Am I a Food Snob?

Let me start with a confession: Without Kraft Macaroni Dinner, Velveeta, and Miracle Whip I couldn't have made it through college. I don't mean just that I ate the stuff-I manufactured it. My tuition, rent, and living expenses were paid with money saved from a summer job at the Kraft Foods factory in Champaign, Illinois. In one sense, I owe my career and current middle-class comfort to highly processed, preservative-filled, mass-produced, heavily advertised industrial food.

So how did it happen that I now find myself snapping up organic radicchio, heirloom tomatoes, and artisan cheese that costs more per pound than I used to spend for a night on the town? Is it simply that my culinary appreciation and ecological consciousness (not to mention wages) have risen since college, or is something else going on? Have I joined ranks with yuppies who think nothing of spending on a single meal of exquisitely prepared food and fine wine what an inner-city family needs for a month of groceries?

Well, not exactly. I still can't tell a Merlot from a Medoc, and the stove in our kitchen is so old that repairmen refuse to work on it. (Luckily, three burners still light, although when we bake we have to prop a chair against the oven door to keep it closed.) So, no wave of guilt overtakes me in the checkout line when I pay a little more for milk without pesticides or a loaf of delicious red-onion-and-rosemary sourdough bread.

I did pay attention, however, when a headline in my food co-op's newsletter recently asked, "Why did you buy the fancy red leaf lettuce when you can buy chopped bagged iceberg for half the cost?"

Mark Muller, the article's author, recounts how relatives question his purchases of natural and organic food. "Have I lost touch with mainstream America?" he asks. "Have I become an elitist -- a food snob?"

FOOD REMAINS ONE of the most significant badges of class in American life. Wealthy, educated urbanites who would never permit themselves to poke fun at welfare mothers or immigrants freely make cracks about spongy white bread and Miracle Whip, which were staples in the cupboard when I was growing up. While I am eternally grateful to have discovered baguettes and aioli (both of which originated as peasant fare in France), I'm not surprised at the trepidation (and occasional hostility) many working-class and rural Americans feel toward new and unusual foods.

Muller explains that his own path to alleged food snobbery began with microbrew beers, which taste so much better than big corporate brands they're worth the extra cost. "I later made the jump into high-quality food," he says. "I find the increased cost small compared to the health benefits, the better taste, and the pleasure of shopping in small co-ops rather than crowded grocery stores."

Still, he adds, family back in Iowa "worry that we are wasting our money. . .There are also larger, unspoken concerns-that eating these expensive organic foods is wasteful and counters our moral obligation to 'feed the world.'"

Muller, a trained environmental engineer who works at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, decided to investigate whether his taste for natural foods in any way worsens hunger in developing nations or harms poor families and hard-hit farmers here at home.

He notes that in North America food has been transformed into a commodity, just like standard half-inch nails or AAA batteries. A pound of lean hamburger in one place is supposed be like a pound of lean hamburger in another, the only difference being perhaps price. But this fails to take into account a whole host of environmental, health, and taste factors.

"Aficionados of cars, stereos, and televisions would not stand for someone claiming that they are all the same," Muller notes. So why would we expect that to be the case with hamburger or eggs or tomatoes?