Positive Liberty

I can’t recall who said it, but it was in the blogosphere, and recently:

The most boring blog entries are always about “What I Ate For Lunch.”

He’s right, but today is Sunday, and a lot of bloggers aren’t writing at all, so you’d better be happy with what you get.

Yesterday Scott and I visited Whole Foods Market. We don’t go often, as Han Ah Reum and Lotte are both closer and cheaper, but it happened to be on our way, and it gave me a chance to rediscover how nice certain “real foods” are.

Real foods? Yup. It seems as if the United States is moving toward a class-segregated food system. Upper-class people eat real food, whole food, brown crunchy whole-grain all-natural organic food. It’s kosher, contains no GMOs, and is produced by peasants who get living wages for their work–all with no impact whatsoever on the environment.

The proles of the food world eat pre-cooked, microwavable glop out of disposable plastic dishes. You’ve seen it before; it’s the stuff the upper class only eats on an airplane. In the grocery store, the food underclass cruises past the fresh produce to work up an appetite, then picks out seven identical microwave dinners for the seven days of the week.

It’s not necessarily that these people really are lower-class, economically or otherwise, but whether through choice or incapacity or ignorance, they’re certainly the have-nots of the American food world. (Yes, I know, at least they’ve got something to eat, while many people in the world are starving to death. But that’s not what this post is about. If you want to write on world hunger, go do it on your own blog. And no, I don’t care if that sounds heartless.)

When you think about it, the average person with enough to eat spends an awful lot of time actually eating it. It may be entirely necessary to keep eating, but it doesn’t follow that eating ought to be the artless, soulless time-filler that it is for so many of us–which brings me back to real food. Real food doesn’t cost all that much more money, but it makes every single day a whole lot more worthwhile, and I would argue that even the time spent preparing real food is a pleasure in itself.

Marketers are catching on, too, and realizing that “artificial” doesn’t cut it anymore. PL reader Kris Preacher sends in this link to a rant about what are now called “nature identical” food additives.

Apparently a product is nature identical if it is chemically the same as something that came from a living organism. Thus sucrose made from crude oil would be “nature identical”–not “artificial.” A google search for “nature identical” yields lemon flavor, grape flavor, verbenna oil, and even estrogen.

It’s obviously a weasel word, and yet one might be tempted to ask what the big deal is. If the product is the same as one found in nature, then what’s the problem? Well, beyond merely fetishizing the natural, there may be some legitimate reasons to insist on old-fashioned natural production: Usually the consumer has no idea how a nature-identical product was made, whether it dumps toxic by-products in the environment, or whether it’s exhausting a less-renewable resource in the process.

I’d like to think that none of these are true, of course, but there are two difficulties remaining: First, I do not fully understand and cannot possibly ever know enough about whatever problems might exist with nature-identical ingredients. It’s just too big and nebulous an issue for one person to be socially conscious about. Second, it’s quite difficult to manage one’s entire diet around such concerns. Even if I read up on the dangers of nature-identical estrogen (which I hope anyone contemplating said product will do), still I can’t be guaranteed to understand the complexities of all the other nature-identical and downright artificial stuff I’m consuming elsewhere.

Because of all this, buying natural food whenever possible seems the best policy to me, though I’m willing to forgive myself the occasional slip. It shouldn’t become a religion.

But, as solemn voices will tell us, it’s the duty of the food patricians, as we eat our expansive and hopefully all-natural breakfasts, to look into these things with all the seriousness we can manage. Someone might be getting hurt somewhere. It might even be ourselves, and our food comes with an often-nauseating measure of social responsibility.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love it if everything I ever ate were all-natural. I’d also like eating off solid gold plates, but I don’t see that happening any time soon either.

–So what did I score at Whole Foods?

–Real bagels. In the last few years, nearly every grocery store has neutered their bagels. Thomas’s Bagels are especially bad. They’re soft and puffy, dull on the outside and spongy on the inside. They don’t even fit in the toaster, for it seems that in the mid-1980s someone decided that making bagels larger constituted an obvious improvement.

Within hours, the toaster magnates hastily called a summit on the matter and agreed to retaliate by making larger toasters. This step angered the bagel syndicate, because it was not enough for them that their product merely be larger. No, the consumer must also appreciate that it’s grown, and this requires a bagel slightly larger than whatever toaster you happen to have. An arms race was on, and the bagel makers fired back with bigger-than-the-toaster bagels. Toaster makers invented a newer, even larger toaster.

As of this writing, the American bagel is rapidly becoming a spheroid.

Now this is obnoxious to all true bagel lovers, as one historical example will show. Not long ago, I saw the documentary Image Before My Eyes, about Jewish life in 1930s Poland. It touched not at all on the Holocaust, but on the way that Jews actually lived, from day to day before the Second World War. Using authentic film footage, it showed how they dressed, where they worked, the music they listened to–and the food they ate. Not to belittle the rest of this magnificent film, but their bagels were enough to make me cry with envy. They were visibly chewy, with a crust as thick as cardboard and a hole in the middle the size of a golf ball. Kids and adults alike were straining their jaws on these beauties, and that is what I call a real bagel.

Whole Foods had real bagels too. Although I doubt that they were quite up to the standard of the glorious 1930s, still they were chewy and substantial, with a fully satisfying crust. Best of all, they slid easily in and out of the toaster.

–Real cheese. France is the undisputed cheese capital of the world, and having lived there for nine months, I’m hard to satisfy. For me, real cheese is raw cheese. A Frenchman may have invented pasteurization, but his compatriots regard it as a denaturing of the food, and I am inclined to agree. Until recently, raw cheese was illegal in America, much to our culinary shame. It’s still hard to find outside of specialty markets, but is well worth the look.

–A big jar of ghee. It’s clarified butter, Indian-style. Made by Purity Farms, the label claimed that it was organic, kosher, and–astonishingly–lactose-free.

We were frankly skeptical, as our household knows all about lactose. Scott’s lactose intolerant, which means he gets stomach cramps at the slightest hint of milk, cream, butter, or young cheeses. He’s learned the hard way which foods have lactose, and I’ve learned the hard way that I should never, ever cook with them. Happily, the label on the ghee seems to be accurate: Scott smothered his breakfast bagel in it and is doing just fine.

This is a great relief to both of us. In our house, making a reasonable facsimile of traditional French cuisine entails substitutions that would cause a real French chef’s hair to stand on end under his toque. We both wanted nothing more than a real-tasting butter substitute, and now we’ve found it.

–Real cola. I got this at Potbelly’s sandwich shop, where we ate lunch afterward.

Now I stopped drinking soda so long ago that I can’t even remember a time when I did drink it. It’s just too sweet, to syrupy, and too simple to hold my interest for very long. The rare exceptions are those few local, independent sodas that don’t over-sweeten their product, and even some of them are pretty bad.

But yesterday I found a new favorite, and now I proudly present to the world… Cricket Cola!

No, it’s not made from crickets. Probably the strangest thing about Cricket Cola is that all of its caffeine comes from green tea. Cricket also has real kola nut extract, and here it’s unlike any of the big guys, whose “cola” flavor is a big, secret fraud (I remember before the Internet was big, and when the book Big Secrets seemed the coolest thing in the world, because it supposedly revealed Coke’s secret formula. Now you just go to snopes.com and learn the real truth: There’s no secret to Coca-Cola at all. They just want you to think there’s one.)

But back to Cricket. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. It’s caffeinated, but not too caffeinated. I suspect it would make a truly excellent rum and cola. Sadly, I only bought one bottle. Now it’s gone, but I’m sure I will soon buy more.

–Real freakin’ granola. The crunchies always go back to their roots.

This Whole Foods didn’t have any wine, because the state of Maryland believes that putting spirits in grocery stores will turn impressionable citizens into alcoholics. Buying alcohol in Maryland means going to a specialty store, where it’s wall-to-wall gin, vodka, and tequila, and where no one is ever tempted into alcoholism.

One upshot of this social engineering is Corridor Fine Wines, another place I’ve visited recently. To imagine what it’s like, picture a Best Buy. Now remove its contents and refill it with wine.

Needless to say, Corridor Fine Wines is one of my favorite places on planet Earth.

After all of our shopping, Scott and I ate like kings last night, with fourme d’Ambert, goat’s milk bûcheron, smoked Gouda, and a sheep’s milk cheese infused with cognac and rolled in savory. We ate them on whole wheat baguettes, with a tossed salad, figs, and strawberries on the side–and glasses of 1999 Inniskillin Meritage to wash it all down.

Having eaten our fill, we brushed our teeth with Tom’s of Maine natural toothpaste. It’s flavored with fennel, propolis, and myrrh (That strange aftertaste is essence of bourgeois bohemianism). Tom’s of Maine is a toothpaste that the Three Wise Men might proudly have presented to the infant Jesus. In all honesty it is the best-tasting dentifrice I’ve ever had.

Still, Tom’s gets a bit carried away on the social responsibility: The label claims that it contains no animal ingredients, which strictly speaking–remember the propolis?–is false. It’s so hard to be good these days.