Mean Cuisine

Washington Monthly, July, 2001 by Greg Critser

Part of the answer can be summed up in one word: abundance. Ten years ago, a pint of cold-pressed, extra-virgin Italian olive oil would set you back about $20. It was scarce, and so it was the chef's preference. Today one can buy a gallon for the same price. Today, of course, imported oil is not the chef's choice. And here is where the real twisted thinking starts: To avoid sounding like an old-fashioned snob, the modern chef instead proclaims that imported oil from big foreign farms "wrecks the earth" Or that its widespread availability will kill off good ol' Farmer Joe over in Ridley. So the "correct" oil nowadays trickles from local boutique olive farmers in, say, Napa. They cost ... $20 per pint.

In this sense, today's menus and cookbooks have become the modern equivalent of the old etiquette book. They are simply prescriptions for socially acceptable snobbery. The snobfest itself flows from what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called "status anxiety," the sinking feeling, often felt after, say, actually speaking to the maid or the gardener, that the world is changing, expanding, and in the process making one smaller, less important.

While once visited upon the wealthy only every generation or so, status anxiety now seems to strike with every tick of the Dow. The culprit is globalization. Only 10 years ago the world was still divided by formidable tariffs and restrictive trade rules. Everything was a fortress--Fortress Europe, Fortress Japan, etc. Consequently, what constituted status was exotic travel, striking off for Nepal, or buying a $20 cup of Italian olive oil. Such was the comforting Raj-like mentality, prissy and white, behind the early '90s preference for Chilean sea bass and New Zealand blackberries.

Today we live in a world of unprecedented free trade. Peaches from Chile and mangos from Ecuador are as common as celebrities at an AA meeting. French goat cheese--it's actually affordable. Everyone is partying, crossing over, dancing the rumba, and eating salsa. Predictably, the food snob, led by the chefs, blanches at all of this debauchery encroaching on his gated estate. He thus turns to the home-grown, to the pseudo-yeomanry of the local farmers' market, to the long "taken for granted" local cheese makers and the "curmudgeonly" presser of Mill Valley olive oil.

Yet this social function of the cuisine of trepidation pales against its economic and cultural impact. This is because chefs have found a growing voice in public policy, which, despite all noble intentions, can negatively affect us all, organic-tomato lovers or not.

At the local level their influence arrives in the form of the growing "sustainable schoolyard" movement, founded by Mice Waters. Using both private and city funds, these programs have a laudable enough goal: to provide an alternative to the greasy fast food bacchanal known as "lunch" in the nation's public schools. In practice, they teach kids about growing their own veggies and plug local farmers into the school nutrition bureaucracy. Kids have taken to it mainly because any fruits, picked ripe, taste better.