Reading in any war book about the food people had to survive on--thin broth with the barest trace of gristle in it, rotting turnips, ditch water, week old bread crusts--arouses in me fantasies of modern day food snobs being subjected to, if not quite this severe a regime, at least wartime era civilian rationing for some extended period of time. The rationed food would not even have to be bad, maybe--just limited in supply, and, most importantly, everybody would have to eat, qualitatively speaking, more or less the same thing. Yes, I am expressing a wormlike desire to see people humbled for at least sensing some aspect of personal superiority in themselves and daring to express it. But I can't endure the archness, pomposity, and judgments upon others' tastes and, by implication, characters and mental capacities, on the subjects of eating and drinking without wanting to see that person driven from whatever level of society he imagines himself to exist on and forced to survive on whatever delicacies he mocked other people for partaking of--forever.
Contrary to what the paragraph above suggests, I have experienced happiness from what I perceived to be superior food and drink in the course of my life, though I am sure I have never felt in doing so the sense of triumph over lesser people or even my former or accustomed lesser self that seems to animate much of the study and experience of heightened eating among the initiated. Most of my happiest memories have had nothing to do with my being superior or in any way more savvy than other people, but were the product of stumbling upon a food culture being so advanced in some area that even the vulgar and socially undeserving could not fail to be exposed to certain delicacies of high quality, because all comparable inferior products had been marginalized or entirely absented from the market--this characterizes things like the beer in the Czech Republic and Germany, bread in France and Italy, coffee and the cafe scene in Austria and elsewhere in the former domains of the Hapsburg empire--you get the idea. The mundaneness, and often fadedness of most of these settings, whose staff and patrons rarely betrayed any consciousness of being inherently above any rivals real or imagined on gustatory grounds, calmed me and put me into the proper mindframe to sense the superior quality of its mundane offerings.
It is clear to me that a major source of the disdain among more cosmopolitan Americans for their less educationally accomplished compatriots is the failure, apart from a few isolated exceptions like the Cajuns in Louisana or maybe some of the more renowned centers of barbeque in the south, of these lower orders to develop, or sustain, a substantial cuisine, especially one in resistance to that pressed upon them by corporate interests. It is hard to overstate the degree of contempt and physical revulsion with which a substantial and socially influential (among the nominally and in some instances certifiedly intelligent) segment of the population has come to regard the ingestion of certain food products, and by extension anyone known or suspected to ingest them on a consistent basis.
I have a rant about the growth of beer snobbery too. First of all, I have drunk a lot of beer in my life. I have had it pretty much every day, and usually a decent amount, for the last twenty-five years. As people know, I lived in the Czech Republic for a couple of years, a country where deciding what beer to drink with breakfast is an important, though not socially deterministic, daily consideration. If one of these little i-phone tapping snots ever tries to tell me to my face to 'get a palate' I may rip the flesh clean off of his skull. Given that beer has traditionally, in the countries where it is most central in the national life, evolved to be consumed in fairly large quantities over a period lasting multiple hours, the most important indicator of quality, and one that correlates strongly with taste, or at least enjoyment of imbibing, because most of my favorite beers do not have a flavor that I identify other than that they taste to me more like beer, that is to say that they give me a perfect sensation of drinking liquid bread and that the pleasure in this will never diminish or grow old, than other varieties do, is in their consistency...
All right, I could go on in that vein for a while, but I will call it a night for (there are some good beer garden scenes and ruminations in AQOTWF by the way...
February 1, 2019--I was really wound up the day I wrote this. I have not gotten this angry for a while. Even at food snobs.
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