Let them eat canned tomatoes

By Julie Powell -- International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK 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 the 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.

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
Perigord 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. Is the woman who buys her children's food at the
place where they take her food stamps therefore a bad mother?


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. (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.

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 the lavish Whole Foods Market is wise and everyone at
low-end supermarkets like Western Beef benighted. Instead, look in their
carts. Some shop at Western Beef for nothing more than diet cola and
frozen bagels; some at the 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.")