Who will work these fields?

No. Really. Somebody’s going to have to answer that question soon.

If, somehow, we manage to bring monstrously evil agribusinesses like Monsanto to their knees, free up vast tracts of arable land for small, seasonal, sustainable farming, where’s all the new help coming from? Seems to me, we’re facing one of two scenarios. Either enormous numbers of people who’ve never farmed before are suddenly convinced that waking up at five a.m. and feeding chickens and then working the soil all day is a desirable thing. Or, in the far more likely case, we’ll revert to the traditional method: importing huge numbers of desperately poor brown people from elsewhere—to grow those tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters. So, while animals of the future might be cruelty-free, which would allow those who can afford to eat them to do so with a clean conscience, what about life for those who will have to shovel the shit from their stalls?

Okay. Let’s say the entire American economy upends itself in fabulous and unpredictable ways, that America suddenly craves fresh vegetables with the ferocity it now has for chicken parts (or anything else) fried in batter—that the boards of directors and top management at Monsanto and Cargill and Con-Agra and Tyson and Smithfield are all indicted, convicted, and packed off to jail (something I’d very much like to see, by the way) for…I don’t know…criminal mediocrity. That farming suddenly becomes the profession of choice for a whole new generation of idealistic Americans. Groovy. I know I’m for it.

I am a proud hypocrite. I feed my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter exclusively organic food. My wife is Italian. Around my house, we’re more than willing to wait until next year for fresh tomatoes. We enjoy the changing of the seasons and the bounty of the surrounding Hudson Valley—and, of course, the bounty of Spain and Italy as well, readily available at Agata and Valentina, the fantastic but nosebleed-expensive Italian market in our neighborhood, New York’s Upper East Side. This celebrity-chef thing is a pretty-good-paying gig.

But what about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Or somewhere on the margins of Detroit? What if I were an out-of-work auto worker, living on public assistance or a part-time job? At least I have time to dig a “victory” garden, right? What does Alice suggest I do if I don’t live in the Bay Area, my fields turgid with the diverted waters of the Colorado River?

Not a problem! “You have to think of a different kind of menu,” says Alice. “You eat dried fruit and nuts. You make pasta sauces out of canned tomatoes…you’re eating different kinds of grains—farro with root vegetables. All the root vegetables are there, and now, because of the heirloom varieties, you can have a beautiful winter palette…Turnips of every color and shape! Carrots that are white and red and orange and pink! You have different preparations of long-cooking meat…Cabbages!…”

Basically, you can eat like a fucking Russian peasant, is what she’s saying. I don’t know if that’s what they want to hear in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Buffalo.

And…what about the healthy, pure, wholesome, and organic foods that Alice says I should be buying—particularly if I have children? If I’m making an even average wage as, say, a sole-providing police officer or middle manager? Regular milk is about four bucks a gallon. Organic is about twice that. Supermarket grapes are about four bucks a bunch. Organic are six. More to the point, what if I’m one of the vast numbers of working poor, getting by in the service sector? What should I do? How can I afford that?

Asked this very question directly, Alice advises blithely that one should “Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or a third pair of Nike shoes.”

It’s an unfortunate choice of words. And a telling one, I think. You know, those poor people—always with their Nikes and their cell phones. If only they’d listen to Alice. She’d lead them to the promised land for sure.

What else should we be doing? Alice says we should immediately spend 27 billion dollars to ensure every schoolchild in America gets a healthy, organic lunch. More recently, she added to this number with the suggestion that fresh flowers on every lunchroom table might also be a worthwhile idea.

This is, after all, “more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security—this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.”

Which is where Alice really loses me—because, well, for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley—but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good—but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school. In fact, 27 billion for organic food for Timmy seems a back-assward priority right now—as, so far, we’ve failed miserably to even teach him to read. What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them? How can he build a world for himself if he doesn’t know how to ask for—much less how to get—the things he wants and needs? I, for one, would be very satisfied if Timmy gets a relatively balanced slab of fresh but nonorganic meatloaf with a side of competently frozen broccoli—along with reading skills and a chance at a future. Once literate, well read, and equipped with the tools to actually make his way in this world, he’ll be far better prepared to afford Chez Panisse.

As of this writing, not too far from Berkeley, just across the bridge, in San Francisco’s Mission District, they line up every Tuesday for the $1.99 special at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. They don’t stand in the street waiting for forty-five minutes to an hour because it’s particularly healthy chicken, or organic chicken, or conscientiously raised chicken—or even good chicken. They do it because it’s three fucking pieces for a dollar ninety-nine. Unless we respect that reality, Alice? We’re lost.

I remember well, when I was eleven and twelve years old, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. My dad and I would travel to Washington. Later, my friends and I would march in New York. And what left a powerful impression in my mind, a lesson worth remembering, was how deeply and instinctively the construction workers, the cops and firemen—the very people whose families were most likely to be affected by the war—how they hated us. The message was lost—coming as it did from what they saw (rightly) as a bunch of overprivileged college kids, whose mommies and daddies were footing the bill for educations these folks would unlikely to ever be able to afford for their own kids. Here were these loud, self-absorbed ideologues who looked unlike anyone from their world and who lived nothing like them—but who had no problem talking down to them at every opportunity about the problems of the “working classes”—usually from the steps of Columbia University. The actual “working classes” we were shouting at knew what work was—every time they rolled into bed at night and woke up the next day. Who were these seemingly unemployed, hairy, pot-smoking freaks with their compliant girlfriends and their big talk about the Means of Production? What production? These cocksuckers didn’t produce anything!

Thus, a perfectly good message got lost with the messenger.

In the same way, having Alice Waters on your side of the argument is like having Alec Baldwin or Barbra Streisand endorse your candidate (a feeling I know all too well). You may agree with everything they say, but you wish they’d just shut the fuck up. No independent voter, disenchanted with the Republicans but struggling to pay his bills, wants to hear about what he should be doing or whom he should be voting for from some spectacularly wealthy “artiste” who lives in a compound in Hollywood—far from the pain and daily toil of ordinary Americans.