We Are What We Eat
It’s easy to take food for granted: that it will be there when we want it, that we will have choices in what we eat and how we eat and when. The Article of the Week has recently several interesting pieces that parse these choices more clearly: what if your favorite foods were no longer available? Or if they advertised your economic status? Or if your choices were taken away altogether? Everyone’s relationship with food is different, which is why considering the larger context can be so fascinating.
“Fixed Menu” by Kevin Pang, March 24, 2015, Lucky Peach
Controlling food (type, portion, quality) is one of the ways the prison industrial complex dehumanizes prisoners, and it’s more effective than you think.
“Trash Food” by Chris Offutt, April 10, 2015, Oxford American
Food as an indicator of class and status, and what you’re really saying when you eat something ironically. What do our food choices and affiliations say about us?
Runners-up: Jon’s picks
“Have You Eaten Your Last Avocado” by Adam Sternbergh, April 20, 2015, New York Magazine
Hey remember Famine? Like, from the bible? It's back now. Get excited. Except don't because famine is just a bummer. I love avocados. I have four of them sitting a foot away on my kitchen table. And I'm worried about them, because after reading Adam Sternbergh's excellent piece, I'm concerned that these avocados that I bought for pretty cheap are turning into precious commodities before my very eyes. In case you haven't noticed, California is facing the kind of drought that usually gets prophesied in the dream of a Pharoah or something like that. And that delicious guacamole that you love (if you're not a monster) of course comes from those miracle farms in California that are slowly turning back into the deserts they started as. It's a piece that takes the biblical end of days growing effects of global warming and brings it out of the realm of climate charts and melting ice caps all the way at the poles and into the (for me in my oblivious life, at least) much more close-to-home issue of a food I love becoming prohibitively expensive to create. It's the story of unchecked growth and the realization that we maybe cannot actually utterly conquer nature, even if it would be great if we could.
“David Simon on Baltimore's Anguish” by Bill Keller, April 29, 2015, The Marshall Project
It's because almost a cliche of people who care a lot about prestige TV and the cultural conversation to think that they totally understand the way that crime works in the American inner city because they watched The Wire. So it's with a bit of trepidation that I wholeheartedly recommend this conversation with David Simon, the show's creator, in the wake of the protests against police brutality in the show's home town this past week. It's easy to forget, considering the way he's been anointed as a saint of TV's golden age, that Simon covered the Baltimore police department for the Sun for over a decade, and wrote THE nonfiction book on crime in the city before he ever went about fictionalizing it. It's a refreshing take on how the system works, and more often doesn't, but with real-life details instead of high-minded dialogue. Tommy Carcetti gets turned back into Martin O'Malley, and Shakespearean drama turns back into stark and upsetting reality. Simon tells the story he's always been telling, of the decline of one of America's great cities and the unfortunate, mostly black people in the bottom that get hurt the most, but this time, he's telling it in his voice, not those of Omar and McNulty.