James McWilliams: Should We Really Pay $4 for a Peach?
[James McWilliams is an Associate Professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos.]
For a movement that's always been touchy about being labeled elitist, the food movement has been surprisingly outspoken lately about the virtues of expensive food. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Michael Pollan sang the praises of sustainable eggs that cost eight dollars a dozen and delectable peaches that go for $3.90 each. Such prices would seem less shocking, he assured readers, if conscientious consumers were willing to "pay more, eat less." Likewise, when asked to explain how average (i.e., not famous and rich) consumers could actually be expected to spend more on food in the midst of a recession, Alice Waters was as clear as she was unabashed: "Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes." So there.
Needless to say, the backlash—as Pollan and Waters must have known it would be—was swift. Anthony Bourdain, who dedicates a full chapter of his latest book, Medium Raw, to attacking Waters's airy idealism, scoffs at the idea that people should be willing to spend more on food: "She annoys the living shit out of me....
But I wonder: Are we taking the food movement's king and queen to the woodshed prematurely? As someone who thinks Pollan and Waters are "damnably" wrong about a lot of things, I would actually defend them here on the grounds that in promoting expensive sustainable food they're really lamenting the artificial cheapness of industrial food. In fact, they've dedicated their careers to attacking the underlying political apparatus—namely subsidies—maintaining our remarkably inexpensive supply of crap food....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
For a movement that's always been touchy about being labeled elitist, the food movement has been surprisingly outspoken lately about the virtues of expensive food. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Michael Pollan sang the praises of sustainable eggs that cost eight dollars a dozen and delectable peaches that go for $3.90 each. Such prices would seem less shocking, he assured readers, if conscientious consumers were willing to "pay more, eat less." Likewise, when asked to explain how average (i.e., not famous and rich) consumers could actually be expected to spend more on food in the midst of a recession, Alice Waters was as clear as she was unabashed: "Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes." So there.
Needless to say, the backlash—as Pollan and Waters must have known it would be—was swift. Anthony Bourdain, who dedicates a full chapter of his latest book, Medium Raw, to attacking Waters's airy idealism, scoffs at the idea that people should be willing to spend more on food: "She annoys the living shit out of me....
But I wonder: Are we taking the food movement's king and queen to the woodshed prematurely? As someone who thinks Pollan and Waters are "damnably" wrong about a lot of things, I would actually defend them here on the grounds that in promoting expensive sustainable food they're really lamenting the artificial cheapness of industrial food. In fact, they've dedicated their careers to attacking the underlying political apparatus—namely subsidies—maintaining our remarkably inexpensive supply of crap food....