Gee Bookseller Mandy must have hit a nerve.

She did indeed. The assumption that "X works for me and therefore it will work for everyone else" is the kind of self-congratulatory "theorizing" that I usually see on the Right ("I managed to put myself through college so I don't see why anyone should need a government loan"; "I was able to quit drinking without any difficulty so it's clear that anyone who drinks too much is simply weak-willed"; etc.) It pisses me off mightily to see it coming from the Left.

You know, so many letter-writers here have characterized this article as yet another "blame the poor" diatribe that I went back and re-read it. And a couple of things jumped out at me. First is that, in the main, the article doesn't have much of a moralistic tone. Yes, there's some discussion of people's priorities, but nobody's getting castigated or put down for having the "wrong" priorities; the author mostly sticks to pointing out cause and effect. If you opt to spend your discretionary $100 on X rather than on food, the chances of your being able to feed your family healthfully go down.

Second, there's a fairly pervasive assumption here that the article focuses on the poor. It doesn't. I'd venture to guess that all families, with the exception of the very rich, pay at least some attention to prices when they go grocery-shopping, even if it's only to say "Mmmmm, got a yen for caviar right now, but jeez, the budget's kinda tight this week...I guess I gotta pass." So to the extent that we all pay some attention to food costs, and to the extent that "better" food (read: fresher, produced with fewer chemicals, more locally derived) costs more, we are all going to need to expect to pay more IF we want to feed our families more healthfully. And again, that's an IF. Nobody's saying you're evil or even a schmuck for choosing to spend that $100 on fripperies like winter coats or anything else. But if the grocery store is where you choose to economize, again, your ability to feed your family healthfully...goes down. And furthermore, it can be argued that it's something of a false economy, since feeding the family cheap food can boost costs elsewhere in the household budget.

It's all very well to demand macro-changes -- changes to insurance regulations, changes to government subsidy practices. I hope like hell we do, as a population, demand those changes, and vote people into office prepared to make those changes a reality. But -- and this is for those letter-writers who have castigated this article as "elitist" -- suppose it takes 20 years to get that kind of legislation written. What are people supposed to do in the meantime? Bitching about "elitism" doesn't make their kids healthier. And if the government isn't going to step in, in any meangingful way, to do that, and the corporate sector sure as hell isn't, then the only way to improve your family's diet is to shoulder the responsibility for it yourself, whether or not that responsibility should, in a perfectly moral universe, rest with you.. And eating "better" food means paying more at the grocery store. It's not a moral argument; it's an entirely pragmatic one. On that great, great, come-and-git-it day, organic, locally raised tomatoes will cost less than ADM's little bulletproof belly-bombs. But until that day arrives, we -- all of us -- have to choose between paying more at the grocery store, or paying less and paying the cost in other ways.