Thursday, April 23, 2009

Eating Strawmen   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

These attacks by Rod Dreher and John Schwenkler on (my friend) Julie Gunlock are just silly. (Schwenkler’s is also unparodiably condescending, as when he compares Gunlock to his putatively dimwitted and shallow students.) Gunlock didn’t deny that some foods are better than others, and she didn’t criticize Alice Waters for denying it. The notion that Gunlock is an enemy of “culinary excellence” is, for anyone who has enjoyed one of her meals, preposterous. Now it is true that Gunlock’s criticism of Waters sits uncomfortably with Schwenkler’s claim that it is somehow a matter of objective moral truth that “if you’re lucky enough to face the choice between grass-fed beef and cable TV it’s probably the latter that ought to go.” But that’s just not the same thing.

Schwenkler then continues with a strawman parade. Noting that he has criticized Waters before, he adds, “It’s one thing, though, to raise criticisms of the way a message is being delivered, and quite another to use those criticisms as a tool for clumsily bludgeoning that message’s content. Grunlock (sic) of all people should be sensitive to the need to choose one’s words carefully … and NR, for that matter, shouldn’t lose sight of the possibility that attention to taste and respect for the wisdom of the past might have something to teach us about how we ought to eat.”

Gunlock didn’t say, and I very much doubt she believes, that we shouldn’t pay “attention to taste” or have “respect for the wisdom of the past” with respect to eating. (Nor, incidentally, does publishing one piece on NRO signal an editorial endorsement of the contents of that piece, any more than publishing Dreher’s original crunchy-con manifesto as an NR cover story put us behind all of his notions.) If Schwenkler’s comment means that only members of his crunchy-con club are allowed to venture criticisms of foodie celebrities—well, what was that about “clumsy bludgeoning”?

04/23 04:21 PMShare