Why Alice Waters is not my hero

I'm a total believer in slow food, whole food, good food--for everyone. My guiding nutritional principals are eating foods as close as possible to their natural state and knowing what is in what I eat. In other words, hell yes, I eat cookies, but I make them myself and know exactly what's in them. I am also a fanatical meal planner, and we cook and eat "family dinner" at least six nights out of seven in a week.

All of which should mean that I totally worship at the alter of Alice Waters, right?

I'd really like to, but I just can't get over the privilege inherent in her work and the movement she founded. The fact is that not everyone has the luxury of eating that way. Not everyone lives in California, where "local foods" offer more variety than potatoes and turnips for eight months of the year. Not everyone has the money to buy organic food (especially not in Montana, where the WIC program has sharply limited the ability of needy women to buy such things). Not everyone has the time to plan, shop for, and cook homemade meals.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but this post on Feministing (HT to Shapely Prose) put into words exactly what's been bothering me. In response to an interview with Waters on 60 Minutes last week (in which she said that people should simply not buy those "two pair of NIke shoes" to be able to afford to buy better food), Shark-fu says,

When I started teaching life skill classes at a transitional housing shelter for homeless pregnant teens in St. Louis Missouri, I quickly realized that many of my students could teach a master class on making a dollar stretch. A good place to witness their resourcefulness was in the kitchen - trust me, making $160 in food assistance last a month takes serious skill.

As grocery prices overall have risen, I know that we have had to make a lot more food choices based less on ethics and more on affordability. I would love to buy all our meat at the local butcher's, and I do when I can, but when chicken breasts are $1.88 a pound at Albertson's, I'm going to head over there and stock up.

Writing about Shark-fu's post, Kate Harding adds:

Shark-Fu focuses on the blatant class aspect here (”Promoting healthy food is a must-try recipe, but folks should skip that extra tablespoon of privilege if they want it to nourish the masses”), but I also want to make explicit what she only implies: that the “two pairs of Nikes” thing is racist, as well as classist bullshit. “Poor white people spend all their money on fancy gym shoes instead of bills and nutritious food” is not a big meme among right wing assholes. Poor black people, on the other hand? Hey, that sounds familiar.

My point isn’t to trash Waters, who — as Shark-Fu also points out — does a lot of good work trying to increase the availability of fresh, nutritious food for everyone. But that statement had more than one extra tablespoon of privilege in the mix, and that’s without even getting into the idea that people are choosing not to “nourish themselves” properly, a thought process that almost inevitably leads to “people choose to be fat.”  Man, I hate articles like this, where someone is saying so many good things, then blows it with something completely ignorant. Sigh.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the slow food movement really plays into this, and into the idea that food is either good or bad, moral or immoral. That kind of thinking only works when you get to worry more about what you eat, not whether you're going to be able to feed your family tonight at all. That's practically the definition of privilege, right there.