My mother and I were recently watching a Top Chef rerun. In this particular episode, one of the contestants scrambled to assemble his dish, an unparalleled entrée featuring perfectly sliced Kobe beef carpaccio accompanied with a boysenberry gastrique. My mother, a Bangladeshi immigrant, just could not comprehend why anyone would voluntarily eat raw beef, thinly sliced or otherwise. I initially scoffed at her simplistic palette, wanting to deliver the condescending comment resting on my tongue, aching to correct her uninformed opinion.
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On
second thought, however, I chuckled, agreeing with her confounded
expression. I quickly realized the sad hilarity of the food industry.
As a self-proclaimed burgeoning foodie, complete with an Epicurious.com
widget proudly affixed on my Macbook, I, too, found myself lost in the
culinary sphere of everything from executing the most perfectly puffed
pommes dauphin to creating a delicate but savory parsnip foam. Yet as
a penny-pinching college student, I can’t fathom why I feel the need to
procure my lox and cream cheese bagel breakfasts from the neighborhood
Balducci’s on New Mexico Ave. in Washington, D.C.
It
finally occurred to me that even if I, too, wanted to purchase the
outrageously expensive pounds of wild ramps at $14.99, it has
become nearly impossible for food snobs to divorce themselves from
loving food to loving the distinction of said product. We also can note
the hypocritical nature of food snobs and regular people alike—that it
is often the same environmentally conscious, Obama-sign-toting liberals
that are also desperate to purchase the 43-dollar liter of Italian olive oil
for their dinner soiree bruschette. Do we all just ignore the startling
statistic that half the world lives on less than two dollars a day? Or
should we continue tickling our refined palettes with a Northern
Bluefin tuna tartare amuse bouche?
Unlike
the argument of criticizing how the wealthy spend their money on
extraneous costs, this contradicting question strikes up a more
unsettling debate. We all
may share this land, but we certainly do not share the same woes that
other families do across the world. The larger problem with the agony
of food and the availability of it is that it is glaringly obvious that
food snobs won’t recognize the poor and hungry because they simply do
not understand the plight of those suffering in a perpetual state of
gastric misery. But if a middle-class citizen hailing from an immigrant
home, like myself, also fails to remember about the other half, who
isn’t guilty of hypocrisy and sickening contradiction?
The
point of this revelation is not to point fingers or engage in a battle
of who deserves what blame but rather a quest in becoming cognizant of
our international shortcomings and hopefully also taking action in the
cause.
Now,
if only an article or a blog could effectively solve the issue of a
global food crisis and simultaneously transform the minds of the greedy
and wealthy, everyone in the world from Monaco to Bangladesh could head
to their local Whole Foods and devour a package of chili-infused Vosges
chocolates perfect for any occasion, guilt-free.
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