“One of the saddest features (or funniest, depending) of contemporary food snobbery is the notion that rich people are getting in touch with the rhythms of the earth when they shop at the Whole Foods market. Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as you know you are doing it. But if you think you are a humble creature of the soil because you are whooping it up on luxuries is one of the oddest things that I have ever seen in my life” (Food Catholic, pp. 21-22).
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Pretty sure the added expense is for organic vs non-organic, which the label clearly at WF. So the issue would be do you think higher organic prices are worth the related health benefits?
It still means you are a person of means and able to make those choices, not a humble peasant. Humble peasants eat what they can afford, they don’t even get to pick the trade-offs.
So eat what you choose and can afford, just remember that the ability to make high-priced choices even for the most worthy of reasons means you are able to partake of luxuries.
I guess I was responding more the the “paying three times as much” part of Doug’s quote as opposed to the “if you think you are a humble creature of the soil” part. I took the tone of the quote (if that’s a thing when reading) to be saying “an apple’s an apple”, kind of throwing away any notion of added value on the whole organic thing. Trust me. My wallet knows I’m paying premium for organic. Sucks that I have to. So peasant? No. Humble? Yes.
Q’d, below is a related issue re: the “Whole Foods” crowd. The below issue is the whole vaccine issue, where the virtue slithering crowd thinks that certain anecdotes, combined with a certain style of arrogance, makes them “immune” from the medical realities that vaccination addresses. The last two lines re: Whole Foods are a kick! ; – ) Q: There’s a perception that vaccine refusal is especially common among affluent, well-educated, politically liberal parents—is there any truth to that? S.M.: It’s dangerous to make broad generalizations about a group, but anecdotally and from the overall data that’s been collected it… Read more »
Your comment just reminded me to check out the motion picture “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” on youtube, which gives an account by a set of CDC whistleblowers regarding the CDC’s effort to change/filter data to remove the statistically significant correlation between vaccination and autism.
Have you seen this film?
Don’t know that I have seen it, but the reason my disqus name is “A” dad, is that I am an autism dad. One of my children is autistic. All of my children received the same course of vaccinations. One child has autism, the other does not. The most responsible comment to the vaccination / autism correlation is of course “correlation is not causation”. There may be a causation, but no one knows what it is, as of yet. Beyond autism, the whole “no vaccination” sub-culture is wider than the autism community, and quite possibly, even more ill advised. (especially… Read more »
After just having our first child, there is no amount of science that could ever persuade me to inject a disease into her helpless little arms. This is the opposite of wisdom.
Take a walk through an old Cemetery. Then ask yourself why are there so many young people and babies in this Cemetery? Then do a little reading about smallpox and whooping cough and all those epidemics that kill babies and young children. You will have to read about them because we don’t have them anymore today because of vaccines.
And you could say we don’t have widespread illiteracy any more because of government schools. Is that a reason to trust your child’s education to the government?
I don’t quite get the connection. However, if you are going down the conspiratorial road that the government is evil and trying to kill its populace I am not going to follow.
So if the government is so trustworthy and immune from abuse of power (not to mention simple bureaucratic boneheadedness and unnecessarily monolithic decision-making), are you opposed to the Bill of Rights, too?
WDH, that’s a pretty heavy equivocation/non sequitur/straw man.
No. Why do you think it is?
Because “the government is not trying to kill its populace” is not the same thing as “the government is so trustworthy and immune from abuse of power.” “Is not trying to do X” “could never do anything bad.”
Your point may be valid. Your strawmanning of what Boone said is not.
Making a valid point in response to Boone’s straw man doesn’t make the valid argument a straw man.
I must be very dull because I cannot for the life of me figure out what you are trying to say.
The Bill of Rights is founded on (and would be pointless apart from) the premise that government isn’t trustworthy, that the people’s liberties and interests are subject to abuse, and that people ought rightfully to be jealous of their liberties. Either those same premises apply to vaccines (as with everything government gets involved in) or you should come out against the Bill of Rights.
If the issue is trustworthiness neither you, nor I, nor scientists, nor pharmaceuticals, nor anti-vaxxers, nor anyone else in all creation should be trusted at all with anything. This, of course, is an untenable position.
There’s the question of relative trustworthiness, and then there’s the issue that the people’s liberties and interests are their own and if people are untrustworthy with their own liberties and interests, that’s for God alone to judge.
You probably couldn’t say that, though. Neither that there is no more widespread illiteracy, or that the connection to government schools and a high rate of literacy is very strong.
It’s as strong as the connection between government regulated/mandated vaccination programs in the US and death rates from vaccine preventable diseases.
A’, a few thoughts. I was born in 1960, and so far as I know, I got my typical childhood vaccinations individually. A thing that has changed from then until now, is that some childhood vaccinations have been combined. All humans build immunity from exposure to disease, either we are exposed to disease naturally, or we expose ourselves to disease in a controlled fashion, i.e. vaccination. Please understand I am not telling you what to do here, it’s just that having lived through this issue, I think I can pass on some experiential “wisdom”. A. Consider passing on the combined… Read more »
It’s just not a risk I’m willing to take. I think the rise of SIDS is directly related to the increase of all these ridiculous vaccines for infants. Vaccines certainly have their place in specific scenarios, but to mandate them for babies across the board is simply an unnecessary hazard.
What rise in SIDS?
https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm
The CDC is about as reliable as the FDA. Refer to Antecho’s previous post.
Okay, I’ll ask again then, without the link: what rise in SIDS? Do you have a source?
Which is why they invented vaccines. To prevent disease.
I hope your child with autism is healing/improving. Indeed, correlation doesn’t prove causation; but stronger correlation makes it more likely that some (at least direct, reverse, indirect, secondary, compounded) cause and effect relationship exists, especially when you don’t have a believed contrary/competing cause to fall back on. Correlation (or degree of repetition) can serve as a wise hedge/caution if you don’t know the exact cause and effect relationship, or even if you don’t know that it’s actually true that some set of sufficient conditions are present at some very instance to bring about a known exact cause and effect relationship.… Read more »
If I had it to do over again, I would get the vaccinations “separately”, as I mentioned to Aaron below. That being said, our family has been down a number of costly “snake oil” rabbit holes re: autisim “treatments”. The root issue is that autisim its self, and its’ cause, remain a mystery, and the type of “mystery” that our generation has trouble accepting. I had an easier time accepting my sons condition, than my wife did. Our host here had posted the below short video at Christmas, it demonstrates a mother’s processing of her Down syndrome child. I hope… Read more »
Sounds like he has much peace; praise the Lord!
Also, that’s great to see those kids in church trusting/believing God.
California now demands vaccination for all children unless a doctor requests a medical exemption. In the last few years, we have had measles epidemics that have seriously hurt unvaccinated children. When herd immunity dips below a certain point, it is deadly for very vulnerable children who cannot be vaccinated, such as those receiving chemotherapy.
I didn’t know this! And I did a quiet fist pump. I grew up in the area that has become one of the least-vaccinated places in all of CA, and after that measles outbreak we had, I’m glad something is being done.
Jilly, here’s something I wrote after the Disneyland outbreak that could be a response to your comments as well: For some perspective on the idea that measles is too serious to respect parental (and individual medical) rights, even in the 1958-1962 period, when measles was running rampant without vaccinations to slow transmission at all, the risk of dying of measles in the US over the course of a year was approximately equivalent to the risk of dying from driving 160 miles today. (In other words, your risk of dying would be worse if you drove approximately 161 miles today than… Read more »
Driving 11.5 miles in what city? What research are these comparisons based on? I’m not necessarily questioning the risk comparison, but it begs so many questions about the sources for the numbers.
US average. Pick your own sources and do the math yourself, though. It’s easy.
I found that the rate of death from measles in 1960 (pre-vaccine) was 450 deaths/year, from a population of about 180 million. We might assume that the rate of death would go down, on a per-case basis, because of improved health care today, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact, a resurgence of measles in 1990 saw a death rate almost two and a half times higher, on a per-case basis, than in 1960. Go figure. I also found that in 2015, there were 1.12 fatalities per 100 million Vehicle-Miles-Traveled. So “if you assume that mortality rates… Read more »
Yes indeed, the 11.5 mile figure is based not on the pre-vaccine likelihood of contracting measles but on a hypothetical year in the near future when the likelihood of contracting measles would explode to 100 times the likelihood of the worst year in recent history (which is what I said originally). The actual risk of death figure for an average person for an average year from the recent past is approximately equivalent to the risk of dying from driving about one-tenth of a mile (well under 300 yards). > his figure of 11.5 miles seems to assume a mandatory vaccinated… Read more »
I think that’s why he said,
“Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as you know you are doing it.”
It’s a single thought. Isolating the “paying three times as much” from the “humble creature of the soil” isn’t the right way to read the passage because it’s not how he wrote it.
The question in my mind is often whether I would really get that much extra for what I pay. Now don’t get me wrong; my family does shop at times at the local “hippie food store”, as we call it. They have some cool things that you can’t get elsewhere, and for that matter, my favorite regular grocery store has a “hippie food section” that we use. It’s a way, really, of getting beyond the ordinary “food trivium” of corn, wheat, and soybeans. But that noted, I’m not entirely persuaded that “organic” (vs. non-carbon based foods?) gets you that much… Read more »
Psalm 90:10 — “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” So there you have it. Our days are numbered and they work out to be about 70 or 80 years on average. Somehow there truly is nothing new under the sun. Now…let’s work with that. Let’s say that over the course of your life you bought only organic, non-GMO, grass-fed, free-range, humane, pesticide-free, fertilizer-free foods, which, despite the absence of… Read more »
I’m honestly having a hard time imagining spending $3000 a month on food under any circumstances, unless you’re eating not merely organic, but luxuriously. I generally kept it under $200/week or >$900 a month when I was feeding a family of seven, which was only for about ten years (from the time the youngest was born until the oldest was no longer adding to the food budget most of the time.) Triple that for a righteous diet, and you’re still not at your $3000. Consider that most of your life you’ll be feeding a smaller number of people even if… Read more »
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but feeding eight mouths – six kids and two parents, or ten if you count the German Shepherds – from Kroger and Food Lion was more or less $400-$450 a week, and we didn’t have the organic options. Throw in the occasional dinner or breakfast out or invite a family or some friends from church for a holiday or special occasion and we were close to $1800 a month. Admittedly, we did buy toiletries from there, as well, but that only brings it to maybe $1500 monthly, and that was over a decade ago.… Read more »
I tend to forget I live in a pretty low cost of living area. And, I was only counting food in the food budget, not toiletries, etc.And I don’t count eating out in the food budget, because we never did it as a substitute for a regular meal except in an emergency — it was a special occasion, more like entertainment.
It is incredibly difficult to keep grocery bills reasonable no matter how frugal you are. My daughter and I manage on about $50 a week but that is no meat, no fish, no eggs, no milk, cheapest vegetables, very little fruit, and a lot of soy and protein supplements for my vegan daughter. It is also eating tofu and rice at most meals! I make sure she gets three meals a day because she dances and she is quite underweight. I try to get by on one but sometimes I crave cheese! We find Trader Joe’s cheaper than the regular… Read more »
I assumed a modest $1000/month rate for normal folks, given all walks of life and family sizes. It was easy to triple, given the three-fold cost of organic stuff. Granted, there’s an enormous helping of assumptions AND tongue-in-cheekiness going on, but again…the point is simply that spending extra is not going to increase one’s numbered days, but it definitely will burn a hole in your wallet.
In what state where you paying $200/week to feed a family of seven? And in what year? I have a family of 4, and unless I want to eat bread, pasta, and water exclusively, $200 a week isn’t cutting it by any means.
Western Pennsylvania, and the time frame was up until about five years ago. So, yes, food prices have gone up quite a bit since then, but the sharp increase started while I was still feeding the whole brood. If I’m lowballing, you’re clearly exaggerating, unless you’re living in Metro NYC or a resort area. $200 would get me 50 pounds of pasta, 25 loaves of bread, 50 12 oz packages of frozen vegetables, and 12 pounds of ground beef. Not a great diet, and not what I fed my family, but clearly not “bread, pasta, and water” exclusively, and quite… Read more »
Indeed, I’m in NYC.
Here’s how to make it to age 70 and be healthy enough to run for president:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/us/politics/donald-trump-diet.html?_r=0
I praise the Lord everyday for the blessing to afford to feed our family of six children organic food, raw milk, eggs from the cage free chickens in our backyard and not being forced to vaccinate. We live in Los Angeles and my food budget is $1500 a month. My hope is not to live longer on earth than God can use us here but to live with health, energy and vitality to do all that He has for us to the best of our ability. My desire is to steward the money and our health for His glory. A… Read more »
I’m not trying to live longer but to live healthier. Thinking quality of life not quantity. For some reason myself and my daughters developed food allergies. Why? Pesticides? Something else in the food? Chemicals? I don’t know. I wish I knew whether it really does any good or not but since I’m not omniscient, I buy organic when we can. Sadly, not at Whole Foods. Living in a small town, we’re lucky if Bountiful Baskets is delivering otherwise it’s hit and miss at our grocery stores.
Where is this 3x number coming from? By my estimation, Whole Foods is somewhere around 40% more than
the average grocery. 40% is pretty significant, but it ain’t anywhere near 200%.
I think the exaggeration is obvious, but the point is focused on the premium price. But I don’t agree that because of the premium it necessarily follows its a luxury or somehow outrageous, which the tone of the snippet from Doug’s book seems to suggest. But to be fair, I’m pretty sure he’s casting the group of folks who, especially here in NY, do frequent WF Markets with the attitude of being “humble creature(s) of the soil”.