(Is this the right time to point out that the linked article was written by a woman named Ho and published in Bitch Media? I thought you might want to know, because it seems like life often imitates The Onion.)
What all of this adds up to is a massive PR campaign aimed at rebranding collard greens, divorcing the vegetable from its working class and indigenous affiliations to place it squarely within the culinary crosshairs of the same massive gourmet health food apparatus that turned acai berries, quinoa, tofu, and chia seeds into “superfoods.” Though the health benefits of such foods are well-documented, their trendiness within majority populations tends to result in a generally unhealthy outcomes for their cultures of origin. The tendency takes the form of a curious kind of reacharound logic wherein economic and racial minorities are castigated for eating “primitively” and “unhealthily” while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class as “exotic” delicacies. As a result, the price of that food item inflates to meet the surge in mainstream demand for it.What is "reacharound logic"? Anyone care to hazard a guess, because the author leaves us not a clue as to its meaning.
Nor does she provide examples of racial minorities being "castigated for eating "primitively" and "unhealthily" while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class...". Does she refer to criticism of the junk foods bought by people receiving governmental aid? That is not isolated to any one racial group, although perhaps in her mind there is only one racial minority. No, wait, she references working class "white" and "black" southern Americans. Working class, that convenient catch-all for people in an undescribed demographic. Everyone who has a job is working class, am I right?
I have visions of upper class people in top hats and carrying canes, walking through the produce section of a grocery store with cherry pickers in their hands, carefully selecting the best produce previously purchased only by working class members.
The central and sustaining drive behind the #foodgentrification conversation is an overwhelming sense of fear: fear of being unable to feed one's family, of losing access to traditional foods, of being priced out of toxin-free produce, of one's food being alternately shamed and fetishized depending on commercial whims, of having one's history repackaged and sold. It comes down to a waiting game; many of the participants in this conversation voiced resignation over the possibility that their food would be next.Reading that made my head hurt. I took two Bayer aspirins, medicine appropriated from a German company and repackaged and sold at whim.
There is a warning of bad things already happening in the gentrification of collards. Blame the hipsters and yuppies.
The apparatus has already been put into full swing: customers are already pre-registering for collard cooking classes, cashiers are already wearing “Collards are the New Kale!” buttons on their aprons, derivative blog posts are already queued up for publication, and trend analysts are surely already mapping out the apex of the greens’ cultural trajectory.Apparatus. Pre-registering. Classes. Buttons on cashiers' aprons. Derivative blog posts. Mapping out the apex. It's a war, sounds like. The war on collard buyers who aren't working class white and black southern people.
And finally, Ms. Ho gets to the big finish.
If anything, the crucial importance of #foodgentrification lies in the way it enables participants to expose a particular piece of economic inequality that operates with a glossy, do-gooder façade. It’s difficult to avoid feeling like you’re not complicit in systems of food insecurity after reading through the hashtag, and the questions that it raises are ones that we should have been asking ourselves a long time ago, well before it got to tofu, then acai, then kale, then collards.There we are, economic inequality. Bingo. Somehow the increase in demand for collards resulting in more acres of collards under cultivation and more jobs created by the increased planting, tending, harvesting, cleaning, wrapping, packaging and shipping of collards doesn't fit into the reacharound logic.
Even though most of those new jobs are likely held by minorities.
Thank you, Ms. Ho, and best wishes in your pursuit of an MFA.
14 comments:
Gunny explains all.
I do know what a "reacharound" is. Now, we're supposed to be giving one to blacks? Are we bigots if we don't?
My daddy was growing collards in his 1/4 acre plot when I was a kid in the 50s. Stuff grows like weeds. I plant it every year in my garden. You can't kill the stuff and you always get 10 times more than you can eat.
Whole Foods seems to me to be all about finding a way way to charge 4 times what you'd pay for the same thing at Shoprite. The method is to appeal to hipster vanity.
We white folks used to call collard greens "wilted lettuce!"
I'm indigenous, too!
The beautiful people are bored with morel mushrooms and truffles so it's on to collard greens. Up next: turnips!
But what about cornbread? You can't eat collard greens, turnip greens or mustard greens without cornbread. Does Whole Foods know this?
I've been eating greens since I was a child. There are collards, spinach and turnip greens in my fridge now, waiting for this evening's dinner.
I'm all gentrifying and such.
There are also chicken necks and chicken feet in the fridge, from which delicious soup stock will be made.
I never shop at Whole Foods. Who can afford that? I buy produce at several grocery stores that serve Hispanic immigrants. Excellent produce and good prices. I'm a serial gentrifier.
I would venture to guess that more whites than Blacks have eaten collards, so who appropriated what. And stay the hell away from my hamburgers if this is an issue.
I do shop Whole Foods, and it is crazy over-priced, so I only buy things there that I can't get elsewhere. They have a lot of such things, especially in the prepared foods category. If you want something carryout that is ready to eat and healthy, you just can't beat their selection anywhere else. Don't buy stuff there that you can find elsewhere or you will pay double or triple. It's the only grocery store I know where you can spend $50 and not need a bag to carry it.
Eyetalians eat green like colored folk. I used to pick dandelion greens w/ my grandma when they were just popping up. Grandma would make sure there were no dogs in the area pissing on them. Greens and cannellini beans w/ salt pork, garlic, olive oil and crusty Eyetalian bread. I took my old man to Ruby's, a famous soul food place in KC. He loved it, particularly the greens. And, Ruby hit it off w/ my old man.
Collards are my favorite greens, which kind of makes sense since I'm from Alabama.
We cook 'em chez YH by throwing into the pot the "burnt ends" & a little smoked fat from when I smoke up some pulled pork in the summer.
Sprinkle on some hot sauce or pepper vinegar (available in the deep south at any grocery store), and eat with corn bread. Truly delish!
IMO that's a person with way too much idle time on their hands. Concocting 'issues' of supposed broad significance when really, what is Whole Food's share of the retail grocery market. Even here in the southwest most all the local groceries, Safeway, etc. carry collards, and have been for years. She just needed something to write about.
Slightly off topic, though it is Southern, I'd like to recommend this piece I just finished reading. "Killer Mike".
An inspiring, popular, and successful rapper from Atlanta. I say inspiring as it gave me much to consider re my usual thoughts about rap music. Which, I admit, were not open minded thoughts.
There is plenty of good reading and fine writing at that site in general. About the South of today.
The Onion indeed. The daily dose of internet rage.
My experience with race/comfort foot/attitude is the exact opposite. Every single food-related conversation I've had with so-called minorities (around here my race just may be the minority) blossoms into something interesting and useful and personal and expansive. And fun and interesting. The idea of a white guy discovering and enjoying something out of character, that their comfort foods are something worthwhile and valuable and contributing to total culture, is appreciated. That is the response I see.
Chip, that is the same thing I've experienced. The slightest amount of polite curiosity about someone's (ethnic)food almost always leads to delighted sharing.
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