I see Forelock is running a challenge designed to make Big Food consumers everywhere feel very smug — they may be eating hog shit off the backs of exploited immigrants, but at least they’re not whacked elitists. I mean, curing your own bacon for a BLT is ridiculous enough. But to promote the notion and dis industrial food alongside the Kraft ad I caught is almost poetic. I just don’t know why he doesn’t expect people to grow their own wheat to make the bread. Maybe mine their own salt, too.
I also see the inevitable backlash against the rather awesome “Food, Inc.” has begun. Never underestimate the power of a few monolithic food companies with so much to lose if Americans start to understand exactly what they are selling. So expect more defense of farmers, only not the Joel Salatin kind, just the ones who have to worry about the “death tax.” Expect more attacks on the messenger, as if the filmmakers and reviewers were the ones forcing poor, overworked moms to resort to dollar meals in the drive-through. And definitely expect the class war to heat up, with cretins everywhere thinking eating well is only about money. I grew up so poor I was toilet-trained in an outhouse, but my mom did an amazing job feeding a family of nine because she learned some basic nutrition in public school in New York City: beans and cornbread make a complete protein. Today an immigrant like her, brought over from Belfast as a baby, would never get any food learning in school, just junk from machines. And while I’m waxing sappy, my dad always said the difference between “poor” and “white trash” is soap and education. Now kids have to get the latter at the movies. But if it liberates them from any notion that they have to butcher their own hog for a sandwich, we all win.