The Europeanization of California

I am not sure if this is happening across the country but here in California many restaurants are engaging in, to my mind, an unwelcome habit. They no longer bring butter to the table with your bread basket. Instead they bring a small bowl of olive oil, and sometimes, balsamic vinegar. You are supposed to dip your bread into both, it being considered oh so much healthier and all that jazz. Even as I type this I am chowing down on a salad covered in vinaigrette dressing. I love balsamic vinegar on my salad. Walnut oil and raspberry vinaigrette are delicious together, don't get me wrong, but on my bread I must have butter, the salted variety preferably. Bread slathered with butter is an American tradition. An elderly European once said that he only ate brown bread in Europe and the first time he had white bread was in America and it tasted like cake to him! I love brown bread, hate white, but brown bread and butter is as good as it gets!

Nowadays I am forced to ask for butter, whereupon the snooty waiters repeat back to me the word, "Butter?" in a sneery, condescending tone. At least in a Mexican restaurant I can say it in Spanish and not receive the stinkeye! This all reminds me of my neighbor's story about asking, at a high class restaurant in the wine country of Napa, if she might have an iceberg lettuce salad and her co-worker getting embarrassed and bent out of shape and saying that "No one eats iceberg lettuce anymore, it's gauche!"

I read a comment by Bob Woodward in Carl Bernstein's biography and he mentioned that Bernstein's ex, the writer Nora Ephron, bitched mightily about the type of lettuce served at a dinner party once and how petty they all thought her. They didn't like her and felt sorry for Carl.

Liberals have turned food into a religion. At the library we are receiving legions of silly books written by well known novelists about their families' obsessive behavior centered around eating. Natural organic, locally produced, they are tripping on their "relationship to food." If you don't follow their puritanical rules you will be shunned! This food cult is a proxy for religion, which explains why many on the left, although they claim to be Darwinists, are not rational, they still engage in extreme religiosity. Of the holier than thou variety!

One of the people I work with, who became pregnant by artificial insemination, informed me that she did not think she would become "fat" like her sister while pregnant, because she had a different relationship to food. So superior! I don't have a relationship to my food, I just eat it. Once someone made a comment that Devil Dog's and my relationship seemed to work, I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing. Where do they come up with this stuff?

I don't care if the tyrannical, pretentious, liberal food police think I am gauche, I want butter! I was raised to believe that it was tasteless to embarrass others over their food habits or anything else, especially in public.