The Foodie as Potential Tool

I’ve been juggling a couple of books lately, as is my habit, and seeing if I could shoehorn either into this blog.

The first is “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. Now while I was afraid that the initial gimmick (Victorian prigs with mad ninja skills meet brain-sucking zombies? Let the hilarity ensue!)-- would dissipate faster than a one-note Saturday Night Live sketch, it didn’t. But as how it might relate to food and/or wine, the best I could come up with was “Do Zombies Have Palates?” (Short answer: no.)

Which leaves me philosopher-mechanic Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft”

a wake up call that we need to get the “work” back into work ethic as our cubicle dwelling, carpel tunnel, spreadsheet ways just might have perverted and warped our souls and the only way to get them all whitely glowy again, like those aliens in that Steve Guttenberg movie with the old people acting cute because they were acting young even though they were just really, really old,

is to remember that our hands were made for more than pecking on a keyboard. (I am full aware of the irony, peck, peck.)

The man knows of what he speaks. He owns his own motorcycle repair shop in VA, called Shockoe Moto. How cool is that? I can hear the ad jingle already…“Why don’t you GO, GO, GO down to Shockoe Moto!”

How does it pertain to this blog then?

This one passage I’ll be discussing has struck a nerve with me. Which holds more water for the foodie lifestyle: the food or the lifestyle? Do we claim our patch of moral higher ground trumped only by vegetarians who, I imagine, prostrate themselves with their broccoli crowns at the shoes of vegans?

On with the passage:

“…our consumer choices contribute to a land war, on one side or the other, whether we are aware of the fact or not. This can be understood with analogy to our food choices…to buy food from a local farmer versus a distant agribusiness. This is a practice the bohemian consumer already has in the cultural toolkit he uses, not only to construct his dissident self image but to give expression to his genuine public-spiritedness. (Italics mine.) If the regard that many people now have for the wider ramifications for their food choices could be brought to our relationships to our own automobiles, it would help sustain pockets of mindful labor.”

What Crawford illustrates is that our purchases should be a reflective, moral act, his hope that the current locovore mindset might one day shift to other arenas of conspicuous consumption. But when he drops the payload “bohemian consumer” and then ups the ante with the money shot “dissident self image,” this blogger starts avoiding mirrors faster than Bela Lugosi.

Crawford touches on the whiff of smug self-satisfaction that can come with this lifestyle. Buying from a farmer’s market, I get a Two-For! I can buoy my ‘dissident self image’ while getting my warm fuzzy on and earning karma credits that I might be doing some good for the local community at large, whatever the hell that might be. Take that, Safeway!

Or another way of saying it: My purchases define me by what I choose not to choose. They say, I am the type who is above mindless consumerism. I am the type who defies the machinations of large (read: all-signs-point-to-yes EVIL) corporations. I am for the genuine over the mass-produced. I am an open-eyed maker of my own destiny and not another blind sheep with my compass pointing towards McDonald’s golden arches. It’s also, sadly, a choice of economic privilege cuz organic/farmstand ain’t cheap. Nor should it be. I stress: Nor should it be. Which opens up a whole other can of Campbell’s Cream of Worms I haven't the time to dip my spoon in today.