[The New York Times issued a title correction. Ed.]

(he ducks)

And of oats — yes, they have a certain Calvinist quality to them, but less Auld Kirk and more, ahem, Regular Baptists.

All the oats in Scotland can’t begin to ameliorate the rest of the Scottish diet, unfortunately. It’s no wonder they liked to strip naked, paint themselves blue, and come rushing out of the glens swinging broadaxes at anything that moved. Not only is it more glorious to die bravely in battle than in your sleep of a stroke, but if they died before supper, they wouldn’t have to eat it.

Yeah, well, your name nothwithstanding, your ancestors must not have been Scots. Haggis, lard and blood pudding, washed down with many deep draughts (and understandably so) of uisge beathe, anyone?

No, but seriously… I shop at WF, too, and eat there frequently. I think my bitchiness comes from feeling kind of helpless about how many choices we do have and how many choices a lot of other folks don’t have — and to echo Hafidha, how much junkie food choices are marketed to everyone as the “easier” choice.

Is there going to be a trickle-down effect here to less economically advantaged communities, or are we obligated to spread the gospel, as it were, and to ask the questions about what kind of food is available to all of us?

Ron,
Liking the thought of the “shared full meal.” Will have to check out your blog again to learn more ….

I didn’t quite know how to respond to PB’s posting (and also, I can’t reply to Blogger posts right now anyway). I try to eat healthfully and realize that I’m privileged to be able to eat the way that I do. I’ve seen the crappy food sold in crappy little corner stores in poorer sections of big cities, with their sorry excuses for produce and ridiculously high prices.

At the same time, I think people in our country who are not flat out broke (e.g. homeless) eat poorly because the market has been structured in such a way to make it appear easier to eat that way. When I look at the price of processed foods like Hot Pockets and hot dogs, I have a hard time believing that they’re cheaper than a couple pounds of rice and beans would be. Not even organic rice and beans! But when was the last time you saw a commercial for just plain old rice and beans?

To my mind, the biggest problem here is the way in which people don’t challenge what is being marketed to them. I have friends who have been on extremely limited budgets, but still ate high quality food. They accomplished this through things like sharing the job of cooking meals with friends, eating soups made from inexpensive ingredients like lentils, joining a food coop, finding a spot to garden, or splitting the cost of weekly deliveries of organic vegetables with roommates or neighbors. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is perceived as “alternative” and we RARELY see it encouraged in mainstream media or in our institutions. I’d love to see middle schools and high schools offer classes on How Not to Have to Buy Everything You Need from the Mall.

What I see you talking about in your post is “community,” and in our society - filled with people buying their own individual everything, completely ignorant of their neighbors’ names - we are not taught how to address these kinds of issues together. So we just take whatever is doled out to us - whatever seems most convenient. Even if it is actually MORE expensive (e.g. individualized portions of yogurt vs. a whole tub of yogurt).

When I was a kid living in new york city, my mother used to go to all the way to another borough to slaughter the chickens we occasionally ate. Later, my parents would drive out to the only health food store on Long Island for meat substitutes, or seek out 7th Day Adventist churches that had (vegetarian) food stores . This was to keep us in adherence to our religious dietary laws surrounding the killing of animals for food. I saw members of our community splitting the cost of a calf or lamb or goat, and then several of them driving out to the country to kill the animals, skin it, divide it up, and bring it back in little white paper parcels. We’re not talking middle class or upper class folks here. Would it have been easier to just go to Pathmark or A&P? Of course! And that’s exactly what most people did. But some people talked to each other, discovered they had shared needs and concerns, and found a way around the mainstream institutions. They created their own systems.