Drewbot

katherinespiers:

My reaction when first I came across this article: “Another piece taking down Alice Waters bwahahahahaha- oh, fuck. Caitlin Flanagan wrote it.”

She’s so stupid and awful. Her argument against in-school gardening programs is quite racist (Mexican kids have to farm anyway!…What? And…in the Berkeley school district?). And then, to make her point that urban areas are juuuust fine on the grocery store front, she goes to a Ralph’s in LA and explains that she bought corn and state-grown grapes and nectarines. Which means she was there in August. August, California, where local produce can be grown. Caitlin, honey? Is this the norm?

I cannot stand people who make me side with Alice Waters.

This article drove me mad.

But as much as I wanted to blame Flanagan while reading the piece, she doesn’t really deserve the vitriol. Her mindset, which allows her to paint the ‘immigrant son going to Berkeley only to learn gardening’ as a tragedy, is the very mindset the foodie movement she criticizes aims to disrupt.

Her way of thinking permanently relegates “food work” to lower classes. The local/holistic/organic/whatever food movement aims to help people understand, respect, and cherish the work and human effort that gets food to our table. In doing so, we hope to flatten the class hierarchy around these networks of production. The goal, some might say, is to spur the upper and middle classes to get involved with, pay more for, and pay thoughtfully for their food.

Flanagan only focuses on the actions of people within a class-based apparatus. And in doing so, she ignores the efforts made by people to reform the apparatus itself.