NY Times: Corporate-Made Food Is OK, But Not Too Much

Alternate title:  Pope Says It's OK to Sin.  OK, I tease.  His Eminence Pope Benedict XI said no such thing, but the secular equivalent happened all the same.  The NYTimes has declared that corporate-made food is OK, once in a while.  Seriously.

You buy your sunflower shoots, summer cherries and free-range chicken at the farmers’ market. You stuff your canvas tote bag with organic and artisanal goodies: a sticky jar of raw wildflower honey, a wedge of pungent cheese from a rustic dairy, a loaf of whole-grain bread that’s so dense and bumpy with seeds and nuts that it resembles a block of macadam. 

Hauling this nourishment home makes you feel noble and healthy. You’re supporting local farmers and entrepreneurs. You’re in touch with the earth.  So then why is it, you wonder, that when you get home from work one evening, drained and famished, you find yourself layering slices of American cheese onto a bed of mass-produced white bread, frying it up in butter whose provenance you know only as “the supermarket,” and dunking the crispy melting result into a lake of Heinz ketchup?   Why? Well, because it’s delicious, for one thing. 

But there are other reasons, too, and they’re worth considering as the Fourth of July rolls around. Because let’s be frank: As much as we dutifully internalize the wise teachings ofAlice Waters and Michael Pollan, there are plenty of unlocal, unartisanal and unapologetically corporate products that we continue to crave and cook with.

There you have it.  Imagine the Catholic church saying, "Hey it's OK to covet your neighbor's wife.  We all do it, it can be fun, and if she's a hottie, well, it's just hard to resist, no?"  Ignore that scripture stuff, those writings, you can sway, no worries.  It's come down from on high New Yorkers, dip that Frito in some ketchup.