The foods you like can say a lot about who you are — and who you once were.
To those in the know, the Sprite from McDonald's boasts near-mystical qualities. If the memes are to be believed, McDonald's Sprite is so powerful that it can make your car fly. It can melt your keyboard or give you superpowers. Some say that it can even wake the dead. |
Encountering these propositions on Twitter, as somewhat of a jokester myself, I wondered: Did rich people get it? Did they know the magic of McDonald's Sprite? Turning this question over in my head, I knew that there are some foods that rich people eat — caviar, truffle, pâté — that not-rich people don't. But were there some foods that not-rich people eat and love that rich people don't know about, not because they can't access them but because they don't want to be seen accessing them? |
To explore this question, I initially wanted to report a piece on food and class. I intended to stand outside of Bloomingdale's and Bergdorf Goodman and ask people walking in and out if they'd be willing to talk to me about their food choices. When I pitched this idea to my editor, though, he was much more interested in my own experiences with food and class, with how I'd come to understand that what we eat says something about who we are. |
I ended up writing a guest essay about the Rio Grande Valley, where I'm from, and about Yale, where I went to school, about McNuggets and madeleines, about the taste I used to have and the taste I have now. It is a story about loss as much as it is about gain. Because though social mobility is a noble, worthy goal, it does not come without costs. |
What Our Readers Are Saying |
I had a very similar path. Came out of a rural isolated town straight to an Ivy League medical school. During an interactive session on "how to handle the difficult patient" I excelled at advanced de-escalation tactics. The professors were astounded — I told them I learned it from working the night shift at Burger King when all the patrons are drunk. The stares I got made me feel like I was Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz"! Let the McNuggets comfort you. They are your roots and something to be treasured and honored. Weave in your new knowledge of self-care and health, of course, but your roots deserve love and acceptance. People like to push on shame, especially in elite circles. The 1 percent need more of us to blow their own worlds wide open. Keep at it. — Food, rural U.S.A. The irony is that, in many lower-working-class societies of the world, food is bought as bulk staples at open markets and lacks the "luxury" or American processed food. Healthy diets do not have to be an appurtenance of higher-class status. That situation was engineered into American life. — Evan, Berlin Moving social class is hard. You seem low class to upper-class people, and you seem snooty to lower-class people. One foot in each space, never fully belonging to one or the other. Upper-class people making fun of your childhood foods and lower-class people making fun of you for eating goat cheese. I don't regret exiting the working class to the middle class, but it comes at a social cost. This article depicts this perfectly. Thank you for writing it. — Jen, midwest |
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