The assault on good food by corporate shills and conservative think tanks who label decent food and local farmer’s markets “elitist” continues. It’s getting old.
Yeah, ok, I’m elitist. I admit it. I like good, non-poisonous food that doesn’t trash the universe. Elite can be good you know. Wouldn’t you want America’s elite fighting force on your side—the Green Berets perhaps—when you’re in a pickle? How is that bad?
Anyway, the point is that I just realized that I’m here in Italy in part because to be elite costs much less than it does in the U.S. Italy seems to have a plethora of elitists, you see, and they mind what they put in their mouths and don’t trust corporation dickheads to tell them what’s good to eat. And they shop at local open air markets all the time, without someone in a suit calling them idiotic names.
Yesterday I visited an outpost of Elitism in the Lunigiana called Naturalmente Lunigiana. I got waited on by the guy you see in the pictures on the website who is shown making cheese or chasing lovable and happy barnyard animals around. The food they sell in their store along the highway comes from just a few kilometers away, which is elitist for sure.
We got a huge bag of stuff. Some soft cow cheese similar to stracchino you can spread on foccacette and make a meal out of. We got a big wedge of aged sheep cheese. I got a beefsteak and a couple of fat sausages.
After the guy hacks off the number of sausages I want he thrusts them over the counter so I can see up close what they look like.
“You see, they are dark. They are dark because we don’t use any coloring or preservatives, only pork, salt and pepper,” he says, only in Italian. Then he adds the kicker, “You can eat them cooked or raw.”
Now, I gotta tell you, only elitists of the first order are gonna want to slide some raw pork sausage down their gullets. That’s because the big corporate profit machine has made us scared to death of their poisoned “food.” They use the government to do their bidding, of course. So the government, using your tax dollars, dutifully informs you to cook your sorry excuse for a chicken for 17 hours in a 350 degree oven and then test for radioactivity before you eat it.
No thanks.
Anyway, all this food cost me a mere €12. Remember, we’re talking artisan produced cheeses and sausages, and a hunk of beef that hasn’t been genetically modified or given monkey brain tissue to eat.
And so, get this, after we pay he asks us if we like yogurt. After hearing our enthusiastic reply he goes in the back and comes out with a bottle of yogurt from his cows. He gives it to us.
Elitism for free! You gotta love it! (It’s like illegal drugs, the one true free market commodity: the first one’s always free.)
(The night passes, the steak is devoured. It is the morning after the storm…)
Breakfast. We already had some yogurt in the fridge that we liked. But this, man, this yogurt was like light years better in our informal taste test—zesty, flavorful and all those other superlatives usually reserved for stupid PR materials.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, come to Italy for your elitism. You’ll save money and eat quite well.
I wonder if the corporate shills have ever been to the old country? Perhaps we should send them. Perhaps they’d never come back. Elitism is that yummy.
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