Politics
CBS
Alice Waters's egg spoon.
- The newest debate in America's culture war is over the egg spoon.
- It's a great example of how Americans are driving themselves insane by insisting even their smallest consumer actions have bigger moral implications.
Do you ever feel like people have become incredibly annoying and you just want everyone to shut up for a second? I feel like that a lot lately.
In related news, The New York Times reports that people are fighting about egg spoons.
What's an egg spoon? You're going to be sorry you asked.
The egg spoon isn't really a spoon at all - it's a small, cast-iron pan with a long handle, which you can use to cook a single egg over an open fire. And the fight over the egg spoon, and whether its users are pretentious elitists and/or its detractors are sexist, is a great example of how Americans are driving themselves insane by insisting even their smallest consumer actions have grand moral implications.
If we believe we show the world how good we are through our consumption choices - an increasingly common view that companies are finding more and more ways to exploit - then it's inevitable we're going to end up having nasty fights over $250 egg spoons.
This is your future, America.
What your egg spoon says about you
The egg spoon first came into broad public view in 2009, when Alice Waters used it on "60 Minutes" to cook an egg for Leslie Stahl.
Alice Waters is the chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and one of the leaders of the "slow food" movement. Slow food is built around ideas like buying local, supporting family-owned and organic farms, and preserving local food traditions.
What people find annoying about slow food is the implicit (and in some cases, explicit) contention that slow food is an ethical obligation - and therefore, that proponents and practitioners of slow food have not just better taste, but better values, than those who eat mass-market, factory-farmed food.
This claim of moral superiority is ripe for a backlash, and we can see it in the response to the egg spoon. But it's not good enough for the egg-spoon detractors to say cooking a single egg over an open fire seems silly.
No, the response has to be that the egg-spoon buyers are a bunch of rich people play-acting as poor for fun, spending absurd sums on esoteric tools like the egg spoon so they can cook in a manner that's only viable if you have a great deal of leisure time. How can they possibly be ethically superior when the activity that's supposed to show that ethical superiority is out of reach for so many Americans without space for an open fire in their kitchens or $250 to spend on an egg spoon?
With this argument, non-slow fooders don't just get to reject the claim that their food values are inferior. They get to claim the moral high ground for themselves, since the slow-fooders have shown themselves to be out-of-touch and elitist.
And then there is the backlash to the backlash, saying we only see this reaction because Waters is a woman, and nobody balks when male chefs want to spend $300 on an immersion circulator so they can do something equally precious, like cook a single egg sous vide.
And now nobody can just enjoy their damned eggs because we're so busy fighting over what our eggs say about us. Which is a shame, because the food at Chez Panisse is very, very good.
Many of our consumption choices are becoming like the egg spoon
Charlie Riedel/AP
The national anthem became a lightning rod at NFL games.
As the NFL is learning the hard way, it's becoming harder to disentangle questions of product preference and taste from questions of values and
Conservatives have to stop flying Delta. Liberals can't eat Chick-fil-A anymore.
I am not especially concerned about the effect these trends will have on the economy or public policy. In fact, there may be a policy benefit to the increasing political polarization of products and services: If it becomes harder for companies to work both sides of the aisle, it will be harder for them to extract corporate welfare from officials in both parties.
But I do worry about the effect this trend is having on individual consumers. Because at the same time our politics are becoming nastier and stupider, everything else in our lives is becoming less separable from politics.
One thing that helps hold society together is that people who are separated by their political and moral views can bond over other things. But as there are fewer "other things" to bond over - partly because we're sorting into brands patronized by people who already share our values, and partly because it's harder to discuss our leisure activities without getting into political disputes - people are forced to devote more and more of their mental space to exhausting fights over politics and values.
It becomes impossible to discuss even something as trivial as the egg spoon in terms that do not relate to the grand cultural divides that define our current political moment. And therefore, it becomes safer to only have conversations with people who agree with us in the first place.
Plus, many people have felt the need to give up products and services that used to make them happy in order to sort into the right side of these fights, and they're grumpy about it.
Just eat your eggs
What I'm going to say is obviously antithetical to the slow-food movement, but I think it would serve a lot of us well to be less mindful about some of the things we buy and eat. Just eat the eggs. Taste them, enjoy them, don't think too hard about what they say about you.
Cook them however makes you happy. Buy an egg spoon, or don't. And then repeat this mental simplification process with as many products and services as you can manage.
And if you think Alice Waters is ridiculous for using such an expensive device to cook her eggs in such a labor-intensive way, remember: Your hobbies are probably kind of stupid, too. That doesn't mean we have to judge each other.
And even if you suspect she does think the way she eats makes her morally superior, that doesn't mean you have to have a fight about it, even if you disagree.
Just eat your eggs, and smile.
Quietly.