Letters to the Editor
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Gee, thanks Alice! (not)
Thanks from all of us in the midwest, or other cold climates (like: all of Canada) for suggesting we live more than half the year on cabbage, onions, TURNIPS (yum!), cauliflower and oh yeah, let's not forget POLENTA.
I'll consider trying that when Ms. Water's gets off her butt and leaves her million dollar+ house in trendy Berkeley to come to my home town of Cleveland, Ohio and actually does what she says for a year: lives on root vegetables and whatever can be found fresh (pretty much nothing) when there is two feet of frozen slush on the ground. That's right: no citrus, no lettuce, no fresh veggies of any kind. Let's see how long she lasts.
Our ancestors who had to eat this way had a miserable diet, and the bad teeth, rotten nutrition, scurvy, rickets, childhood diseases and early death to prove it.
Enough people have pointed out that Ms. Waters (BTW: a good chef and restauranteur and author of some good cookbooks) lives in one of the mildest climates in the US, which also means California is one of the biggest farming powerhouses in the world, providing the whole country with food. And we are not unappreciative, because we can't possibly grow this stuff year round in the rest of the US. But that doesn't give her the right to get on a high horse and spout off this kind of elitist food fascism. In it's ignorance of the reality of most working people's lives (and as pointed out, she isn't really a working person anymore, she hasn't been involved with the day to day operations of Chez Panisse for a long time -- what she is basically is a Foodie Celebrity with all the time in the world to shop and cook and pontificate) and her Marie Antoinette-like pronouncements of "Let Them Stop Renting DVDs and Eat Organic Veggies", she is actually cruel.
Sure, we'd all love to eat like she does if we had millions of dollars, all the time in the world to stay home and cook, a mild climate in the priciest part of the US, and really cool organic farmers markets at our doorstep (oh and let's not forget that farmers are lot more likely to give their nicest produce to a famous chef than an ordinary shopper!). But we don't. And we never will.
Maybe I particularly snarky because I recently finished reading the also insufferable Barbara Kingsolver, spouting a nearly identical academic/elitest/food snob set of opinions in her new book "Animal Vegetable Miracle". Much like Ms. Waters, Ms. Kingsolver dances around the problem that a lot of the foods we consider absolutely normal parts of our diet cannot be obtained locally at any price: coffee, pepper, nearly all spices, chocolate, fresh fruit in winter, citrus anywhere but CA and Florida. Does Ms. Waters really do without these items? Does she seriously expect most people to willingly do so? If so, she's even more naive and elitist than she comes across.
BTW: I love cooking and good food, and I luckily have access to both a good, very uncommercialized food market and local growers (in the summer!) for all kinds of wonderful, fresh produce. I know the difference between a homegrown peach right off the tree and a rock hard, mealy peach dragged up from Chile in February. Even so, if I want to eat fresh, healthy food in the cold winter months, I have to depend on food sources that are very far from home. I might add, I also like ethnic foods and I like diversity in my diet. The idea of living on root vegetables half the year is just too lame and pathetic to discuss seriously.
I'd like to briefly address another point: the idea that "eating local and/or organic foods" will immediately translate into being thin and presumably will cure all obesity. This is rubbish. My ancestors lived on farms in Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia -- they grew all or most of the what they ate, and cooked everything (obviously) from scratch (which is no small amount of labor, all by womenfolk). There can't have been any fertilizers or chemicals, so what they ate must have been purely organic.
And nearly everyone of them, bless their hearts, was obese. And I don't mean "a little overweight" or "a bit chunky" -- I mean morbidly obese. Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes -- the whole lot. Few of them lived past age 62. I have no doubt that their healthy, homegrown, homecooked food was delicious and no doubt they ate it in quantities sufficient to get very, very fat. Homegrown and organic is fine, but it is no cure for obesity.
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It's elitist and not all at the same time
First she advises, eat the way the peasants and the poor did. Okay, cause if you think wealthy land owners and royalty were eating only locally, ha. The sent ships out to get food and spices from other regions and I see no reason why I should never eat a pineapple or banana becuase they don't grow in California or that frozen veggies are bad, its just a preservation method. Food travel allowed the poor to eat better, not worse. The poor became more able to eat because now they could afford what was only available to the rich previously. There are plenty of people starving on this planet and they've always eaten what's grown locally. So basically, advocating a only eat local, in season, is saying return to poor people's lifestyles, but it will cost more and consume more time and energy to search out these ways, so it's also elitist.
I just think too many people eat convienince foods from the freezer section. I think that's where a lot of the health problems come from so the whole eat organic and local and blah blah, okay you do that, for me, I have enough trouble keeping up with my studies, job and running a household to sit around and research what food is in season when, what grows near-by and where do I go to get it when I don't want to spend my Saturday shopping, nor am I a morning person and there is no way in hell I'm giving up the one day I have to sleep in to go shopping at the more expensive farmers market.