Friday food blogging

This comment in a discussion about some ugly food-pandering done by the Bush campaign at Pandagon is pretty funny. My god has it really come to this? "Vote for me, since I too eat food with lots of preservatives!"

Seriously, are they going to photograph him eating fresh vegetables next and say that Bush, like you, would rather eat fried chicken and pizza?

This comment made me laugh:

The bad news is that, to a significant number of American voters, Swiss cheese -- the kind you get sliced in packages in a supermarket -- is hoity-toity.

I have found that it's easier for people to understand that I don't eat meat than to get them to understand that I do eat of the stinky cheeses.

Julia Child's recent death has brought attention to the rapid growth of experimenting with cooking/food in our society. However, this has created an enormous "food gap", a situation that should concern anyone who is concerned about other gaps in our society, be they wage gaps or the gap between red and blue. And while the temptation surely exists to assume that red-staters are food-ignorant and blue-staters are food-knowledgable, the situation is far more complex than that. I for one know many people who are otherwise gun-toting, book-eschewing, Bush-voting red-staters who really know how to cook and would faint before eating a piece of baloney on Wonderbread with a touch (not too much) of French's mustard. Though I can't say I know too many people who voted for Gore and don't have any idea what "hummus" is, so I guess that the red/blue divide might still be an issue here. But I'll bet that they're out there in large numbers.

We can hope that the Repubs don't try to wield anti-foodism the way that they have successfully wielded anti-intellectualism in the past. If it suddenly becomes shameful to like pepper with your salt the way that it's become shameful in some places to read in public, local cuisines could suffer. Good Southwestern cooking could be shunned for Taco Bell much like The New York Times has gotten shunned for USA Today. School boards might have one more unending struggle as people endlessly debate whether children should be exposed to salsa and mustard in the school lunchrooms. Having a glass of wine with dinner is already a suspect thing to do, but what if Ann Coulter starts calling it treason?