"Edible Media" is a biweekly look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.
The left has always had an uneasy relationship with pleasure -- and thus with food. For every freewheeling beatnik or free-loving hippie, there must be 10 dour left-wingers who see personal pleasure as an obscene indulgence in a world wracked by war, hunger, oppression, and environmental ruin.
Yet one of the most powerful critiques of consumer capitalism is that it drains life of vivid pleasure and offers instead "pleasure." A handmade dark-chocolate custard becomes a dull, corn-sweetened "chocolate" shake. Peddling boundless diversity and freedom, mass-market consumerism delivers regimentation, sameness, and mediocrity. As Michael Pollan showed in Omnivore's Dilemma, the dizzying variety arrayed on U.S. supermarket shelves boils down to endless combinations of two ingredients: corn and soybeans.
By treating pleasure and food as beneath responsible discussion, the left cedes too much to the hucksters who run the show. Rather than deride pleasure as a vice of the rich, the left should try to revive it as a principle for all.
That's why I was happy when the left-liberal weekly The Nation came out with its first issue devoted to food this week.
