Tell Me What You Eat and I’ll Guess Your Socioeconomic Class
Food should bring us together but it’s doing the opposite
Having a meal together is supposed to be a bonding experience. It’s why you invite your weird uncle to your holiday dinner and it’s also why business lunches are a thing. Wedding feasts. Restaurant dates. Family dinners of all kinds.
Everybody has to eat every single day. Like sex, it’s a pleasurable experience you can share with another human being, but unlike sex, it’s something you can share with anyone.
I love to prepare meals for others.
It’s how I bring people into my fold. Sometimes I show off with a special meal, but other times, it's just pizza on the deck.
But we as a society aren’t breaking bread together; we’re breaking up.
If you tell me your favorite fast-food place is Chick-fil-A or that you love to eat at Cracker Barrel, I immediately make an assumption about your politics. I could be wrong, but I’m probably right.
If you tell me you’re addicted to Starbucks, I come to a different conclusion.
Libs mostly like chicken sandwiches and plenty of conservatives drink coffee. But these chains have all put themselves out there politically, and people have flocked to them or fled them accordingly.
It’s more than the marketing, though. It’s cultural.
Our religious background, our socioeconomic group, the place we live all determine what we eat, and even in the era of fast food and chain restaurants, we still retain differences in our diets.
Several years ago, I was talking to a woman who works for a friend of mine. My friend was taking her staff to lunch at one of my favorite local restaurants. It’s not a fancy or expensive place, and in a bigger city it wouldn’t stand out as being particularly unique, but the staffer said she had never gone there. It’s been open for decades and occupies a very visible location, so I was surprised.
The staffer was nervous about not knowing anything on the menu. I recommended the hummus as an easy choice and something the restaurant is known for, but she had never tried it and was not sure she was willing to.
You might not think hummus is a rarified food and I didn’t think so, either, but for some people it is. Another time, she mentioned she only uses certain name brands of canned green beans; I’d have to be very hungry to willingly eat a canned green bean.
At that point, she and I probably had roughly equal household incomes. We are both white women living in the same town. I’m about half a generation older. She’s a nice person and an exemplary worker. But culturally, I had long understood, we had very little in common. Our dramatically different diets are just one tell.
There was nothing to prevent the staffer from trying hummus or other international foods, just as there’s no reason I couldn’t eat canned vegetables if I wanted to. I grew up eating them almost daily, in fact. Did I stop eating canned veggies because I developed an interest in healthy cooking, or did going off to school influence both my politics and food preferences? Who can say?
I like to look for interesting new recipes, but I’ve become uncomfortable with recipes that call for special, expensive ingredients not available in a standard grocery store. Some of these recipes feel exclusionary to me. I want to cook things that bring people together.
I’ve pivoted toward peasant food.
All over the world, people have figured out unique ways to turn beans, rice and ordinary vegetables into tasty dishes. Potatoes are nutritious and affordable and lend themselves to so many different dishes.
I’m no longer going to make anything that requires a special cut of meat or spice that I can’t get without leaving town … although I have to immediately contradict myself and note that occasionally I do travel to an Asian or Middle Eastern grocery store specifically to get good soy sauce or labneh.
I can’t really explain how I’ll go out of my way to obtain a peasant food that isn’t from my food tradition but I won’t move an inch to buy, say, a special type of mushroom: I’m substituting the basic button mushroom every time.
Culture and food are tightly linked.
Why wouldn’t our food become political? Everything else is.
“You’ll love this dish if you’re a liberal who pores over the New York Times Review of Books!” or maybe, “I developed this recipe especially for cooks with a red MAGA hat in their hall closet!” might as well accompany some descriptions.
I’ve long appreciated whole foods — lowercase. I bought the La Leche League cookbook, Whole Foods for the Whole Family, long before I’d ever heard of the grocery store. That book got me into baking whole-grain bread, making my own yogurt and cooking with beans and legumes.
I grew up in a meat-and-potato Midwestern family. My husband is a Dutch vegetarian. When I married him, I set aside my specialties of lemon dill chicken, pot roast and meaty stews. I started making more bean dishes, and I try to find and replicate Dutch favorites.
A typical Dutch dinner is meat-based.
So it’s not always easy for me as an American to translate a meaty Dutch dish I’ve never even tasted into a vegetarian one, but I try. Lots of potatoes are involved. Think stamppot, minus the sausage, or with a vegetarian “sausage.”
If you’ve never had it, stamppot is essentially mashed potatoes with other foods mashed into it. If you’re a Midwestern meat-and-potato person, you’re probably going to like it just fine. It’s not fancy or expensive or difficult to make.
The same goes for most peasant foods. These are foods poor people ate all the time, because they could afford the ingredients and the prep was easy. Poor people don’t have time to fuss with elaborate recipes all day. Don’t mistake the national dish that they ate once a year on a holiday with the things they ate on random Tuesdays: They are usually quite different things.
I call it peasant food because that’s what others call it. You could also call it poverty food, but that doesn’t sound as good.
In the U.S., if I say I’m eating the food of poor people, you immediately think of boxed macaroni and cheese, or canned Spam, or Velveeta, or other highly processed foods. I have a really big problem with that. None of that stuff is what poor people in any culture traditionally ate, and I don’t think we should stay silent as it’s marketed heavily to the poor.
Corporations market highly processed foods to poor people to bolster the company’s bottom line.
They aren’t serving poor people’s best interests. The poor are just another market to sell to — and a profitable one, at that.
Dried beans, rice, carrots, potatoes, onions, oatmeal, lentils, tomatoes, pasta and whatever produce is in season — these are the real deal, and they’re what I mostly cook with. Even with inflation, they’re mostly affordable. You can throw in some egg, dairy and sometimes some fish or chicken if you want.
The food tastes good because it’s made with care, not because it contains special, expensive, hard-to-source fancy-ass ingredients. Minestrone. Lentil soup. Homemade bread.
And, most importantly, friends and family to eat it with.
About Michelle Teheux:
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack, or buy me a bag of coffee beans! You can also find me on LinkedIn.
As you know, I'm a huge fan of gourmet food. I'm not doing well financially but I came from a rich-ish family with aristocratic roots. So, eating pate, foie gras, truffles, steamed crab, or a good duck a l'orange is comfort food for me.
With that said, I'm sad to admit that I sometimes will eat at Honkey Bucket (Cracker Barrel) if I want good mashed potatoes. It's fucked up to say, but Cracker Barrel actually was very maligned because of the term "cracker."
Anything with potatoes! My wife is Honduran, so I reluctantly eat rice and beans off and on; it's not too bad if you add lots of salsa. Right now we have tamales galore, the ones wrapped in banana leaves!