Why caring about what you eat is not pretentious.

I ended up in somewhat of an accidental argument yesterday with an acquaintance who I both like and respect. He's a talented home brewer, a devoted beer enthusiast, and I admire and share his passion for craft beer. But when our conversation turned to one of the local breweries yesterday, we started butting heads.

"Oh, I hate the restaurant there," he bemoaned, referring to a local brewery's fairly new restaurant on their premises. "I don't know who they think they are. Everything is so pretentious."

Normally one to let little things slide, especially when drinking with friends, I just couldn't let this one past me. "I happen to like the restaurant," I piped up, "and I respect what their doing with their food."

And with that I opened one momentous can of worms. It wasn't that I felt the need to defend the restaurant, or convince him that it was a place he should give a second chance. I understood his complaints--that for a restaurant connected to a brewery, it hardly catered to the typical beer-drinking brewery-goer. The food was expensive, the dishes leaned toward that of a restaurant rather than a pub, and there was little on the menu that was a particularly good accompaniment to beer (well, maybe I didn't agree with that last one). This was all fine with me--I certainly wasn't going to defend the restaurant against any of these complaints. What I did feel the need to argue against--and why I absolutely couldn't justify keeping my mouth shut--was his claim that the restaurant was pretentious.

I may be opening another can of worms, but I feel the need to explain my belief that caring about the food you eat, or in this case serve, is completely devoid of pretension.

The restaurant in question is one that has a quite open and adamant preference for sustainable food. The owner of the brewery is a supporter of Slow Food, and the restaurant is making a conscious effort to serve "good, clean, and fair" food. Their menus inform guests of this, with each menu item described in great detail including quite often the source of its ingredients. They explain that their meats are raised without antibiotics or hormones, that their produce is organic or local and not genetically engineered, that their cheeses are artisan and hand made. The intentions behind the food are explained up front, which means that guests who dine there are asked to think about the food they are eating.

This is far from pretense. This is pride, yes. But it is pride in a good way, as in "we are so happy with the ingredients we procure and the dishes we prepare that we want to share this information with you." This is not an attempt to be elite, or exclusive, or high and mighty. If anything, it is the opposite. This is an attempt to inform, so that when people taste what is being offered, they will begin to understand why a dish tastes the way it does. Doing this even involves a degree of humbleness, showing that the taste of a dish doesn't necessarily come from the kitchen, it comes from the farm; that quality comes not from the restaurant but from the ingredients used. But most importantly, this is an act of introducing, an attempt of someone who believes passionately in something to introduce those concepts to others, because they believe there are others out there who might benefit or be interested, or maybe even agree.

I'm no longer talking specifically about this one restaurant. Wanting to eat sustainably raised or artisanal food is no more pretentious than any other specialized diet, which is to say it is not pretentious at all. Vegetarianism is hardly an attempt to be elite or exclusive--it stems from personal beliefs and is a personal act of living out those beliefs. Kosher diets are entirely similar. Fasting for religious purposes has not an ounce of selfishness in it. Restricting your diet to lose weight does not mean you are "above" eating dessert or greasy food; it simply means you are denying yourself of them. For christ's sake, even refusing to eat carbohydrates was (briefly) accepted as the most natural thing in the world. Basing what you eat on where the ingredients come from and how they were raised is just one of many ways approach the food choices that we make.

And we all make choices. The daily decision of what to eat is one of the most ubiquitous issues in our culture. We all need to make this decision, and we need to make it multiple times a day. We not only need to eat a certain amount of food to live, but we need to eat a certain amount of certain types of foods, with certain nutrients, to keep our bodies functioning properly. Yet there is no hard and fast rule about what exactly we need to live--we can adapt to a wide variety of diets, foods, and amounts of it and still get along just fine. Because of this, because we can survive whether we eat 1000 calories a day or 3000, whether we make time in the morning to eat a breakfast of eggs and bacon or grab a granola bar on the way out the door, whether we carefully prepare our dinner or dine out every night, the act of eating necessarily involves making decisions every single day.

There are so many factors that go into this decision that it's impossible to even compile them all. The main ones, of course, include taste, cost, and nutritional value, factors which vary in their importance from person to person and even from meal to meal. Other factors range from ones completely out of our hands--such as the marketing campaigns we're exposed to-- to ones we hold close to our heart, such as our preference for our mother's macaroni and cheese over all other versions. Among these factors, although perhaps not one of the obvious ones, is the factor of impact: the amount of resources the things we eat require to reach the point where they are ready to consume.

I understand that this is something that the majority of people out there don't ever think about. It's also not something that's easy to understand, or even to quantify. It's not clear whether the ecological impact of orgainically-raised grass-fed cows from New Zealand flown halfway around the world is more or less than that of corn-fed cows driven just 1,000 miles from slaughterhouse to plate. And its certainly not a convenient thing to think about, especially when you're really hungry. But it is one which some of us choose to consider when selecting our food.

Personally, I want to eat food that has been prepared with passion and intention, by someone who cares about food as much as I do and with ingredients that were grown and raised for taste rather than for profit or convenience. I want to keep corporate interests and profit margins away from my dinner table, and I believe the best way to do this is to seek out producers, purveyors, and restaurants that share my beliefs. I want to buy from the underdog--the small farmer that realizes government-endorsed pesticides may not be the best option, the rancher that works twice as hard to grass feed his animals, the artisan cheese maker that spends hours turning out a product that can be mass produced for less time and less money, purely for the pleasure in doing so. When I spend money to eat food from these sources, I'm not doing it because I consider them "better," or because I consider myself "above" their mass produced counterparts, but because I want to support the individuals whose values are aligned with mine and whose actions and intentions I can support.

I understand there are people out there who view food completely differently, who want their meals quick and efficient, or who care about taste more than cost, or cost more than nutrition, or nutrition more than taste. I know there are people who can't stand certain foods, and who love the taste of others. I understand that regardless of what we decide to eat or why we decide it, we're all making these decisions. In this way, we're all equal--we all ultimately satisfy our own hunger and none of us are better than anyone else because of what thoughts run through our mind when we go about accomplishing this basic, essential human need. No matter what we think and how many factors we consider when choosing our dinner, it is not pretentious that we care about what we eat.