Alice Waters is big fat snob!

The Internet/blogosphere is great. Example: this morning. I checked out The Amateur Gourmet, which led me to the FN Dish (the Food Network is running a contest, by the way, so get over there and leave your URL!), which led me to this post on EaterSF, which led me to this blog at KQED, which led me to this oldish article at the New York Times. (Funny the way that a series of blogs led me right back to a print publication, right?) I've been watching the food crisis develop in the pages of the Economist lately (we haven't seen it on our own supermarket shelves...yet). I guess that (serious rice-aholics aside) Americans are pretty well insulated from the crisis in the greater world, but it should be just a matter of time before the shock wave ripples through our own heavily subsidized food system. When it does, I certainly hope (Ms. Waters* and Mr. Pollan) that it will help even out the now-yawning chasm between subsidized, processed food and what, in simpler times, might have been simply called "real" food. And like Pollan and Waters, I'm a big fan of my local farmer's market. But I'm not sure that we're coming from the same place... ...The reigning farmer's market in the Bay Area (and maybe in the country) is at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. The market may send a beautiful perfume of fresh lilies, spring greens, and deep-fried asparagus wafting down the pier, but the breeze on market days also carries the not-so-subtle odor of bourgeois self-importance. Well-heeled foodies from Pacific Heights and gawking tourists well outnumber serious bargain hunters, and a pound of new potatoes is hard to between the lavender-honey face scrub and $7 bahn mi. Seriously, there is WAY more fancy prepared food and specialty gourmet schwag than real, staple produce. And that produce is frequently twice the price of similar stuff in a supermarket or at many other farmer's markets. A lovely place on a Saturday afternoon, but I find it difficult to believe that the masses will flock there to stretch a food dollar that is already on the rack. I know that Waters probably spends more time at the Berkeley Bowl, and that she's done exceptionally good things in East Bay public schools. Still, I can't help but think that, for all their good intentions, Waters and a lot of the local food movement has created a culture (or at least an image) that drives away the very people who could benefit from it most. I guess what I'm saying is that I believe in the Simple Food, but I prefer a more understated sensibility and a healthy sense of humor. This weekend, we're headed to the Maker Faire on Saturday, but we'll try to bring you pictures of our own, more proletarian, Alemany Market. That's where I suspect the real answer lies. Fight the good fight, Comrades! *I'm remembering with relish the scrap I got into this recently-past. I called Alice Waters a stuck-up, poncy snob and some guy got all pink in the face. He maintained she was "at the forefront of an exciting culinary revolution." I think I eventually conceded that she was at the forefront of an exciting culinary revolution of stuck-up, poncy snobbery, and ducked into the kitchen for another Murphy's. Hmm...I guess that says a lot about what kind of parties we go to.