Bowled over

What is it about bowls? Specifically: Why is food in bowls a thing? Because Instagram, is the quick answer. Food - specifically, healthy food - looks nice when photographed from above, in a bowl. The only permitted flat food is, of course, avocado toast.

There are breakfast versions involving granola, milk, and berries. Those I'm OK with. It's the savory ones that I'm having trouble embracing. These bowls - at like $12 a bowl - were very much a thing in Toronto. A city that also sells sub-$12 non-bowl lunch options, so I never wound up trying one.

I'm having trouble putting my finger on what my issue is with these bowls, exactly. Part of it is that I feel shamed by their existence - all that balance, those grains and greens where I'd sooner have pasta, (fewer) greens, and cheese. (The bowl-as-trough aspect isn't the issue.) It's a sense of inferiority for not going bowl, mixed with a sense of superiority for my non-faddishness in this area. (In this one area. I did buy a jumpsuit.)

But it's also the contents of many dishes labeled "bowls," which tend to sound vaguely nutritious but... bland. Cuisine-less, and not as in fusion, or the productive mix of existing cuisines. More like a bunch of supposed-to-be-good-for-you ingredients piles on top of each other. Thai or Chinese stir-fry, salade niçoise, Japanese or Vietnamese noodles with toppings, gnocchi with pesto, these all involve bowls, but they're not bowls in the utilitarian Western 2016 sense of the term. It's some sort of puritanical asceticism where you have a "protein" with your meal. Even if the ingredients are identical, a bowl is not a salade composée.

Consider this pro-bowl Guardian article, whose author writes, "I love how gentle and nurturing it feels" to eat one of these bowls. A bowl - and the Guardian ones actually look OK! - might taste good, but it's not really supposed to. It's supposed to nourish and nothing more. Which is, I think, what puts me off.

Do the rich not sweat?

I get that Maggie Lange's "In Defense of Disgusting Gym Clothes" is meant to be contrarian. But is it, really? Isn't the idea that if you're truly hardcore, you skip the 'performance' fabrics in favor of comfortable old clothes, pretty standard? While yes, people do dress up for the gym (or so I've heard - I'm usually the only person in the one I go to, and use the disintegrating regular-shirt approach), who's announcing that they do so, loud and proud? At best, you might get a defensive answer, about how whichever pants were on sale, or, conversely, that spending $90 on leggings guilts you into going to the gym. And sure, there's some shaming of those who work out without the proper sports bra or sneakers, because they are, according to onlookers, injuring themselves. But no one wants to announce that they put on ass-lifting pants so people will check them out. OK, not no one, but few, few. (And even that woman says she doesn't want attention!)

Lange does make a good point, though, about sweat and more accumulating on workout clothes in a way it doesn't on regular ones. It's not so much that sweat would ruin these clothes, though, as Lange suggests (shirts, maybe, but black leggings?), and more that they'd render them unwearable until the next laundry cycle. Which is something I'd long wondered about 'investing' in clothes for the gym. If you've spent $90 on your leggings, do you wear them more than once before washing them? (I may be finicky about this sort of thing, but unless it's really cold at the gym, I'd advise against.) Or is this part of the status-symbol aspect of these clothes? As in, not only do you put a lot of $$$ towards your workout-wear, but you have enough $90 leggings to make it through a laundry cycle.

Well-made

-In what seems strange to call good news, it appears that most of the response to the Bangladesh factory collapse is not conflation of poor labor conditions with shoddy workmanship that our sort would never stand for. Yes, we should be aware of the connection between the clothing we wear and the clothing found in the rubble - i.e. that these factories produce our clothes. It leads to outrage, and - apparently! - to sensible articles in the mainstream press about what's to be done. But I'm pleased to see that this conversation hasn't gone the let's-change-how-we-shop route, a route that tends to take attention away from things that would actually prevent such tragedies in the future, and to direct it towards unrelated and relatively petty concerns, namely that clothing these days isn't stitched together as artisanally as it once was.

And in any case, voting with our dollars-or-euros-or-pounds probably won't do much, especially considering what that tends to mean, namely going with a store that happened not to be in this latest news report, but that in all probability sources its clothing the same way. Like, if you read that the Gap is bad, you might go to Zara instead, or vice versa. But if - categorical imperative-style - everybody did as "we" are supposed to and bought only second-hand or ethically-certified local-sustainable you-pay-a-bit-more-but-you-get-to-feel-good-about-yourself clothes, or not shopping, period, would that be the answer? It would effectively shut down garment industries abroad. And certain such industries might need to shut down temporarily - must companies leave Bangladesh? perhaps for a time - but if "we" treated this shift as a kind of lifestyle change and not a boycott until various issues were properly addressed, then yes, that would be not so wonderful for workers abroad. And this gets to bigger questions re: "local" - we do need to consider that there will be consequences for workers abroad if we decide that everything must be produced domestically.

And... today's running podcast was Elizabeth Cline on Fresh Air. On the supply end, she knows so much more than the rest of us, having actually gone to China and Bangladesh and done some impressive-sounding (something for the to-read list, the author herself having redeemed my sense of what the book would be about) research. As for demand, Cline says that she herself now shops far more ethically than she once did, and cites her outfit the day of the interview - which includes a pair of high-end, U.S.-made jeans. Cline argues that we should care more about garment quality - which fabrics, and how they're stitched together - and that our indifference to this explains how we come to have cheaply-made clothing in the first place.

And this is where she loses me. We're under an ethical obligation not to consume clothing produced in terrible conditions (albeit not at the level of individual consumers, see paragraphs above), but we're not at all under an ethical obligation to care if our clothing looks nice. This isn't like with food, where you're eating more healthily if you're not eating junk. What are the ethical consequences of wearing a badly-fitting t-shirt?

The problem, then, is almost that Westerners/Americans aren't materialistic enough. We don't fetishize our clothing. We've decided we have better things to think about. Which was really how I thought about it when Cline was lamenting the fact that her own mother never taught her how to sew. And I'm thinking, let's say she had. And let's say women were still expected to do all sorts of domestic chores themselves, at home. Would Cline have gone on to write this fascinating-sounding, internationally-researched book?

-I now can't wait to read Alison Pearlman's new book about food culture. From L. V. Anderson's review:

The food movement ran into trouble when it began insisting that good taste was also capital-G good: Food that is good for the environment, for animals, for workers, for community-building, and for health will also taste the best. The argument is seductive but specious—what tastes good to one person won’t taste good to another—and dangerous. In the final section of her book, Pearlman notes that food-focused publications have increasingly covered issues related to environmentalism, labor, and politics over the last decade—but only “as problems to be solved not by collective political action but by individual shopping choices—in other words, consumption.” If consumption is virtuous, only those with the economic means to consume discriminately can have virtue. Which is how restaurant menus became infected with the elite farm brand-names and modernist amuse-bouches that proclaim how much less accessible they are than the food of the masses. The less accessible, the better.

This this this this this, and also, this.

Again with the lattes

You who are young and broke, did you know that buying coffee out every day costs more than not doing so? For what is, I estimate, the ten billionth time, the NYT is passing along this useful information.

Having already, in the linked WWPD post, listed my objections to this advice (coming, let me reiterate, from the standpoint of, I'm not commuting and I live in the woods, and thus am not defending a personal daily-coffee-out habit), I won't repeat the whole thing. 

This, though, is worth repeating: the first step, frugality-wise, should always be to cut that which you wouldn't miss. The money you spend on things (or upgrades) you don't notice. What that is will vary from person to person, and maybe it'll be coffee (or switching from lattes to drip), but chances are, if you're getting coffee out, this is something you actively enjoy. If that's where you cut (as opposed to, for example, realizing that there's no particular reason to buy t-shirts from J.Crew rather than Old Navy), you'll feel you're depriving yourself. 

Food court imminent?

Mark Bittman wants (link!) an indoor food market to go where the Fulton Fish Market once was. Not that this would much benefit me at this point, but I'm all for it. Remember how I was just recently raving about one of these in suburban Philadelphia? It's not exactly that NY doesn't have one - between Bittman and the commenters, we're reminded of the Essex Street Market, Chelsea Market, Eataly, and Arthur Ave. in the Bronx. But nothing spectacular. If there were a giant indoor market with high-quality produce and hipsters-make-your-food deliciousness, I'd be there in no time. So, this has the WWPD seal of approval. With certain caveats:

-What would the market sell? Would the whole local-only ethos be sustained (as with the highly-regulated Greenmarkets) or would the "market" concept get diluted? Bittman's vague on this. But the local thing really is what makes a New York City market different from one elsewhere, so you get New Yorkers assuming markets elsewhere sell locally-produced food. Not so! You know those markets in Paris that lead tourists to think the French know what good food is? They sell some local food, but barely. Are there enough local farms and artisanally-minded new-Brooklyn liberal-arts grads to fill some giant space in lower Manhattan? Or would this be supermarket produce, artfully arranged? In which case, why not advocate for policy that would improve the overall quality of city supermarkets?

-And yes, it matters not just that there is a food market, but also what it sells. The Reading Terminal Market is indeed big, but the food itself, from what I experienced, wasn't so hot. I had one of the worst slices of pizza of my life, and walked by tub after tub of various Amish gelatinous desserts, which for all I know are delicious, but yes, I'm skeptical. (Nothing personal against the Amish - my own ethnic cuisine produces similarly appetizing tubs, about which I'm equally enthusiastic.) It seems a stretch to claim, as Bittman does, that that market is the "grandest" in the region.

-Everything New York and food-related ends up swarmed with individuals not there to buy groceries. Photographers - smartphone and mega-camera alike - take up much of the prime real estate in Greenmarket stalls, and those who wish to actually, like, purchase ingredients have to wait their turn. Tourists love visiting food markets - Chelsea Market and Eataly especially - but the scale of NY, along with the number of tourists it gets, makes it such that between you and that bunch of chard are fifty enthusiastic European visitors, because it's some obscure Christian holiday and they all have the week off.

And I don't at all fault tourists for wanting to visit food markets. It's fun! And cheap! My point is that crowds of non-shoppers need to be taken into account. Either they don't buy anything, or what they want are prepared foods, which New Yorkers don't really need an indoor market to purchase. (See: takeout.) So it might also be worth looking into ways of selling high-quality food that are maybe not so photogenic. A shiny new waterfront market in what's already not a residential area (and such a short walk from the immensely popular tourist destination that is Ground Zero!) risks being a place to photograph food, and not purchase it.

Snobbery and indifference to stuff, or my love-hate relationship with the idea of buying pants at Lululemon

Is dislike of stuff - of shopping, of material objects - an admirable quality? Is liking stuff evidence that one is a bad person? Or is there more to it?

Graham Hill's account of having gobs of money but choosing to live with less helped me put my finger on what it is about the 'we have too much stuff' line of thought that can be so frustrating. Hill insists, and insists some more, that he's unusual for having had so much to begin with (tech-boom something-or-other), but that his lessons apply to regular-folk as well. And, well, yes and no.

First the yes: There's no point disputing that stuff tends to be bad for the environment, and to have been produced in unsavory conditions. Stuff plainly does not matter more than people. If, in a fire, you'd save your stuff and not your family, you have a screw loose.

But is the difference between the pro- and anti-stuff contingent really that the latter set care, while the former set are ego-driven and oblivious?

There are multiple reasons someone might join the anti-stuff bandwagon. Some people really are just hippies, and would rather meander in the wilderness than deal with the hustle and bustle of the mall. Others wish they could afford the $90 Lululemon yoga pants,* realize that they cannot (or can't get those and also buy cheese and, well, priorities), and then are all, screw Lululemon with its $90 yoga pants. Or: they think of all the amazing things they'd do with $90 (save the world, spend it on experiences, and/or buy even more cheese) and can't believe those with $90 to spare waste it on leggings.

Or - and here's the one we tend to forget about - there are those who could totally afford $90 yoga pants, but who are so secure in the knowledge that they could do so that $90 leggings don't feel special. If you don't have the concept of needing to save up for anything, you can afford, as it were, to be less materialistic. Status items lose their appeal if you already have whichever status. Result: they're associated with strivers. It's a form of status to have whichever handbag, but a still-greater form to not get one.

Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't own an Hermes (i.e. nearly everybody on the planet) stands accused of not owning one because they think they're too old-money or intellectual for something so obvious. Most of us can't buy the thing in the first place! It means that non-ownership of name-brand stuff - when it could be afforded, or when it's presented in a certain way - can have that meaning.

This came up in my post on weddings - that opposition to the big blow-out wedding seems very anti-one-percent, but is often snobbishness of a different kind. Spending up on a wedding seems low-class, crass, and McMansion-ish. Does this mean that everyone should have a conventional and expensive wedding, perhaps going into debt, in order to demonstrate non-snobbery? No. (Which I should have spelled out - many readers seemed to come away thinking this was my point.) But it means that we shouldn't have such a simplistic take on what snobbery entails. It isn't just the contests over who has the biggest wedding/ring. It's also the ones over who best demonstrated their distance from the bourgeois, mass-culture norm.

We kind of understand this when it comes to poverty (as opposed to middle-class-ness) and food (as opposed to stuff-more-generally). The whole lentil argument - why don't poor people eat more lentils? (Insert whichever observations re: buying in bulk.) And the requisite-if-oversimplified answer is, because the only treat available to them is fast food. But we really don't when it comes to status-seeking among the not-impoverished. Some commenters do, but on the whole, most who discuss this topic don't. To understand doesn't mean to celebrate, or to be all relativistic and say that there's no ethical problem with wastefulness. There just needs to be a better way of urging less-stuff, one that acknowledges why some care for stuff more than others.

There's a gender component as well - yes, men and their gadgets, but on the whole, materialism is associated with femininity. With men earning and women spending. Spending largely on their own upkeep, but also on decorating their houses. Conversely, getting rid of all your stuff - especially doing so to travel the world with "an Andorran beauty" named Olga - is a kind of classic macho fantasy. (Is it OK to write about women in this manner in the New York Times opinion section if you seem to be coming from the left?) I suppose the appeal of this article was partly that Hill acknowledged the male capacity to accumulate stuff. Too often, 'stuff' is equated with stuff women use to look pretty and save time on housework, when of course women should be naturally pretty and slim from all that vacuuming.

*Lululemon might be the clothing store closest to where I live. It taunts me, saying, 'Do you really think those Old Navy lounge pants, those Target sweatpants, do you any favors?' I tell it, 'But I just bought new jeans a few weeks ago, and finally, in friggin' March, got around to buying a proper winter coat (there's still snow, and it was of course now on sale). I'm not about to spend $90 on leggings.' Do you think it cares? It responds, 'But these pants, which you've never even tried on, would be amazing, so amazing as to inspire you to work out more often.' I tell it that I've tried this before, albeit with much cheaper workout wear, and it sits in the workout-wear drawer, the fantasy of going through that many workout outfits (five?) in one laundry cycle still unrealized.' And so it goes.

Such a chore

There was evidently some study, coming out of UCLA, that shows that American middle-class kids are brats, while their Samoan equivalents are not as bratty. Without knowing a thing about Samoa, we might assume that this is correct. French and Chinese kids are better-behaved. Why would any other non-U.S. locale whose child-rearing practices are profiled in the WSJ be different? Slate and the NYT parenting blog are also on the case. At the latter, KJ Dell'Antonia asks if kids need more chores. What do you think the commenters will respond?

We of course hear from those who were expected to do all the chores growing up, and who are, we can assume, amazing people, or who expected this of their kids, all of whom are currently happily married and immensely professionally successful.

My own gratuitously contrarian thoughts on the matter, which I see overlap with some of the comments:

-It would seem that a child raised without having to do chores would grow up to think chores are something parents do, not that he, the child-as-adult, will always have people waiting on him. I do plenty of chores now that I was never asked to do, never thought to do, as a kid, and never expect that someone will, say, swoop in and buy me my groceries. (But if so, I'll email you the weekly list.)

-The difference is when you bring gender into the mix - if mom does all the chores, and dad none, even if none of the kids do chores, the boys will grow up thinking chores are for the wife, etc.

-On the other hand, if one parent stays at home, whichever parent that is, it becomes more difficult to justify chores as something that everyone has to pitch in with after school or work. If one parent gets home at seven, wiped out, and doesn't have to do anything, why should Junior, who already had school and soccer practice and three hours of homework, have to do the vacuuming?

-Probably also awkward: what if there's a housekeeper? While my only personal experience of this was time spent at a German scientist guest-house last summer, I'm aware of a phenomenon of adults hiring others to clean their toilets for them. Artificial, I'd imagine, in such a situation, to tell your kid to start scrubbing.

-While bathrooms do need regular cleaning, as do kitchens, lots of "chores" are make-work, whether for a June Cleaver or a put-upon 5th-grader. Bed-making, for example. Dusting. Even essential chores can be more or less of a fuss - laundry will happen more often if you insist on washing jeans after every wear, food prep at dinner need not reach back-of-Michelin-starred-restaurant proportions, etc. Unless you're doing serious entertaining, and often, there's something to be said for learning to live with a little mess.

-Whereas there are life skills, like how to deal with money, or how to cook, that parents too frequently ignore. That whole "but what if Junior never learns how to do his laundry?" argument is overrated. Junior will dye precisely one load of white wash pink, his first month of college, will ruin a few crappy t-shirts from high school, and the world will not end.

-The "builds character" argument is predicated on the idea that kids need to learn to do things they wouldn't have wanted to do. Yet for most kids, on most days, such activities as "soccer practice" and "school" fall into that category. A kid who goes to school - and homeschooling might not accomplish this, at least without all kinds of outside effort - learns that it's a wide world that does not* revolve around him. That is the life lesson. Why teach kids that they need to keep their rooms tidy, only to watch them grow up and spend ages 18-25 living in intentional squalor, after they realize that tidiness is not in fact necessary?

-Requisite class angle: maybe it's better to schedule ballet and Mandarin lessons for Junior than to make him fold laundry. But if parents are, or a single parent is, exhausted from three jobs, or not academically-inclined, not wealthy or plugged-in enough to get these activities for their kids, or otherwise not a refugee of the Upper West Side now living in Park Slope, and it's a choice between uninterrupted vegging out and an interruption that involves folding laundry? Could be.

-When I think back to kids I knew who were truly self-sufficient, it was generally for fairly tragic reasons involving absentee parents. As with our society's bizarre insistence on having college freshmen share bedrooms, there's a point at which character-building switches over into something less innocuous.

-If poodles could do chores. That's all.

*Typo fixed.