THEY glare at you at the market when you ask for a bag, think nothing of forking over $8 for two measly organic chicken breasts and favor restaurants with tiny portions, precious fare.
They’re the food police and their patron saints — Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, chief among them — are on a crusade to tell you not just what you should eat, but how you should eat it.
Like an exclusive clique of anorexic cheerleaders, they think they’re better than you.
It’s not enough that you should simply eat your fruit and veggies. No, in order to be virtuous they first must be preceded by fashionable adjectives such as local, organic and sustainable — recession be damned.
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And since you’re too stupid to figure this out, the food police must save you from yourself. No longer content to silently judge you and the contents of your grocery cart, they’ve nobly taken to clanging their enameled cast-iron cookware outside their 150-mile “locavore” food radius.
Leading the culinary cops is Alice Waters, the poster child of all things local, organic and sustainable. In 1971, Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. Part restaurant, part counterculture commune, it put seasonal, ingredient-driven menus on the map. But her actual cooking, which mainly centers around painstakingly composed salads, has always been overshadowed by her cooking philosophy: a chiding and bourgeois brand of junk food prohibitionism.
Waters even attempted to pressure the Obamas to choose a White House chef of her liking. In what reads like the cover letter to the 18th Amendment banning booze, she wrote to the administration: “The purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America — the White House.”
And since she knows best, she recently told columnist Maureen Dowd she’d like to serve President Obama “some golden beets” — even though he’s said he doesn’t like them. (“Is it wrong for me to wish that [Waters and Dowd] would just go away, already?” asks Feedbag blogger Josh Ozersky. Not at all, Josh, not at all.)
But mainly she and the rest of the Food Police seem out of touch. While the economy drives people to fast-food dollar meals, they cluelessly extol the virtues of expensive organic grapes. On a “60 Minutes” segment last month, Waters thinks nothing of paying $4 a pound for greenmarket grapes (that’s about $10 for a bag). When Lesley Stahl questions her about such high prices, she responds incredulously, “And some people want to buy Nike shoes — two pairs.” One might wonder to whom she is referring.
But the kicker is when she invites Stahl into her home, where she uses a quaint wood-fired hearth to whip up some eggs while flashing a beatific smile. Is it any wonder Anthony Bourdain recently told the blog DCist, “Alice Waters annoys the living s – – – out of me”?
Us too. But she’s not the only offender. Read on for more of the Food Police’s holier-than-thou household hints.