The Value Bucket

The other day I was driving through one of those highway commercial strips. The Librarian was riding shotgun. More accurately, she was riding Freshly Baked Peach Pie, if what the passenger is holding is the determinant. We passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. The sign out front touted “The Value Bucket.” The Librarian noted the sign and observed, “It’s crappy, and you don’t want to think about where it came from, but it’s cheap and there’s a lot of it.”

We agreed that this was an excellent metaphor for much of what Americans consume. To torture another metaphor, fried chicken is just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce).

Consider clothing, although much of it lacks even the virtue of being cheap. The majority of it is made to fall apart, sewn by underpaid, overworked, abused people. Same goes for all those bits of consumer electronics, from ear buds to desktop computers. Also small consumer goods in general, from table lamps to blenders. We’ve all got closets full of this junk, some of it still partially functional. Closets full? Those self-storage places seem to have sprung up everywhere in the past decade. No doubt they are full of sawdust-and-glue furniture, old televisions, area rugs outgassing formaldehyde, and other wretched plastic detritus.

Just as well that those televisions are in the storage bin. Otherwise the two-dimensional screens would be displaying one-dimensional plots and characters interspersed with zero-dimensional corporate propaganda – by which I mean both commercials and “news.” Television offers us a Value Bucket even more greasy, rancid, and overflowing than the dumpster behind KFC.

By contrast, I’ll share the advice my father gave me when I turned eighteen, which was drinking age back then. We went to a local bar, ordered drinks, and he offered the following: “If you only learn one thing from my mistakes, learn this – never drink cheap booze. If you have just a little bit of money, buy a very little bit of the very best you can find. You’ll have just as much fun. Your head will thank you and your stomach will thank you.” The Minor Heretic has followed this advice, with rare exceptions, to this day. It goes beyond alcohol, however. It is decent advice for consumption in general.

I suppose it is futile to advise most Americans to drink a couple of decent quality beers instead of a six-pack of that dilute cat urine they call light beer, or eat fewer calories of better food. Recommending small efficient cars instead of four-wheeled dirigibles or compact, well designed houses instead of 5,000 square foot McMansions is shouting against the hurricane. Our tastes have expanded to fill the available space and won’t contract until nature puts its foot down. By nature I mean not only our overstrained biosphere, but also the declining deposits of minerals and fossil fuels and our own overfed, overstressed bodies. We’ll gorge today and repent in the intensive care unit.

The Librarian and I fled the strip and ended up at the house of some old friends. We ate pizza topped with their own produce and baked in their stone oven and accompanied it with their home made wine. We followed it with the aforementioned peach pie. It wasn’t expensive food, except in the cost of time and care. Those last two factors are the key to understanding the Value Bucket dilemma. We have been robbed of time by a corporate economy bent on extracting more work for lower wages. We have been propagandized into caring more about quantity than quality, and to accept shoddiness as a fact of life.

Still, I count among my friends many holdouts against speed and volume. We’re fighting a delicious battle against the forces of the Value Bucket. Join us.

Butter

I am sitting at the end of a long farm table, looking at a scattering of condiments towards the other end. Among the salt shakers and bottles of hot sauce is a three inch yellow cube on a plate under plastic wrap.

I should tell you that this farm is on an island and has (among many other animals) one extremely free-range dairy cow. I forget her name, but she has one. I encountered her a number of times as we both wandered around the farm pursuing our respective agendas. Both involved renewable energy - photovoltaics and wind on my part, indigenous biomass on her part.

When I sat down to my first meal here the cook pointed out both the regular butter and the farm butter. At first I didn’t get it. The yellow cube she pointed to looked like a chunk of cheddar cheese. It didn’t register as butter to my eyes. Later I figured it out and tried some.

It was as different from store-bought butter as cream cheese is from aged cheddar. The farm butter was a brilliantly rich yellow, the real yellow that food processors try to put into supposedly buttery food with artificial color. It was almost tacky looking it was so…real. It had a creaminess and an uber-buttery flavor alien to the white stick of the grocery store. The texture was firmer than commercial butter at room temperature, but not as hard when chilled. I was thrilled and consumed a goodly portion of heavily buttered homemade bread.

Of course I asked to buy a pound to take home. The only problem is that it will run out and the farm is too far to visit just to get butter.

I mention this experience to point out part of what we have lost with industrialized agriculture. We have gained convenience, for sure. We have cheap food, or at least cheap calories. We have consistency. What we have less of is flavor, color, and texture. Read Michael Pollan and others on the subject and you’ll find that we have also lost nutritional value.

But forget about that for the moment. Let’s consider consistency, as in invariability, sameness. It is a culinary virtue only in terms of food safety. The aforementioned cook told me that the character of the butter changed with the seasons, according to the cow’s diet. The spring butter is the richest, when the cow is grazing on the new growth. It gets whiter and leaner in the winter when the cow can’t graze at all. How wonderful. I want my food to carry the sign of when it was created. It’s not just about some romantic vision of agriculture. It’s about knowing, truly understanding, what I’m putting into my body. I like being able to meet the person who produced my food. Or the cow, for that matter. That is real food safety.

Michael Pollan writes about the abstraction of food. Beef is beef is beef, wherever it came from. Eggs are eggs and butter is butter. In the past few years people have been challenging this abstraction by pointing out the real differences in taste and nutrition between industrially produced food and traditionally produced food. The difference is there, it is real, and it is dramatic. The contrast just smacked me between the eyes again.

Buttered toast for breakfast tomorrow.