Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Class Ware


     It happened again: Over an expensive dinner with friends, it was discovered that I do a blog about rosé wine. "Maybe you'll write about this dinner!" someone hinted. And OK, the characters were storyworthy, from the tall blonde with the penetrating stare I'd just met to the soignée brunette I've already had complicated times with. We were a staggeringly attractive crew and the restaurant was the kind of spare, warm, candlelit space well-to-do Bay Area grownups have, to be frank, grown dependent on. I know I have. I love that shit.
     Ideas were thrown around about new inspirations for my posts here; someone asked if I recommended any particular bottle for summer. It was a new inspiration for me to explain why I don't want to talk much if at all about bottles, or wineries, or varietals. 

     "You start down that road, and it demands the structure of the whole blog bend to it," I told the blonde. "You'd have to write about every bottle. And you'd feel obligated to know every new thing and keep up with trends on social media or whatever. I'm no sommelier, don’t care to be, and I don't write about food because I don't like most food writing, which goes double for wine writing. The industries are so powerful that if you start playing on their field, you have to play by their rules."
I don't know what it is. I must have liked it. Where? When? This image was in my phone.
     I was lowballing. The truth is, I hate capitalism, and the intentional erosion of the wall between life and work makes me furious. Most of the food and wine writing I see is an amalgam of marketing and psychological manipulation, with a lot of aiming for "impressive." I'm opposed to it. I love Lucky Peach, but it’s not innocent, rather, baldly macho. Some of my companions at the table were -- of course! -- techbros, or “techbroae,” a term I invented intended to make them sound like spiders. It signifies rapacious moneymakers who think it their duty to compete, win, exterminate, and celebrate. All other activities are either tolerated with the tenderness of a benign totalitarian (charity) or done for by cold libertarian injection (historical precedents include the Ellis Act and charter schools). That we shared a table bothered me in an old familiar way; I'm used to it and I'm not innocent. Besides, techbroae undoubtedly suffer along like the rest of us, and the ones I hang with are usually nice. I have sliced some of these people out of my life, but not all.
     A different group of friends had split off after the reading we'd all been at; they went to the brewpub a block away. They were younger, and singler, less inclined to sit quietly and focus on a chronological conversation and ultimately simply not comfortable in a restaurant like this one. They were lower class, whether temporarily by age or by actual socioeconomics. We were higher class, at least in the dumb U.S. formulation of that term.
     So I was at the table, and I wished I had gone to the brewpub. I was having fun, and also rosé, sparkling, right where I was. I love my friends, like the human I am. But I suddenly resented the fussy plates, the thin goblets, the fear in the waiters' eyes -- fear of their bosses, fear of our potential disapproval, fear that some thoughtlessness of ours would cause them to have to stay late washing an unforeseen mountain of dishes. None of that stuff existed at the brewpub, I was sure. There, the plates would be thick, the glasses too, and the servers would be sassy, strong, and easy in the knowledge that they were more in control of things than any customer. I'm so much more at ease in this type of place.
     Know what, though? Brewpubs don't have rosé. I’m not innocent.
     Yet zero shame is felt by me on account of my upper-crust eating and drinking habits. Zero. I can't buy myself socks anywhere except the bulk bin, but I can drop three figures on a table for two without blinking any day of the week. In addition, I have the special ability to despise the economic forces behind and inside gentrifying, exploitative, racist restaurants, while loving their food. I myself work in a food shop that is none of those things, but it puts me close enough to the industry to see even more of the BS than you can see from your table. Maybe you don't know about the enforced drug abuse, the absolutely unchecked bigotry, or the way the system is set up to destroy bodies making it impossible to do this kind of work after age 35, at which time no restaurant worker has health insurance let alone savings. (Again, for the record, not at my place.) But boycotting anything that tastes good, the way a lot of activists I know are so proud of doing, solves nothing. Denying your desires is plain dangerous, while on the other hand, eating good food is a solid investment in your own health. So while I would have felt better there, they don't have rosé in the brewpub. I like both.


Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2014. Photo by Stefanie Kalem
[Note: I wrote this over a year ago.]