by John Walter
Excerpt: "Beef has become an occasion, the packages keep shrinking, and the old cheap staples are creeping back onto the plate. The grocery aisle has been telling this story for years - in small print, and almost nobody has been listening.
Editor’s Note: "Nobody will announce it. No president will stand at a podium and explain that the country has begun to eat differently, that the weekly shop has become a negotiation, that the meat counter is now a place where decisions get made rather than taken for granted. It will simply happen, the way most things happen here - one smaller bag, one cheaper cut, one modest substitution at a time - until the food on the table resembles what people ate in 1935 and nobody quite remembers when the change began.
What started this was small, a box of pasta that no longer weighed what it used to, and the argument widened from there. The drift runs back toward the habits of the Great Depression: meat rarer and cheaper, beans and potatoes and bread returning to the center of the plate, fat and preserving back in the kitchen, cooking once more from scratch, substitutions accepted as normal. Hunger is not the problem. The difficulty is more like a slow erosion of standards, and erosion is much harder to notice than famine. (In this video, we’ll go over a tool for this community that can mean the difference between life and death.) Length is part of the point. Read it the way such changes arrive: slowly, and with attention."
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