Well, for starters, it's remarkably tone-deaf and elitist to be pushing for people to spend more on food when they're trying to feed their families on ever-tightening budgets.
Here's Charlotte Allen in the L.A. Times:
Just in time for the worst economic downturn since the Depression, here
comes a new crop of social critics to inform us that we're actually
spending too little for the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the
furniture we sit on and the gasoline that runs our automobiles.
Never mind that U.S. job losses these days range from 200,000 to
500,000 a month, that foreclosures are up 32% over this time last year
and that people are re-learning how to clip newspaper coupons so as to
save at the supermarket. Dire economic circumstances don't seem to faze
these spending enthusiasts, who scold us for shopping at supermarkets
instead of at farmer's markets, where a loaf of "artisanal" (and also
"sustainable") rye bread sells for $8, ice cream for $6 a cup and
organic tomatoes go for $4 a pound.
For those of us who buy a LOT of milk:
The most zealous of the spend-more crowd, however, are the food intellectuals who salivated, as it were, at a steep rise in the cost of groceries earlier this year, including such basics as milk and eggs. Some people might worry about the effect on recession-hit families of a 17% increase in the price of milk, but not Alice Waters, the food-activist owner of Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant, who shudders at the thought of sampling so much as a strawberry that hasn't been nourished by organic compost and picked that morning at a nearby farm -- and thinks everyone else in America should shudder too.
