Yes, yes, I know, never will economics and a Guardian columnist meet without a disastrous clash of misunderstanding. But Ms. Williams really does need to be introduced to the works of Thorstein Veblen, only a century or so old now and his Theory of Conspicuous Consumption.
Underneath the
bubbly-chef personalities and ruddy appreciation of the wonderful
yields from mother earth, there is this unmistakable tang of snobbery –
we can toy with cheap ingredients because it’s so manifest that we
could afford steak if we wanted to; we can mess about with menus
because no one’s year will be ruined if it turns out to be not to their
taste.
It
has always been a very middle-class characteristic to attempt to
individuate oneself through food. When aubergines and garlic were
exotic and un-English, that’s what we all ate. The message back then
was "we are adventurous, open-minded, independent of spirit, fond of
foreigners".
The
message now, with the off-fall, is still one of adventure, but now
foreign food is too common. Anyone, anywhere will eat a curry. So we
try to project a kind of nostalgic integrity, a world in which no one
hurries and nothing is wasted, a return to a time before ready meals,
and women with jobs, and mass production. Never mind that it’s totally
fraudulent – never mind that it’s a hundred times less wasteful to
throw away a pig’s ear than it is to devote three days to making it
taste nice.
One reason it is so fashionable to eat offal is because, precisely like that pig’s ear, it takes lots of labour to make it taste of anything other than what it is, rubbish. As it is labour, time, that we are all short of, eating things (in public, no less) that take a lot of time to prepare is a way of stating our social standing, showing that we are rich enough to purchase substantial amounts of other’s labour.
If prawn cocktails with Marie Rose sauce and a steak and chips took more labour to produce, then those would be the fashionable things to eat.
Vanderbilts and diamonds implanted in their backs, the rich being fat in places where food is in short supply, they being thin when calories are abundant, tans being a no no when peasants work in the fields, becoming fashionable when only foreign holidays make them possible, eating the wrong end of an animal….all the same thing and known as conspicuous consumption.
Anyone got a copy of "Theory of the Leisure Class" to send her?
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