I’m a kind of populist when it comes to food – especially how the media handle it.
Since everybody has to eat, it seems to me media entities would have way more relevancy dealing with food safety and health and affordable meals and real-life food preparation than with insanely expensive restaurants where you can’t get a reservation anyway and even if you could you would be disinclined to eat their, say foie gras.
The worst offender, in my book, is the Food Network. It staggers me that in this day and age it can justify the financial and culinary waste of things like Iron Chef. I find it impossible to watch without thinking about how many people could be fed (like in Haiti right now, let alone all the financially strapped people in our own country) for the cost of the high-end ingredients. And Oh! The waste!
Maybe someone should try a food challenge show to develop healthy meals for schools, or packagable food for emergency situations.
Sometimes you truly need a little reminder of what food’s role in society can be aside from a life necessity. The Melville Charitable Trust has harnessed food as a social change agent in a way that is at once unique and obvious. It seems to be working in their single experiment at Billings Forge in Hartford. The good news is there are lots of inquiries about it and one day you could see this replicated in other places around the nation.
You can read more about it in my story here in The New York Times Metropolitan section.