that transform food into cuisine, and eating into a pleasure.
WITH his gastronomic tests, Brillat-Savarin sought to find others like himself, of whatever economic status, who truly enjoyed food. It's easy to do the same today, but the method isn't to assume that everyone at Whole Foods is wise and everyone at the Western Beef benighted.
Instead, look in their carts. Some shop at Western Beef for nothing more than diet cola and frozen bagels; some at Whole Foods for premade sushi and overdesigned bottles of green tea. These people have much in common. So, too, do the professorial types poring over the sweet corn and dewy blueberries at the greenmarket and the Honduran family at the discount grocery, piling their cart high with rice and dried beans and canned tomatoes and all the other stuff you need to make something out of nothing much.
Julie Powell is the author of the forthcoming "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen."
) don't necessarily have anything to do with it. I don't necessarily like the class argument either, but it's easier to use that single word, rather than say "go to the liberal food co-op, then go to the Pathmark in the bad side of town, compare incomes, and tell me which one has the higher average income."
Linear Mode
