A Defense of Pleasure

Here's a wonderful defense of good eating and the good life by NY Times food critic William Grimes. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, in the United States, where even serial killers are considered innocent until proved otherwise, all sorts of harmless pleasures are routinely described as guilty.

May I mount a defense? Most arguments against fine dining as frivolous, excessive and somehow morally wrong rest on one of two propositions, both of them false. The first is utilitarian. The food that goes into my mouth comes out of someone else's. In this Malthusian view, the total food supply is seen as a large pie. Rich people push forward to the table and cut big slices for themselves, leaving their poorer fellow citizens to slice the pie thinner and thinner until, in the end, the truly desperate fight over a single cherry. On an international scale, it is greedy Westerners who load up at the expense of everyone else.

No one, rationally, believes in the pie-chart model. Food surpluses pose as much a problem as food shortages, and famines, it turns out, usually have political causes that require political solutions...

...There is something amiss in this reasoning. Disparity of incomes and national wealth might or might not be unjust. I'll leave that to others to sort out. But the $500 Manolo Blahnik shoe, the $50,000 car or the $3,000 television set is not, in and of itself, a wrong. And I'm willing to bet that a thorough audit of my impassioned letter writers would turn up one or more of the aforementioned items. For the record, I drove a Honda Civic to many of my dinners, rather than an S.U.V., which means that any potential food guilt should have been prorated by a formula calculating miles per gallon saved. I might also point out that restaurants employ people.

The second objection to fine dining is moral. It boils down to this: It is all right to enjoy food, but not too much. It is all right to eat out, but not to spend too much money doing it. There are two moral impulses intertwined here, the ancient prohibition against gluttony and the more modern Puritan objection to indulging pleasure for its own sake.

Grimes then dismisses both impulses.

A really well-written, clearheaded, and much needed piece.