¡Join the fight!
There's a crappy editorial at the LA Times this morning, in which writer Charlotte Allen clucks her tongue at the growing argument against cheap goods, in this case, argued by Ellen Ruppel Shell in her book Cheap. It's garbage, because Allen fails to take down Cheap's base argument, that cheap means someone upstream had to pay the real cost for cheapness. Read more...
Judging by Alice Waters' interview on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, the downturn in the economy has not impacted her restaurant Chez Panisse at all. Apparently San Franciscans are still going for the roughly hundred dollar meals of grilled local squab in salmis sauce with squab liver toast and bittersweet chocolate souffle.
Because Waters is sticking to her guns. It's slow food or die at Chez Panisse. And who could argue with her core belief that eating foods without poisons on them is a right, not a privilege? Not El Dragón. And local food isn't just a lefty, Berkely cliche -- after all, isn't it an old school Republican value to have a web of small businesses (local food systems) networking across the country? And, for years, major hospitals have been begging Americans to eat more, fresh, green veggies in order to staunch the obesity and diabetes epidemics in this country.
The problem is that Waters doesn't explain why people think sustainable food is expensive and why it seems elitist. Without doing that, the whole argument for local/sustainable/organic foods, the whole movement, stops in its tracks like a shopper with sticker shock -- and Waters opens herself to being called elitist. Which fellow gatekeeper Leslie Stahl does. Repeatedly.
