Medium Raw

Which is where Alice really loses me—because, well, for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley—but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good—but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school. In fact, 27 billion for organic food for Timmy seems a back-assward priority right now—as, so far, we’ve failed miserably to even teach him to read. What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them? How can he build a world for himself if he doesn’t know how to ask for—much less how to get—the things he wants and needs? I, for one, would be very satisfied if Timmy gets a relatively balanced slab of fresh but nonorganic meatloaf with a side of competently frozen broccoli—along with reading skills and a chance at a future. Once literate, well read, and equipped with the tools to actually make his way in this world, he’ll be far better prepared to afford Chez Panisse.

As of this writing, not too far from Berkeley, just across the bridge, in San Francisco’s Mission District, they line up every Tuesday for the $1.99 special at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. They don’t stand in the street waiting for forty-five minutes to an hour because it’s particularly healthy chicken, or organic chicken, or conscientiously raised chicken—or even good chicken. They do it because it’s three fucking pieces for a dollar ninety-nine. Unless we respect that reality, Alice? We’re lost.

I remember well, when I was eleven and twelve years old, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. My dad and I would travel to Washington. Later, my friends and I would march in New York. And what left a powerful impression in my mind, a lesson worth remembering, was how deeply and instinctively the construction workers, the cops and firemen—the very people whose families were most likely to be affected by the war—how they hated us. The message was lost—coming as it did from what they saw (rightly) as a bunch of overprivileged college kids, whose mommies and daddies were footing the bill for educations these folks would unlikely to ever be able to afford for their own kids. Here were these loud, self-absorbed ideologues who looked unlike anyone from their world and who lived nothing like them—but who had no problem talking down to them at every opportunity about the problems of the “working classes”—usually from the steps of Columbia University. The actual “working classes” we were shouting at knew what work was—every time they rolled into bed at night and woke up the next day. Who were these seemingly unemployed, hairy, pot-smoking freaks with their compliant girlfriends and their big talk about the Means of Production? What production? These cocksuckers didn’t produce anything!

Thus, a perfectly good message got lost with the messenger.

In the same way, having Alice Waters on your side of the argument is like having Alec Baldwin or Barbra Streisand endorse your candidate (a feeling I know all too well). You may agree with everything they say, but you wish they’d just shut the fuck up. No independent voter, disenchanted with the Republicans but struggling to pay his bills, wants to hear about what he should be doing or whom he should be voting for from some spectacularly wealthy “artiste” who lives in a compound in Hollywood—far from the pain and daily toil of ordinary Americans.

There is no better example of a counterproductive exercise in advocacy than Alice’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes. Introduced by a shockingly lazy and credulous Leslie Stahl as the “Mother of Slow Food” (a provably false assertion that thirty seconds of Googling would have put to rest), St. Alice of Berkeley was depicted floating ethereally above the fray as she grazed through an expensive greenmarket, pontificating dreamily about the joys of local produce and sustainable, socially conscientious eating.