“Pollan is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.” http://trunc.it/cubwm
I’m loving this thoughtful, intelligent piece from Lisa Miller at Newsweek on class and food in America. One thing that gets short shrift, though, is this:
Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, believes that Americans can fight both obesity and food insecurity by being more, well, like the French. Americans take an approach to food and eating that is unlike any other people in history.
Yes, but…America is also the only Western industrialized nation without a reasonably strong social safety net. The French have day care, housing, education, and health care taken care of (more or less) with tax dollars, which would make it an awful lot easier to spend one’s time worrying about the conviviality of their meals. I’m not convinced that the fabulous food cultures of Europe are solely the result of their superior understanding of cuisine juxtaposed against Americans’ lazy tendencies; I suspect that the nature of their political economy has something to do with it as well.
