Food porn
There is nothing that annoys me more than waking up on a Saturday morning and realizing 1) I failed to rinse out the coffee pot the day and now have to WASH DISHES before I’m fully caffeinated, which is a buzzkill and 2) I’ve turned on NPR just in time for the worst radio program in the history of ever, “The Splendid Table.”“The Splendid Table” is hosted by some self-righteous twat named Lynne Rossetto Kasper (I had to look this up because I always thought her name was Lynn Rosette O’Casper) who delivers treatises on food and fine dining in a breathy alto. To be fair, I have never actually listened to an entire show because despite my need to hear the news, I can’t abide Lynne Rosetto Kasper and her pretentious fucking program–I must immediately purify myself with something loud and unmannerly, like Minor Threat. However, this trifling fact does not stop me from forming an opinion that Lynne Rosetto Kasper has birthed an entire generation of upper-class food snobbery that is currently sweeping college towns (here’s looking at you, Ann Arbor!), the New York Times weekend edition, cable TV (the Food Network? Really?) and a deluge of applications to culinary schools when you can’t decide what else to do with your trust fund.
Let me back up for a minute. As a vegan, sharing meals with people who aren’t vegetarian sometimes means negotiating complex territory. There are the not-vegetarians like my family, big eaters who find vegetarianism silly and say things at Christmas like, “What do you EAT? Can you still have beer?” and occasionally dangle a strip of pork steak in front of me to see if I’ll take the bait. Annoying, but they’re coming around. Then there are the not-vegetarians who are the target audience of Lynne Rosetto Kasper, who ONLY EAT MEAT OCCASIONALLY and buy it GRASS FED from local markets and blah blah. I have a sneaking suspicion that my veganism causes this second class of people a secret inferiority complex because they are educated enough to know that veganism makes the most sense, logically, ecologically, and financially–yet they just can’t give up (insert name of something they could totally give up). They feel as though my veganism is a statement on their failure to do so, and even if I have not mentioned ANYTHING ABOUT IT, they notice my salad or instructions to the server and simmer shamefully across the table, feeling judged. Then they say things like, “I used to be a vegetarian, but…” or “I tried veganism for x number of years, but…” (if I had a dollar for every time I heard either of the above sentences, I would be able to pay off my student loans AND my siblings’ student loans). I’m sympathetic to a point–the path to my veganism was full of stops and starts, and I’m a good enough cook that learning how to prepare cheap, delicious, well-balanced meals wasn’t that big of a learning curve for me–this isn’t true for everyone. But the bottom line is that I want to be vegan; I want my lifestyle to not involve suffering and death as much as I can possibly ensure, and that means foregoing even your organic, grass-fed, locally purchased T-bone. This is the real difference between an ethical vegan and a fad vegan: the first reason I’m vegan is morality. (I grew up in the country and have seen plenty of chickens and pigs slaughtered, so I’m not speaking from a glass house here.) I think it’s wrong to kill animals.* Explaining this to the Lynne Rosetto Kasper crowd, I almost always feel that I’m a disappointment: “Oh, well, that’s niiiiiiice.” I’ve gotten the distinct sense that my veganism would be more acceptable if it involved an argument about my refined palate or food allergies or commitment to purchasing only tomatoes grown within a ten-mile radius of my apartment.
It is precisely this demographic to which Lynne Rosetto Kasper speaks. This week, the introduction to “The Splendid Table” involved Lynne Rosetto Kasper waxing poetic about spring and what it means for us. “Don’t you just want to run barefoot through a field of strawberries and drink creme fraiche?” she intoned, inadvertently describing every tampon commercial made during the nineties. This is the kind of ass hattery that everyone else makes fun of upper-class white people, and rightfully so. I must once again refer to my countrified upbringing. You do not RUN BAREFOOT THROUGH A FIELD OF ANYTHING! This leads to chigger bites, grasscuts, and possibly worms from whatever fertilizer has been sprayed on said field. Farmers and field workers do not wear flowing white gowns; they wear overalls and boots, even during the dog days of summer. Also, I also find it annoying when people translate phrases into French when the words in English mean the exact same thing. But because this is NPR, and this is Lynne Rosetto Kasper, we cannot just say “fresh cream.”
The most frustrating part about “The Splendid Table” besides its pretentious introductions, however, is its seeming oblivion to the politics of food. I realize that there are people out there who can afford to drop $100 on ingredients for a single meal (not including the wine)–those are the people to whom Lynne Rosetto Kasper exhorts, breathily, to throw caution to the wind by trying unconventional food pairings (duck fat and cinnamon sauce, pomegranates and spinach alfredo). But these people should also be reminded, as they’re trotting off to the farmer’s market with their gigantic stroller and reusable shopping bags, that there are no supermarkets in the Bronx, or that many children in the U.S. are growing up obese and asthmatic because the USDA can’t stand up to lobbyists and officially declare soda and chicken fingers unhealthy, or that SNAP (formerly food stamps) dollars stretch a lot farther at Wal-Mart than they do Whole Foods. Everybody eats, so food politics affect us all; yet any discussion of food justice, food and water security, and the problems of growth stunting and malnutrition in 2/3 of the rest of the world as a result of the U.S.’s dietary “needs” is conspicuously absent from “The Splendid Table”.
Instead, callers ask questions that draw upon Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s expertise in coming up with pornographic adjectives for meals. Have a sip of your morning Bloody Mary every time she says “succulent” or “buttery” or “creamy” or “robust”, and you will be on the floor by the time “Car Talk” comes on. Lynne Rosetto Kasper also interviews the most ridiculous people. It seems that everyone who has ever been featured on her show has written a memoir that approximates this narrative: Anxious vegetarian urbanite, on assignment for their magazine job, is sent to interview an organic dairy farmer in upstate New York about the raw milk craze**. Anxious vegetarian urbanite is transfixed by the simplicity of life in the country, the charming rustic savages that (still!) inhabit small towns, the idyllic Americana of slaughtering your own pig and inviting everyone over for a roast. They decide to move to the farm and grow organic beets and compost and make their own fertilizer and eschew pasta in favor of white-tailed deer meat. There’s always some point where the Anxious Ex-Vegetarian Urbanite has to slaughter some animal they’ve raised from infancy, and there are many tears but a tidy moral justification to ensure fellow omnivores that it’s natural, that eating meat is still okay. After a year they publish a book and go around the country on speaking tours (and invariably, to Lynne Rosetto Kasper, where she fawns and coos and they talk about how EGGSHELLS really produce such a BUTTERY flavor in your backyard tomatoes).
To each their own, right? If you enjoy Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s show, that’s fine; we all have guilty pleasures, we all have to have escapes from the constant blitz of news highlighting all the social injustices, wars, and economic disenfranchisement to maintain our sanity and refresh us for meeting such challenges head-on the next day. I’m convinced that “Project Runway” was created for just this purpose, in fact. But I do see a connection between “The Splendid Table” and the haute cuisine (witness my French, bitches!) food mania that’s overtaken upper-class white people of my generation and introduced such appellations as “foodie” into the lexicon. “Foodie”? This is just a dumb word. It’s as dumb as “poop” or “boob”. Besides, since everyone likes food, isn’t everyone a foodie? (The underlying assumption here is that not everyone has as sophisticated an understanding of food as do the Lynne Rosetto Kasper set. For instance, you cannot be a “foodie” and eat at Qdoba, apparently. You can be a foodie and eat out of a food cart in Portland, Oregon. Maybe the distinction has to do with the fact that foodies will pay a lot more for a lot less actual food?)
I hope the federal government doesn’t gank NPR’s funding, but as public radio tightens its belts, I have to wonder: why did you pull the fantastic “News and Notes” in 2009 when you could have pulled “The Splendid Table”? I suppose my feelings about public radio are that it should enlighten and inspire in addition to providing a variety of news sources and perspectives. “News and Notes” fell into that category; “The Splendid Table” categorically does not. Its home is the Food Network, where it can teach a new demographic of highlighted housewives how to pronounce “minestrone”.
* The second question I get after saying that I’m vegetarian for moral reasons is the outlandish what-if question: “What if you were stranded somewhere, starving, and the only thing you had was a goat? Would you kill the goat and eat it so you could live?” There are so many logical fallacies with this question that I almost want to direct the person to the nearest humanities department and tell them not to come back until they’ve taken an introductory course on Greco-Roman civilization and read a bit of Aristotle. However, since I know what concept they’re trying to get at (I think), I usually answer good-naturedly. 1. If I am stranded somewhere, starving, and the only thing around is the goat, and if the goat were female, I would likely milk the goat before I would consider slaughtering it. 2. If I am stranded, somewhere, starving, and the only thing around is the goat, and if the goat were male, killing it would solve my immediate hunger problem but within three days I would be starving again, so I’ve only prolonged my suffering/inevitable death and caused the suffering of another creature to boot. No dice. 3. If I am stranded, somewhere, starving, and the only thing around is the goat, I would not actually know how to kill it with my bare hands. Suffocate it, maybe? This seems labor-intensive. Suppose I manage to suffocate the goat to death. How do I skin it? How do I cook the meat? Do I cook the meat? It seems more likely that I would be able to forage for berries and pick fruit from trees for sustenance, or follow the goat to wherever it finds berries and fruit (and water), as a more intelligent and labor-saving choice. (One of the most poignant scenes in an otherwise stupid movie, “Into the Wild”, is where the main character finally kills something belonging to the family of Cervidae–deer? elk?–and, alone, is unable to skin it, move it, gut it–really, do much of anything with it–before it is devoured by black flies and night falls. The point, underscored dramatically and well, is that is takes a bunch of sophisticated tools to actually transform an animal from carcass to something remotely edible, and this is best done by a team of individuals who are specially taught or trained how to do so. For those of us without this training, we’re better off as foragers.)
**Haven’t we established that drinking raw milk is a bad idea? Louis Pasteur, anyone? Brucellosis?
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