Food Class-ification

I, like many other Americans, grew up eating meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers and other “comfort food.”\nBut America is rebelling against its food culture.\nIn the past decade or so, America has quite possibly undergone a food revolution. My house – a middle-class, Midwestern-rooted home with access to the Food Network – has changed its culinary habits in the extreme, and I have a feeling we are not alone.\nNow it’s risotto Milanese for dinner, or maybe some herbed chicken with couscous and apricots.\nThis change in tastes is cosmopolitan, introducing international cuisines to the American kitchen, as well as bourgeois and expensive, costing more than white bread and a slab of meat.\nWhy this change in taste? \nFirst I call attention to the Food Network. Regardless of whether or not they are a cause for this new culinary identity, they certainly reinforce it. Glamorous Giada de Laurentiis makes Italian food with working urban sophisticates in mind; she shops at Whole Foods for some of her ingredients, and brings together classic Italian recipes with new American tastes. Ina Garten makes deceptively simple food, often influenced by rural French cuisine, with fresh, beautiful ingredients she buys in the Hamptons, then tosses in the back of her BMW. \nThese chefs and others have the luxury of buying their ingredients at upscale grocers. They have introduced the fine life to middle class Americans, regardless of whether or not we have access to it.\nToday this food revolution also goes hand in hand with the “green movement.” People have become more conscious about the environmental and health ramifications of eating foods contaminated with growth hormones, insecticides and other harmful chemicals. So people buy organic. Or, people buy local produce and animal products to help the local farming economy and offset the vast amounts of energy it takes to ship produce and meat from California or Florida up to Indiana.\nOn the one hand, the expanding market for new foods shows that America is getting fed up with gigantic chain grocers with foreign produce and processed foods. During our grandparents’ lives, Americans could walk to the local butcher, baker and market for their needs. By rejecting certain old kitchen habits, we yearn for a less anonymous, less corporate past in favor of a local, friendly one.\nOn the other hand, who the hell can afford this stuff? An expanding market in luxury foods makes no sense at a time when oil prices are more than $90 a barrel, or as tuition prices rise out of proportion to our incomes. \nThe food revolution further illustrates the class stratification in this country. The rich can afford to be sophisticated and ethical, and the middle class struggles to do the same. But the poor will be condemned to the same old white bread. \nMy hope is that this is just a beginning of the food revolution, and that eventually the demand for these foods will cause their supply to rise, and eventually, prices will go down. \nThen we can all eat richly.