Queen of the Bondo

Every Wednesday the anonymous blogger at The Lead Paint Cookbook reviews a different weird cookbook. Last week she tried something a little different and reviewed How to Be a Pretentious Asshole about Food How to Be a Better Foodie. One of her readers suggested that there needs to be some kind of foodie backlash movement. Well that caught my eye because it’s something I’ve been thinking about in a vague, formless way for a long time.

Something that really grinds the Cheapskate Evangelist’s gears is the idea that eating healthy is expensive. It’s an idea I first heard back in 1996, during my ill-fated year at an exclusive liberal arts college. I was a menu planner for my vegetarian food co-op (which I joined in order to receive reduced room & board) and we were having our weekly food policy discussion (yes, I participated in things like this back then). I believe the issue at hand was whether we were eating too much raw spinach (the consensus was that we were), but someone also brought up the idea that the vegans among us were causing the co-op to spend too much money. “Eating healthy is super-expensive,” a girl wearing one of those Guatemalan pullovers popular in the late 90s said.

And everyone seemed to agree.

Everyone but me. I didn’t say anything, but the idea that eating healthy is an expensive proposition not open to low-income people is something that’s been sticking in my craw for the last 14 years. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring the intersection of cheapskatedom and food. Stay tuned!