triciawang:fyi - I love Christina Dennaoui’s blog Modern and Im/Material Things. I don’t know her personally, yet , but it feels like we would be good friends if we ever met. She’s super geeky intellectual, crisp, no bull-shit, & silly.

Tricia has me all figured out. It’s nice to know that my personality actually comes across in my writing. And based on the breadth of her blogs (including her awesome blogs about digital culture and urbanism) and her penchant for photos of Pho (see what I did there?), I also think we’d be friends. So go read Tricia’s blogs (all of them)!

Are you wealthy enough to afford cuts of [insert farm name] [insert special breed of pig] slow poached in [insert another farm name’s] [insert special type of milk] served with greens from [insert urban rooftop garden]? Then you are eating like a White Person. Do you feel really good about yourself while you’re doing it? Then you are a White Person.

Did this seriously get published in GOOD.is without someone telling the author that the “white people” phenomenon she is referring to is a product of class status, globalization and  cross-cultural growth? I understand being provocative can help drive interest in an article, but how can you talk about class without actually using the word class? The author states that “white people food” has a lot to do with money but then continues to subsume the issue of economic capital under the category of race. Each of the author’s arguments about well-reviewed restaurants in New York and their relative proximity to or location in Manhattan has everything to do with money not race. Manhattan is an island of the rich and poor; the middle class is mostly priced outside of it. Call it “Rich People Food” if you must because that’s at least a little more accurate. 

To be clear, there is indeed a relationship between race and class status. That relationship is not really explored in the article. People with enough money to be foodies are “whites.”  What about the issues of cultural appropriation and fetishism inherent in the author’s definition of “white people food”?  The whole article reads  like something between white guilt and post-colonial studies for dummies. 

Via the LA Times

“9. Resto: As well as resy and a good many other inane abbreviations. Resto, which is presumably for people who can’t be bothered to write out ‘restaurant,’ sounds like a cross between a rest home and a pasta shape that someone thankfully reconsidered. At least e.v.o.o., though stupid, still makes sense, as it is an abbreviation of a long string of words and it is useful to distinguish between a mis cup of this expensive stuff and a cup of more pedestrian olive oil in a restaurant kitchen, when you’re scribbling stuff out with a Sharpie while taking reservations.”

Do people actually use the word “resto”? I could see the word in the context of a sentence like the following” “Omg, I ‘ll totes make a resy at the resto lates today.” Then again, I probably  will never hear a sentence like that because I like to befriend people who won’t butcher the English language.  I require all of my friends to bathe on a regular basis and speak in complete sentences.  I’m setting the bar high, I know.