Sunday, May 1, 2011

Those elitist Barefoots

I read through this article about food and elitism, and I started wondering if I'm a food elitist.  I mean, can somebody who makes macaroni and cheese on a regular basis really be a food elitist?  I mean, okay, sometimes it's not Kraft, but nonetheless.  I am a woman of simple tastes, and if I could do it without gaining weight, I would live pretty much entirely on grilled cheese and macaroni and cheese.  Oh, and pizza.  Which I buy frozen from Costco, most of the time.  With a side of brocolli, because I have a degree in public health and parents who raised me to not get scurvy.

But I don't like champagne, or truffles.  I don't have an appreciation for really fine foods with fancy-sounding ingredients.  I like good, simple food.  I don't like having to ask, "what is xyz?" when I'm at a restaurant.  I like wine that tastes like juice, and much to Mr. Barefoot's constant annoyance, I can't kick my soda habit.

Mr. Barefoot and I try to shop locally, we buy organic when we can, and to make that financially possible, we also choose to buy in bulk (a savings which in some ways is countered by our high rent for our apartment that is large enough to keep bulk items in - room for a 25lb bag of flour is hard to find, but that bag cost the same as the 5lb bag of King Arthur.)  We have a shelf in our pantry dedicated to a rag-tag team of containers filled with cous-cous, four kinds of rice, barley, cornmeal, and anything else that comes in those iffy-looking containers.  We recently switched to dried beans, because we eat a lot of beans and the price of dried organic beans is vastly cheaper than canned conventional beans.  Dried beans hardly seem elitist to me, especially when we are buying them to save money.

I mean, maybe going to the Farmer's Market often enough to take engagement pictures there makes us elitist:


I do think we do a lot of things that make us elitist.  We both own Kindles, and we read a lot of books.  We go to movies, then put our noses in the air and say the book was better.  We travel, often to places that require passports, and when we do, we go to museums or we go scuba diving.  In our house, computers outnumber people, we recently bought smartphones, and we both have post-graduate degrees.  

So yeah, we're elitist.  But not when it comes to food.  

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