Land Of Plenty
Consider two of the "ten most emailed" articles from yesterday's NY Times (registration required):
* A eight-year-old Scarsdale tot who obsesses over outrageously expensive fashionable jeans
* A nine-year-old African boy who spends his days breaking up rocks that his mother sells for pennies to a cement contractor
How can Americans put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation we at Seattlest can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in the food and drink that keeps us from shrieking with moral outrage.
Roman emperors kept the plebes happy with bread & circuses. Marie-Antoinette told the peasants to eat cake. America's industrial food complex feeds us amalgamated, irradiated bar-coded fecal spam.
Well, Rome fell to the barbarians and the French aristocracy went to the guillotine, but we've become so sedated by all that high-fructose corn syrup that we're too fat and happy to rise up in anger.
Wake up, guys! Somebody has to tell Merkins to stop drinking the sweet, deadly Koolaid!
But who? Should it be up us, to the floggers? (New word, short for food bloggers.) Are we the only ones paying attention, or does our vision stop at the edge of the plate? Are we too numbed by Nebiolo and sated by soufflés?
Our manifesto: Floggers of the world, unite! We've got nothing to lose but our food chains. Let's stop playing "Rhapsody in Blue Cheese" and switch to something fierce: "Food, Glorious Food!" perhaps. More suggestions, please!
