Medium Raw

I wish.

John F. Ke

Something I wish I’d never read. I can only hope she’s happy—even weird and happy will suit me just fine. She will feel loved. She’ll have food. And shelter. A large Italian and Sardinian family—and a smaller American one. She’ll have seen, by the time she’s six years old, much of the world, and she’ll have seen, as well, that not everybody on this planet lives—or can live—anything like the way she lives. She will, hopefully, have spent time playing and ru

Beyond this, I don’t know what else I can do.

12

“Go Ask Alice”

To him the markets were like the stomach of the shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring that everything was for the best.

—ÉMILE ZOLA, LE VENTRE DE PARIS

Alice Waters wants to help. Shortly after Barack Obama’s election victory, the “Mother of Slow Food” wrote the new president a letter, advising him of his first order of business: that “the purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place in America—the White House.”

Reminding the president that they had helped raise money for him, she proposed that she and her friends, then–Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl and restaurateur Da

That there already was a chef at the White House, a person of “integrity and devotion,” seems not to have occurred to Ms. Waters. Nor did it seem to matter that this chef had been sourcing and serving largely organic, local, and sustainable food for years—or that there already was a kitchen garden. Making the mistake of judging a kitchen staff solely by its customers, Waters, observing—or at least hearing of—the previous tenant, no doubt assumed the worst. But I doubt she considered the matter long enough for even a cursory Google search.

It was, as it so often is, ultimately, all about Alice. “I ca

She got her garden in the end, as things turned out. Though the new president managed to resist the temptation to appoint Ms. Waters to government office.

As ham-fisted and clumsy as this approach was, a crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions, it would probably have gone down a lot better had Waters bothered to vote in the previous forty-four years. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the differences both philosophical and practical between Bush and Gore and Bush and Kerry were…striking, to say the least. Those were close contests. Whichever way you went—your vote inarguably counted for something. One need only read the front page of the newspaper to see how that decision played out and will continue to play out for some years. So there’s simply no way Alice or anybody else can realistically make the argument that “there’s no difference, man, it’s all the same military-industrial complex.” I am, admittedly, bitter about this. It sticks in my craw. It’s something about Waters that I just can’t get past.

After she had boasted of not voting since 1966, it seemed a little…crass of Waters to presume to now tell the president what to do. Particularly as he’d arrived in the White House facing a newly collapsed worldwide financial system, spiraling unemployment, and two wars—both of which were going badly. Americans were being thrown out of work in unheard-of numbers, and here was Alice, leaping on board to promote, among other things, the idea that we should be spending more on food. But then, tone and timing have never been a strong point with Waters.

Let it be said that, on balance, I would like the world to look, someday, much like Alice probably wants it to look. A city on a hill—or many cities on hills—surrounded by unbroken vistas of beautiful countryside; small, thriving, family-run farms growing organic, seasonal, and sustainable fruits and vegetables specific to the region. Healthy, happy, antibiotic-free animals would graze freely over the land, depositing their perfectly odorless, organic shit back into the food chain so other wonderful things might grow…The schoolchildren of the i

Or Italy. Not the real Italy, mind you. But the Italy of wine labels. The Italy of romantic-weekend comedies, where lonely, wistful divorcees end up getting joyously boned by lusty young handymen who wear banda

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes—or olives—and they don’t shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose—who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the off-season—as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.) The vaunted soil of Italy is as advertised, depending on who you are and where you live. If you live near Naples, though, the chances are good that your farmland is a not-so-secret dumping ground for toxic industrial waste from the north. Here, the true stewards of the earth are neither chefs nor grandmothers nor slow-food devotees. They’re the Naples-based fraternal organization, the Camorra. And the old man growing olives in his backyard in Chi-anti probably doesn’t make a living selling olive oil. He gets by renting his house to Germans.

So, who will work the Elysian Fields of Alice’s imaginary future? Certainly not her neighbors—whose average household income is currently about $85,000 a year. Unless, perhaps, at the point of a gun. And with Waters’s fondness for buzzwords like “purity” and “wholesomeness,” there is a whiff of the jackboot, isn’t there? A certainty, a potentially dangerous lack of self-doubt, the kind of talk that, so often in history, leads to actions undertaken for the “common good.” While it was excessive and bombastic of me to compare Alice to “Pol Pot in a muumuu,” it is useful to remember that he was once a practicing Buddhist and, later, attended the Sorbo