But the dispute between us is about what these two conflicting changes add up to. At first, you said, US food was "a million times better today than it was 30-35 years ago." Now you say that the "average" of the good and bad is so improved that it's "barely in the same universe." As before, I don't think these are very adequate quantitave statements about conflicting changes. Its been my observation that in LBO you tolerate much more complexity in making sense of conflicting trends. Again: how do you average the good and the bad in American food?
Hint: can we construct a point system, eg plus 20 for improvements in the Virginia A & P, minus 20 for inedible chicken, minus 25 for KFC, plus 15 for new editions of Joy of Cooking... No, I don't think it will work. We just need, to describe all this, a more complex descriptive statement.
Jesse
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 11:31 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] bagels/ethnicity
>
> On Sep 9, 2006, at 11:24 PM, utopia1 at attglobal.net wrote:
>
> > As to your remark that food in the US is "a million times better
> > than it was
> > 30-35 years ago": unqualified and uncomplex, this remark falls apart
> > immediately. (It didn't make it here through cyberspace, so I had
> > to use a
> > secret technique to resonstruct it.) We all know the ample evidence
> > of the
> > improvement in American tastes, "slow food," New Paltz, Union Square,
> > etc. But we also know about the collapse of the American diet, the
> > quality
> > of fast food, the corruption of the food supply, etc. It's hardly a
> > conservative longing for some past golden age to point these things
> > out.
> > (Where do you manage to buy edible chicken?) I leave you to
> > quantify all
> > this, and to figure out how it all adds up to a million-fold
> > improvement.
>
> Ever read old American cookbooks? Repulsive stuff. The old editions
> of the Joy of Cooking, aside from having those interesting entries on
> how to prepare muskrat, range from the dull to the appalling. Now you
> can get really good food in small cities across the US. During my
> first marriage, I used to visit my mother-in-law in southwestern
> Virginia. When I first visited in the late 1970s, the A&P in Abingdon
> didn't have garlic. On my last visit in 1999, you could get baby
> eggplant and kimchee. Yeah, sure there are lots of fatties, and lots
> of crappy food, but nothing in capitalist life is ever without
> contradiction. But the average is so much better than before that
> it's barely in the same universe.
>
> Doug
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