Oh, Bon Appétit magazine. I want to like you, I really, really do. But just when I get to thinking you're Food & Wine for the less pretentious, you give me something like February 2008's "Green Issue". An entire issue devoted to the few, the proud, the enlightened among us foodies who consume only free-range meat, only locally-grown produce, and only organic, bio-degradable, sustainable, recyclable, low-carbon-footprintable, utterly eye-rollable products everywhere else in their lives. But for now let's focus on the food, and the derisible buzzword of the moment: "locavore".

Locavores are people who buy their food stricly from local sources - meat, produce, dairy, the works. People like Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon on page 27: a couple from Vancouver (of course; it's Canada's San Francisco) who spent a year living as locavores, saw the light, and wrote a book about it. A book that they presume holds interest for, you know, other people. And the rest of the issue continues in the same vein: profies of organic chocolate, rethinking the notably sustainable sardine, eco-friendly restaurants in major U.S. cities, a new "green" vodka on the market, designer bags made out of old coffee bean sacks (fair trade, naturally), etc. All part and parcel of the organic food craze, the vegetarianism of the 2000s.

And before I start sounding like a bitter naysayer, let me just yay-say this: I have no problem with organic food - the industry itself, the growing trend towards it, the people who buy it and the farmers who supply it. I love that consumers are concerned about the welfare of the animals that we too often unthinkingly eat, caring not where the meat comes from and what happened to it on the way to our dinner plate. I love that we can buy fruit and vegetables that haven't been sprayed to hell with pesticides and saturated with growth hormones - that we can taste a natural, pure, untampered-with Florida orange right at our nearest grocery store. What I can't abide by is the snobbery that so often goes along with said organic consumption, the notion that unless you're best friends with your dairy farmer and pick your own tomatoes you're somehow contributing to the downfall of the planet's resources - or, at the very least, an ignorant simpleton who might as well just chug the whole bottle of DDT if you're going to put supermarket broccoli in your mouth, for the love of crimony. Don't you care what you eat?

Yes, I do. I also care about not coming across as a self-righteous blowhard, and furthermore, I respect that not everyone lives in the Tuscan hills and thus can't always subsist on what's local and in season - that sometimes, you need to buy mushrooms that perhaps have had a bit of a road trip on the way to your grocery basket. But that's okay. We're not going to die, the sky is not going to erupt in ozone holes and the birds and bees will continue to chirp and buzz in their as-yet-un-clearcutted forests. Yes, it would be wonderful if everyone decided to demand more environmentally-friendly food and more humanely raised meat from here on out, but until such time, keep your preachy rants to yourself, your foodie memoirs in the drawer, and your superiority complex set on a gentle simmer.

This entry was posted by Darryl, on Sunday, January 13, 2008. You can leave your response.