On Dec 9, 2013, at 9:02 AM, Andy <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lemme try something here.
>
> Regarding Doug's recent post:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/doug.henwood/posts/10151931955411475
>
> I kind of thought foodie meant gourmand instead of health food enthusiast.
> But that aside, how safe is the assumption that the latter is peculiar to
> people with money?
"Foodie" wasn't my word - it was Remeike Forbes's. I wouldn't use it - I don't like the word in itself, and seemed wrong in context. But the quote itself is pure brilliance:
Via Remeike Forbes:
Ernst Bloch on foodies (1947):
"That is why all improvers of our situation who merely concentrate on health are so petit-bourgeois and odd, the raw fruit and vegetable brigade, the passionate herbivores, or even those who practice special breathing techniques. All this is a mockery compared with solid misery, compared with diseases which are produced not by weak flesh but by powerful hunger, not by faulty breathing but by dust, smoke, and lead. Of course there are people who breathe correctly, who combine a pleasant self-assurance with well-ventilated lungs and an upright torso which is flexible to a ripe old age. But it remains a prerequisite that these people have money; which is more beneficial for a stooped posture than the art of breathing."
A commenter added the source, and some more quote:
Akilano Akiwumi-Assani
p.467, The Principle of Hope v.II, 'Malthus, birth-rate, nourishment' - and the preceding passage - "All in all, even without grotesque visions, every organic desire for improvement remains up in the air if the social one is not acknowledged and taken into account. Health is a social concept, exactly like the organic existence in general of human beings, as human beings. Thus it can only be meaningfully increased at all if the life in which it stands is not itself overcrowded with anxiety, deprivation and death" Bloch wrote the Principle of Hope in Cambridge Mass during the Great Depression ('38-'47) , he was blacklisted and his wife, an architect, ended up working in kitchens to support them. Scuppie rustica consumer sovereignty movements are nauseating against such a backdrop.