Oysters, Pearls, and Occupation

Today, protests erupted all over the world, some peaceful, some less so, from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. While movements like Occupy Wall Street have been ongoing (if unrecognized), responses to the events in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia earlier this year have spurred protests from the Spanish indignados to the Greek debt crisis--suffice it to say, something is going on here and it's not good. Criticized for the lack of unified message, the mere fact that there is a global outcry against the capitalist financial system points to the fact that perhaps these disparate issues (climate change, income inequality, nuclear power, food insecurity, you pick your hot button) are framing a more frightening problem: the system we built is broken, and the people in power are not interested in or capable of fixing it.

Long a political tool (Boston Tea Party, anyone? No, I'm not referring to a Bachmann support rally) and an increasingly important political issue in this day and age, it's easy to see the connection between food and the evils of corporate capitalism, and today's use of food as a protest of these issues asks important questions about the systems and cultures we support and promote. Wednesday's NY Times Dining & Wine section featured a fascinating article on the food chain supply at the Occupy Wall Street protests--an interesting look at how counter-cultures come about as well as a nice spotlight on the movement itself. Yet, this article ran under an almost full-page spread of restaurant critic Sam Sifton's final review (before he assumes the position of National Editor) of Thomas Keller's Per Se. Opened in 2004, Per Se represents that kind of American dining that reached its pinnacle at the turn of the 21st century--attention to ingredients with a dose of fine dining opulence or what Sifton calls the best restaurant in NY with a seamless combination of "French pretension with control-freaky West Coast pedantry" (and an obvious tendency toward high-culture hedonistic satisfaction, if you ask me).

In these recession-wary times this style of consumption is both outdated and offensive; as a food culture we have moved toward a more simplistic version of fine dining where fine equates to 'from the earth', traceable and fresh, and where sustainability is more important than deconstruction or molecular manipulation. That Sifton fails to acknowledge that We are the 99% can't even dream of a meal where "dinner for two can scratch at $1,000 — or about the same as the median weekly household income in New York State," let alone that the writer's self-aggrandizing farewell took top billing over the fascinating and ongoing confluence of food, politics and protest, puts the issue of income disparity into sharp relief. Is Per Se the best restaurant in NYC? The answer is irrelevant. The times they are a-changing, and the growing economic tumult and political unrest at home and abroad should have us (and Sifton) asking more challenging questions than whether an appetizer is a food or "a poem about creaminess".

What is certain is that there is something going on here, and that food will play an important role in how these issues are framed, represented and fought. Be it the "The Big Shift" or "The Great Disruption" our world is changing, our place in it less certain--it is up to us to choose where and how we want our voices to be heard. Political reform and fundamental change is always daunting, but if we have learned anything is should be that revolution truly can start on our plate.