Do. Not. Politicize. Plate Lunch. DO NOT EFFING POLITICIZE PLATE LUNCH!!!!!!

Lemme preface this rant by saying--I'm glad Obama won.  I am!  I'm absolutely tickled we both grew up in the same place, eating the same food.

I like Obama.

I like plate lunch.

I like that people will get a chance to read about plate lunch.

But why, dear Lord WHY, is the plate lunch being politicized?

It's OVER people!  The man was elected!!! Can we STOP using the man's popularity to push every little thing???  WHY are there journalists scratching their heads, musing that "It all seems like odd fare for a man as bookmark-thin as Mr. Obama, who seems to treasure his treadmill"???

MAYbe it's just as simple as he said: He grew up eating this, and that's why he likes it.  End of story.

When you're in Philly, you get a cheesesteak.

When you're in NYC, you get a pastrami sandwich, a bagel with a schmear, and a proper slice.

When you get drunk in Rochester, NY, you get a Garbage Plate.

And when you're in Hawaii, you get a plate lunch, every time you can.

Sure, it's multicultural, a fingerprint of a glossed-over plantation heritage, and born of resourcefulness in the face of exploitation and hardship, much the way soul food was.  All of this sh*t looks great by way of cultural close-reading.

But that's missing the point.  When you travel, you should eat as the locals eat.  Save the FN calorie counting, treadmill OCD, and MFing gravy-hating pretension for when you're at home. 

I like that there are new-school plate luncheries with lighter fare, like the ones cited and obviously preferred the NYT (Kaka’ako Kitchen, Luke’s Place on the Big Island).  I think it's a good thing that folks in Hawaii have a greater variety of healthier choices, to help switch things up. 

But you can get a plate with characterless-yet-virtuous brown rice, lean protein and salad ANYWHERE.  Why the hell would anyone come halfway around the world for it?  Is that the kind of food you should be seeking out as a tourist, with a finite number of meals to immerse yourself in a place?  Is that the kind of food that you'd crave when you're far from home?

As a homesick HI-expat, I say: No.  A thousand times no.  And when I go home and find increasingly more places for reinterpreted creme brulee then there are for real Hawaiian food, it makes me want to cry and throw up and seek out as much plate lunch as I can without blacking out.

Hawaii is a state of foodies.  The Food Network has a HUGE viewership from the islands, because they're exactly the kind of people who are thinking of what they'll be eating next, whenever they're not ACTIVELY eating.  On any given night, you could choose dinner from more than a dozen cuisines (most of them Asian), whose authenticity and freshness would far surpass the same ethnic offerings in New York.  The price and quality of the local seafood (helloooo, ahi tuna!) and produce (and the casual regularity of their use) would be enough to bring anyone appreciative of real food to tears.

"Localvore" should NOT be a trendy term simply used to foist high-priced produce in a farmers market, or to push unbearably self-conscious multi-course menus in highbrow eateries.  "Localvores" should presume that in a given place, the people who live there will be able to feed you what is most indicative of their environment--foods of the best value, foods they are most proud of, foods that are as likely to be as humble and un-PC as they are delicious.

And if that happens to be two scoops of rice, mac salad, and a hamburger patty covered with a fried egg and gravy, then shut up and eat it.  Obama and his camp saw fit NOT to use his childhood foods as folksy leverage.  It would be great if the Times could do the same.

Comments

[The Man]

My only defense of this NY Times article would be that they're not necessarily politicizing food, they're just sort of using Obama as a segue into a discussion about plate lunch.

Lots of people are doing this: Obama is immensely popular right now, so everybody is trying to piggy-back on that popularity by baiting people with an article about Obama and then making some tenuous connection between him and some topic that they really want to talk about, like plate lunch.

It's a cheap gimmick, an attempt to make something "topical" by linking it (however weakly) to whoever's famous at the moment. If somebody was trying to push a plate lunch article a few years back they would have linked it to Lindsey Lohan.

Why not instead make the topic -- plate lunch -- compelling in and of itself, rather than roping people in with mention of Obama?

It's just unimaginative writing, they could have spent more ink on the plate lunch itself than giving us a bait-and-switch about Obama and his caloric intake.

I guess, by piggy-backing on a politician's celebrity, they are sort of politicizing things, but I think it might be a bit incidental to this more general "bait-and-switch" tactic for grabbing reader interest. I don't think your article's wrong in what it claims, I just think poor writing is a bit more the culprit than political agenda.

[Andreapants]

I knew you were going to write about this when I saw the NYT article earlier this week. Oh how I miss your rants!