A foodie repents

I think, like many movements, the "foodie" movement is a reaction to the kind of mass-consumer food that became prevalent over the last few decades. The kind of ho-hum average and entirely consistent food that you could get any season, with different stores staffed by different people thousands of miles away from each other. You can get practically the exact same meal in Winter in Boston as you can in Summer in Nevada. Want sushi from your local Mr. Tuna in Colorado? No problem!

It's interesting to revisit the chains that were popular when I was growing up, the ones that haven't really changed their decor or menus. The food tastes exactly like I remember it, and it's honestly terrible. But growing up I didn't know it was bad, all food everywhere basically tasted like this. It was either this or local mom & pop homestyle stuff...nothing special.

Looking back, I think I grew up at an intersection of two events: people were becoming affluent enough to eat something other than food cooked at home, and we had become so enamored with our ability to provide any season, hyper-consistent food that we never stopped to ask if it was a good idea.

Think about how many Chotchkie's-style casual dining restaurants there are, all virtually interchangeable from each other. Once you start to hit a number of locations in the hundreds, it's just inevitable.

I think foodie-ism is looking at this ossifying industry and finding it relatively easy to disrupt. It can get pretentious at times, with lists of all the locally sourced ingredients in the homemade ketchup, but it also means you can get good food for a change. It means that if you have 20 restaurants, you have 20 actual choices of places to eat and not groups of interchangeable taste-alikes.

Even in traditionally very manufactured food places, the burger joint, newer franchises like In-n-Out or Shake Shack, which actually artificially limit their expansion to ensure the kinds of ultra-high quality ingredients they use are available.

Honestly, if you like food at all, it's an awesome time to be alive, I have no idea how we made it through the 70's, 80's and 90's.

I liked this part:

Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance ... it’s a form of surrogate politics. To some, it’s not even surrogate politics; it’s the real deal, politics at its most urgent and consequential. [...]

I’m thrilled by this notion, and yet I find that I can’t submit to it. [...] If shopping and cooking really are the most consequential, most political acts in my life, perhaps what that means is that our sense of the political has shrunk too far [...] Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.”

*

Food choices matter, but it's important to understand that a politics limited to consumer choices (like food, or boycotts) is very limited and unlikely to make much difference. There are exceptions (like South Africa), but the record is not very strong.

It's all about me, me, me!

This is the dark side of the second tier of what's left of the literary movement - articles which begin with a long section of blithering about the author's background, family, or cats. At least on blogs, one has the option of skipping the "About" page.

The New Yorker would not have published this in its heyday.

By the same author: "How to Spend Money".

So, in a nutshell the author thinks that the 'foodie' movement can't feed the world.

Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. At its heart, the foodie movement is the complex jumble of things the author mentions. Politics, art, identity, history, etc. But it's also highly supported by people with excess income. So some of this critique seems to warrant further investigation. On the other hand, many of these movements actually are dipping into techniques from a previous era and different social strata. For instance pickling, home preserves, raising your own chickens, etc. Many of these things are actually able to co-exist with urban density, and many more can be if urban planning was adjusted in certain respects.

Additionally, I think many who focus on the quality of food would argue the world can't afford to feed the future 11 billion-peopled world using current agricultural practices. Economically, cheap transportation costs prop up various agricultural bread baskets, and will likely see future disruption as oil availability fluctuates. Other places, like California, require more water than is actually locally available. Some would also question the environmental cost of modern ag processes. From pesticide use to deforestation, agricultural use is often at the core of human's environmental impact in an area.

The foodie/locavore/in-season movement all have various things to offer to this debate. Throwing such a focus out seems silly, possibly at least as silly as those who think GMO products have no part of the future equation to feeding the world.

There is also "Brunch Is for Jerks" [1], and "I am not a coffee drinker" [2] from the Times. What's up with the petty food articles these days from award-winning print media? Aren't there real issues to talk about? These seem less like interesting cultural takes and more like whining.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/opinion/sunday/brunch-is-f...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/opinion/sunday/i-am-not-a-...

This article gets it hugely wrong. Food is one of the highest forms of art; one that's vital and human and social all at once.

You don't have to like it, but you do have to eat, and it's such a large part of life and culture that yes, it does matter.

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

-- John Adams

The seemingly trivial becomes the pinnacle of importance when it stands on a solid foundation.

>after her ordination

Nuns aren't ordained. They take vows but ordination is only for priests (or deacons).

"from an environmental point of view, density is good." The author is confident enough to gloss over this which makes me skeptical of his conclusions about any large scale impact of the 'foodie' movement.