On Foodie Elitism
By 
Don’t live on the west coast? None of this until summer for you!
The mockery of Mark Bittman’s “turns out the Bay Area is a nice place to live with many available foodstuffs” column has been swift and inevitable. But there are also some substantive issues at stake here, and Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s response is devastating:
The true villain for the food movement isn’t someone who buys fast food when they should be eating lentils. It’s someone who, despite having the resources to do so, hasn’t researched where his or her food comes from. Grocery shoppers’ desire to purchase fruits and vegetables—a seemingly admirable, or at least innocuous, one—is recast as consumer demand for out-of-season produce—the height of decadence. In 2011, Bittman had some harsh words for these consumers:
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Bittman lamented the fact that “we have ceased to rely upon staples: long-keeping foods like grains, beans, and root vegetables, foods that provide nutrition when summer greens, fruits, and vegetables aren’t readily available.”
Is Bittman relying on root vegetables in Berkeley? When he’s in Rome learning the craft of pasta sauce? Or when he was on a food tour of Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali? Along similar lines, I became somewhat less impressed with David Tanis’s remarks about how he for one is going to stick with “end-of-winter vegetables” until the “local and seasonal” green ones sprout, when I noticed he’ll be giving a cooking workshop in Sicily this April. I point these things out not (just) out of culinary envy of New York Times food writers, but because it genuinely does mean something different to be a strict locavore if you travel around all the time, or live in grocery-endowed part of California, or both.
In addition to the problem that being a “locavore” isn’t much of sacrifice if you live on the California coast or can afford to travel wherever you want, there are the additional problems that 1)relying solely on local produce requires, you know, plenty of money and 2)in the vast majority of places it would be completely unsustainable if more than a minority did it anyway.
Look, I like farmer’s markets and the local co-op; I try to buy as much localish produce as availability and budget permit. But I also appreciate well-stocked supermarkets with decent produce to go along with other staples. And as to the idea that I shouldn’t have access to most vegetables for 9 or 10 months a year unless I can move to Berkeley, go to hell.