Palatics

Rob posts about a kerfuffle in the foodie community in which Anthony Bourdain has attacked — gasp! — Alice Waters. There’s a ton to unpack here, which I’m not going to get to in just one blog post.  As a start, I’ll dig into the  full meat of Bourdain’s comments:

[Interviewer] Any advice about food?

[AB] I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue. It’d be great if he [Obama] served better food at the White House than what I suspect the Bushies were serving. It’s gotta be better than Nixon. He liked starting up a roaring fire, turning up the air conditioning, and eating a bowl of cottage cheese with ketchup. Anything above that is a good thing. He’s from Chicago, so he knows what good food is.

Strong words, and I’m the first to acknowledge that Waters, for all of her culinary contributions, can come across as a bit precious in her quest to save the world one perfect peach at a time.  But Bourdain’s supposed wrestling between his libertarianism and his disgust for fast food exposes a certain naivete on his part about the shortcomings of the modern food system. Our fast food culture is not an outgrowth of a libertarian food policy, but instead is a result of an extremely prescriptive set of laws that props up a few giant industry players — and their outputs of unhealthy foodstuffs and environmentally destructive practices — with enormous government subsidies.

As a result, unhealthy food is cheaper than more nutritious alternatives.  It is not simply a matter of consumer choice when the market conditions have been so drastically altered, and the people on the losing end are all too often those who have already been dealt a bad lot.

My believe is that those of us who have a choice about what we eat should use that choice to support alternatives to the industrial food system.  Sure, I spend a fair bit more money on eating that most people, but I don’t do it because I’m just throwing my cash around.  I do it because I think it’s making a difference.  If I help support an alternative market, then maybe someday that demand will make more sustainable food accessible to people of lesser means.

I recognize Bourdain’s suspicion of dogma; I have no interest in telling people what to eat.  But I’d like to start moving to a place where more people have the ability to make unbiased choices about what’s right for them.