Choices for food-aholics

Once upon a time, for those of you not old enough to remember 50 years or more ago, we ate what was local; shopped at corner markets able to brag that they had more than one brand of bread; yearned for reachable restaurants that mimicked the menu (if not the actual fare) from Italy or France; savored the freshness of frozen peas and beans; waited for Idaho or Long Island potatoes to reach the markets for Labor Day, corn to be pickable for the Fourth of July; hoped the freezer stayed below freezing (just) so the vanilla or chocolate ice cream would not be liquid; agonized over the array of 10 to 15 types of candy; got sick of coleslaw by summer’s end; watched the deli slice freshly cooked ham or pastrami laid onto plain white bread or rye wrapped in wax paper; bought one of a dozen soda pop brands (only one each from Coke and Pepsi); gobbled Wise Owl or Lay’s potato chips; ate slices of Tony’s pizza (“Topping? What the heck is a topping?”); stuffed hot dogs only at ball games, Coney Island or Papaya King on 86th Street; gorged on strawberries and cherries for the brief two weeks they were around; hoped that relative would send oranges from Florida at Christmas; and — rarely — ventured into Chinese eateries usually ordering the American creation chow mein.There was a time when the nation’s cultural and social ethic was guided, forged, by politicians and the great and good, actors and actresses dubbed “star” only after years of acclaim (not the moment they get their name in lights). Nowadays, the nation’s ethic seems to be governed by gastronomy in all its guises: celebrity chefs, cooking competitions, restaurateurs, cookery magazines, morning news presenters posing as rabid tasters, cook books and, of course, supermarkets with hundreds of brands of bread, butter and everyday essentials, all vying for the consumers’ awakening into a new trend. “New and improved” are the bywords in this newly formed gastronomic nation, promoted by television advertising, brightly colored coupons, bombardment of every website with foodstuffs and television producers convincing the couch-potatoes glued to the small screen that they too can make a 2,000-calorie dessert with “just the most flavorful, sustainably produced, new chocolate,” or that those off-the-street contestants can cook themselves into 15 minutes of perfectly cooked fame.You can always judge the efficacy of a regime change, in this case cultural and social, by its ability to completely overwhelm the spending budget of most homes. In the last 12 years, the proportion of “spend” from wage earners take home pay has grown steadily. The numbers employed in the service industry, comprising restaurants, fast-food chains, supermarkets and the supply of food to the market, has grown in exact proportion to that “spend.” We’re eating ourselves into a new America all while we stay glued to the gastronomy and overindulgence on TV or wander through the malls, trying to decide which of more than a dozen eateries we feel matched who we are. We are becoming the food we eat.Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.