Food Snobbery

I sometimes call myself a "food snob." That's a not-so-nice way of saying that I'm very "food-aware." I wasn't always this way, but it's been close to thirty years at this point. I think I got it from the older of my two brothers. He is a "food snob," too; and I mean that affectionately. It's not a bad quality, in and of itself, though it can manifest in not-so-helpful ways.

For example, while we're on the subject, I remember once having a fit in a grocery store parking lot when my mother, trying to be helpful, came back out to the car with the generic store-brand of pop-tarts rather than with the true blue thing. What I wanted was blueberry frosted with the little colored sugar sprinkles. What I got was, in my mind, not fit to be opened, let alone consumed.

Food snobbery, at its worst, doesn't necessarily imply an awareness of healthful or sustainably produced foods. Sometimes it's just snobbery. And hissy fits are never called for. For the record, I am still working on controlling my inappropriate internal child-snob. I have to fight it most in large, corporately-owned grocery stores with poor selections - I walk through the aisles muttering angrily under my breath like a Hebrew prophet in a scratchy shirt - and, in particular, when I'm faced with Kraft products. But that's another post entirely. I'm sure, as you read along, you'll hear it, on occasion, crying out.

The reason I attribute this to my brother? Well, he is 13 years my senior, which means that when he went off to college, I was only 5 years old. A very formative time in my life, to be sure. I remember him coming home for a visit once and going on an absolute tear about WonderBread. It was full of air, he said. It was full of chemicals, he said. It was not fit to be consumed, he said. Or words like those. And from that day on, I don't believe I ever partook of another slice of WonderBread. His words were to me the words of revelation. They were the words of a god - a god who knew food. And this so-called "food" was not worthy of the name.

It goes without saying, however, that I did not then, in my pop-tart days, consistently apply the ethic he taught.

Life is more complicated now. I'd still say I'm a food snob, but I've realized that as an adult I follow a completely different food ethic. I might describe the old ethic best as "only eat brand name foods." I've come a long, long way from that.

Actually, I've come to realize that I now have at least 4, maybe 5 different - and sometimes competing - food ethics. They are as follows:

• only eat locally produced food
  
• only eat organic and sustainably produced food
  
• only eat foods of the highest nutritional values, ie, "SuperFoods"
  
• never eat the products of large-scale industrial "agriculture"

This is a tough standard for consumption! I always, always fall short. Sometimes radically short. I confess that some of my eating habits go against all of these rules. I have a particular weakness for DunkinDonuts coffee and donuts. For $3, and a scant 10 minutes of pleasure, I can break all of these rules at once.

You'll note that I'm neither vegetarian nor vegan. I was once. For 5 years I had an ethic of eating no red meat. That was toward the end of high school and most of the way through college. What finally wore me down was a persistent craving for a BigMac. My vegetarian ethic ended ceremoniously - a good friend was there to mark the occasion with me - at the McDonald's on route 6 in Newton, Iowa. I've never looked back. Which is not to say I have no ethic for meat consumption. See the above. And I'm sure I'll write about it soon. I'll also get back to the complications of having competing food ethics. But now I've got to go, well...eat.