The Politics of Arugula

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE!
Why My Former Hero Shouldn’t Be President

The arugula meme was born, so far as I can tell, when a young and relatively unknown presidential candidate by the name of Barack Obama, attempting to sympathize with a group of Iowans about the challenges of rising food prices, opened his mouth and promptly inserted his foot:

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

The state of Iowa, for all of its vast food production, does not have a Whole Foods, a leading natural and organic foods market. The closest? Omaha, Minneapolis or Kansas City.

Mr. Obama, perhaps sensing a lack of reaction from the crowd, moved along to the next topic.


A gaffe? Surely – and the fact that Iowa actually does grow and sell a fair share of arugula doesn’t do much to alleviate that. The reaction, in any case, was every bit as merciless as the rise to fame of a previously obscure leafy green was, err, meteoric: what had previously been the province of the occasional recipe-blogger immediately became the political slur du jour, an all-purpose tool for accusing your opponents of being effete, elite, and otherwise out of touch with the concerns of those fabled ordinary Americans. And Obama, in turn, was promptly anointed as the fancy-dining liberal with the Ivy League degrees: “wine track” candidate who would surely be rejected by Hillary Clinton’s shot-downing beer drinkers, the blue state counterpart to Miss Buffalo Chip and John McCain’s – ahem – salt-of-the-earth Ferragamo loafers.


Continued: A country so polarized that consuming arugula has become a political act


Nothing wrong with being an elitist arugula eater from outer space and such!