The food movement can't seem to decide where it stands on frugality. On the one hand, we're told that cooking at home saves money, that we should be buying raw ingredients in bulk and eating virtuous 20-cent meals 'recession friendly' meals rather than the fried deliciousness we now consume. On the other, we're informed that we should shop only the fresh-produce-and-meat aisles of the supermarket, that is, if we absolutely must shop at a supermarket - we should really be setting aside a couple hours each day to farmers' markets, butcher shops, fishmongers, cheesemongers, and other quaintly-titled artisans - and that's before any cooking-time enters into it. We are told that we should - if we care about health, taste, and the environment - spend a larger proportion of our incomes on groceries. Which is it?
What seems like contradictory advice is just lecturing directed at different audiences. The grains-and-lentils bit is meant to argue against the notion that anyone's so poor as to have to eat at McDonalds, while the 'mongers suggestion is aimed at those of us who, the movement wants us to believe, could eat well if only we stopped being so damn cheap.
So, a couple things. Is price even a proxy for health-promotion when it comes to groceries? With restaurant food, it certainly is not - most of what a fancier place serves resembles fast food grease-wise but comes in larger portions. For better taste, to an extent, although attempts to gussy up basic foods - English muffins, potato chips, candy bars - tend to produce inferior results to the low-end brands. What about for sustainability? Shouldn't local foods that are in season - and, in theory, that taste best - be the ones that cost less? I can see how, as it stands, some better food choices cost more than some worse ones. But shouldn't we be striving for a situation in which good foods cost less? Isn't asking the middle-class-and-up consumer to spend a greater proportion of his income on groceries - 'like they do in France' - asking not only something unrealistic, but also something that will make those same groceries a major burden on the less wealthy?
But more to the point: is denouncing consumer frugality really the best road to go down? The food movement has come under so much criticism for ignorance of the poor that, to its credit, it has, I think, become a bit more self-aware when it comes to those for whom 'where does each ingredient come from?' artisinal grocery shopping is logistically inconceivable. But consumers with somewhat more choice in the matter are blamed for wanting to keep costs low, as though thrift is in itself suspect, at least when it comes to food. Which it is, if we're looking at all who sell food-movement-approved establishments as particularly worthy charities, not as places where consumers, you know, consume.
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Anthony Bourdain is apparently with you on this.
Yes, Bourdain really has it in for Alice Waters. But I guess what I was getting at more here is that there's now a general agreement that the poor can't afford organic milk - and a general horror whenever Alice Waters or similar suggests the poor just need to rebudget - yet the food movement fails to understand that those who can (or can sort of) afford it might, for reasons of frugality, choose the regular kind.
To put it in UChicago terms, I thought the idea was to help push forward an economy of scale: if everyone buys the organic milk who can afford it, then the farmers producing that milk can do so on a larger scale and at lower average cost per unit. Organic milk is a particularly good example here, since it does seem to be getting mainstreamed and cheaper (the Super Wal-Mart in my hometown has been carrying it for the last few years), thereby making it more accessible to the lower-income folks.
I never took econ in college (fool that I am - instead I studied stereotypes about Jews and money). But that makes sense. Still, the food-movement types tend to be against "organic" once its adopted by Big Agriculture, that is, once the small-scale, local ideal stops mattering. (Organic is supposed to be a philosophy, not just an attitude towards pesticides.) I don't know how this applies in terms of milk - whether the advantages to organic milk are imagined to remain or disappear when said milk is distributed via Walmart. (I get milk that's local but not organic, which I suppose makes me a yuppie of the worst kind.)
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