[Download] "Food for Thought: Renewing the Culinary Culture should be a Conservative Cause (Ideas)" by The American Conservative * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Food for Thought: Renewing the Culinary Culture should be a Conservative Cause (Ideas)
- Author : The American Conservative
- Release Date : January 30, 2008
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 60 KB
Description
ALICE WATERS might not seem like a conservative. A veteran of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fundraising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for "edible schoolyards" --where children work with instructors to grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce--to John F. Kennedy's attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she has given her gastronomic movement, the "Delicious Revolution," strikes the ear as one part fuzzy-headed Marxism, the other Brooksian bobo-speak. This woman is not, as they say, one of us. But a closer look tells a different story. In a 1997 talk, Waters quoted from an essay by Francine du Plessix Grey about the film "Kids," which portrays the sex-, drug-, and violence-crazed lives of a circle of New York teenagers. Du Plessix Grey writes of being haunted by the adolescents' "feral" and "boorishly gulped" fast-food diet: "we may," she suggests, "be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialization, the family meal." Such an activity "is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilizing discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness." These teenagers "are deprived of the main course of civilized life--the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions."