TL;DNR: LOL, prole tell!

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749095)

https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status/884754433036476417

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749104)

https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-magazine/september-october-2021/it-still-seems-unbelievable/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#43200956)

His point is that even the wealthiest among us used to have similiar tastes as middle and lower classes, either in music, food, or hobbies. Today, the groups are basically different nations.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33750199)

Lmao I've been an investment banker for 10 years and went to a JJC dream school and am married to a surgeon and we don't do any of that shit (except drink wine sometimes). He is literally drunk on the smell of his own farts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749185)

The fuck is this guy smoking? Is he talking about the rich folks in NYC that all live within a few blocks of his house?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749205)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749220)

Leave it to Brooks (a pseudo-con) and libs to elevate this difference into a moral superiority.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749249)

But Brooks is objectively right that many people with a HS education will freak out and feel very uncomfortable when put in that situation. That's part of the reason restaurants like that use those kinds of words, to intice the "right" sort of customers and keep the wrong ones out.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33749271)

Recently, I discovered a coworker who just has an associates degree holding The New York Times. Instinctively, I understood that they were planning to use it to pee on like a crated Labrador, their two years of junior college slumming clearly leaving them with little working knowledge of indoor plumbing, or where to direct the neon-green Mountain Dew micturition of the lower classes. But as I gestured to help them arrange the broadsheet on the floor and offered to relax their bladder by soothingly expounding upon the ingenious early sewers of the Minoans, suddenly their face froze, and I could tell from their primitive grunting that, to my surprise, they were actually trying to read it.

Specifically, they were pointing their humanities-schooled sausage fists at the latest column by David Brooks, America’s preeminent analyst of our moral decline according to whatever he read or watched on TV or overheard in a Starbucks that day. “How We Are Ruining America” it was titled. “Hmm, yes,” I said, knowingly. And seeing as I have a bachelor’s degree, once gave money to NPR, and own a pretty nice sweater, I volunteered to interpret Brooks’ words for them.

David Brooks has read a book, I said with fatherly patience. A book is like a meme with very many words. I explained that this book was written by a man named Richard Reeves, called Dream Hoarders, and that this book was full of very many complex ideas about the ways in which America’s wealth inequality has become a self-perpetuating system as the privileged classes create structural barriers—including zoning restrictions and college admissions biases that ensure their kids become elites as well, thus making it difficult for poorer people to achieve their own class mobility.

I could tell from the furrowing of my coworker’s community college-graduating Neanderthal brow that these concepts were perhaps too complicated to address in a mere conversation or 800-word column, so I skipped ahead to the part about the sandwiches:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

A-ha, I said to my pitiable friend who has never seen a Fellini film and thinks oolong is a Disney villain. Here Mr. Brooks is illustrating that those “structural barriers” we were just discussing “are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent,” whose ignorance of fine meats stands between them and true affluence.

I explained how this was just like the time I squired them to a Subway and they didn’t know what an avocado was so they started crying. Great, phlegmy sobs, like the kind heaved from the bosom of Lady Liberty, lifting high her lantern as she welcomes the wretched to the shores of opportunity and great sandwiches, only to see them starve because they don’t know the right words for fancy ham.

“It’s okay,” I said to my own adopted huddled mass yearning to achieve a certificate of vocational training. “We’ll just go get a burrito and empty it in a Ruffles bag.”

As I explained to my grateful, greasy compatriot then—and as David Brooks so finely elucidated for us now—it was not their fault that the nation’s deeply entrenched class divisions fostered by systems built on institutionalized racism and economic disparity have left them so feeling marginalized. They just need to pull themselves by their Wonder Bread bags, stop eating gas station nachos, and get hip to David Foster Wallace, because that’s what’s really standing in their way:

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

Indeed, I said single-malted-scotch-ily. I explained how this column serves as yet another clarion call alerting us to America’s slow sinking into a morass of cultural decline, which David Brooks and others like us—we who thoughtfully chew our piquant charcuterie while brooding over the Proustian reveries of ourselves it inspires—can only look upon it sadly, gazing down at our bologna-smeared consorts and lamenting the many bloviating, condescending, overpaid butchers of language and meat that are driving us apart.

My barely educated friend nodded sadly in agreement at Brooks’ wise column, then took a giant burrito-and-GED shit on it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33752353)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/11/the-real-problem-with-david-brooks-sandwich-column/?utm_term=.c8e20594a2d0

Wonkblog Analysis

The real problem with David Brooks’ sandwich column

By Caitlin Dewey July 11 at 3:27 PM

Whatever you make of Italian salamis and David Foster Wallace, we should all be able to agree on one point: “lower-class” ≠ “Mexican.”

In a Tuesday column for the New York Times, commentator David Brooks earned the ire of the Internet masses by suggesting that the college-educated bourgeoisie are single-handedly ruining America. The entire column has proved controversial in some corners, but no piece more so than the lunch anecdote that appears toward the sixth-to-last paragraph.

Brooks recounts taking a friend with a high-school degree to an Italian sandwich shop, only to turn tail when he realized the shop’s “upper-middle-class … cultural signifiers” made her uncomfortable. Instead, Brooks says, he and his friend “ate Mexican.”

Wonkbook newsletter

Your daily policy cheat sheet from Wonkblog.

Sign up

The obvious implication is that tacos exist in a totally different cultural caste than those Italian subs. It is common, accessible and, most importantly, cheap -- a cuisine even Brooks’ flustered friend could love.

The association between cheapness and “ethnic food” is not Brooks’ invention, of course. In fact, it has some basis in data: The average cost of a meal at a Zagat-rated Italian restaurant in New York is more than $16 higher than at a Mexican one, according to a much-covered analysis by Krishnendu Ray, a New York University sociologist.

The average price of a restaurant meal, by cuisine

Based on the averages for Zagat-listed restaurants in New York City

0204060Japanese$68.94French$66.45American$63.92Continental$60.38Italian$56.32Spanish$52Greek$49.94Korean$47.40Vietnamese$40.44Mexican$40.41Indian$37.40Chinese$35.76Southern $34.15Thai$32.50

Source: Krishnendu Ray/Zagat

WASHINGTON POST

But the real issue here -- and one that goes to the heart of Brooks’ column -- is why Mexican food is cheaper than Italian. In his 2016 book “The Ethnic Restaurateur,” Ray argues that the price gap can be directly attributed to the social status of these different ethnic populations.

To come to that conclusion, Ray draws in large part on his analysis of nearly 30 years of data from Zagat, the popular restaurant guide. He found that a handful of cuisines -- namely, French, American, Italian and “continental,” or Western European -- have consistently been more expensive than their competitors.

When cuisines do experience major price shifts, Ray also found, it often has something to do with the economic and social status of their emigrants. The average price of a Japanese meal jumped 97 percent between 1985 and 2013, for instance. That has been attributed, in part, to the growth of Japan’s business class, many of whom made frequent visits to the U.S.

There are exceptions to this “ethnic” = “cheap” rule, of course. (Brooks could have taken his friend to New York’s Toloache, where tacos run $16 a pop.) But Ray’s data demonstrates that the pattern -- or as he calls it, the “global hierarchy of taste” -- still holds for most restaurants, even if there are outliers.

That’s had real consequences for restaurateurs and chefs of color. As my colleague Ana Swanson chronicled in this great piece last fall, a huge number of Chinese immigrant-owned restaurants have begun serving sushi because they realize Americans will pay more for it. In a stunning essay for NPR, published earlier this year, the L.A. restaurateur Diep Tran railed against a culture that’s prompted some customers to tell her that, “for Vietnamese food,” her restaurant is too expensive.

“Immigrant food is often expected to be cheap, because, implicitly, the labor that produces it is expected to be cheap, because that labor has historically been cheap,” Tran wrote. She goes on to write that it’s been difficult for her restaurant “to break out of the trope that equates communities of color with cheap food and cheap labor.”

Similar tropes have been broken before. As Ray recounts in his book, Italian food was eschewed by “the taste-making elite” of the early- and mid-20th century, who viewed the influx of poor Italian immigrants with something like disgust. As those immigrants’ children began moving into the middle and upper classes, Italian food moved with them -- into gourmet sandwich shops.

As the sports radio host Julie DiCaro wrote on Twitter: “My Sicilian grandparents would be thrilled to learn that in 2017 soppressata and capicola are the rarified info of the elite!”

Maybe that will one day be said of chorizo, bolillos and Oaxaca cheese.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33752507)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33814462)

"OH LOOK AT HOW 'ELITE' I AM WITH MY POMODORO!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33814340)

"OH LOOK AT HOW 'ELITE' I AM WITH MY POMODORO!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3671689&forum_id=2],#33814477)