Coming home from work the other day, I stopped by our local fancy bread store and bought a walnut olive loaf ($ 4.25) and a bottle of Evian water ($ 1.25). As I counted the change from my $ 10, I began to wonder: Now that staples like water, bread, and coffee come in upscale versions, what will be the next product to go gourmet?
My first thought was that we are about to enter the age of the gourmet Slurpee. Some ex-hippie from Oregon will begin selling sundried-tomato Slurpees at $ 5.15 a pop, and psychologists and pottery instructors will eye each other across Navajo-motif Slurpee bars wondering, “Is she looking down on me because I only ordered the spinach-and-feta-cheese Slurpee while she ordered the arugula-cappuccino Slurpee with orzo sprinkles?”
But on second thought, Slurpees won’t be the next big thing. Slurpees are, after all, a product of industrialism, and we only gourmet-ize products that a 15th-century jailer would be embarrassed to slop out to an unrepentant blasphemer: bread, water, overstrong coffee. We feel we are touching something elemental in the human experience when we rip open a loaf of bread that will go stale in 15 minutes because it is entirely free of preservatives. We feel purified if we can twist open a bottle of water that has gone untreated since it sat organically in a puddle in France. The whole gourmet trend of the 1990s is an attempt to return to the fundamentals, to the natural rhythms of life, and thereby learn to appreciate the colors of the wind.
And so the people who want to get back in touch with the rhythms of nature, who want to simplify their lives of the excrescences of modern commercialism, will rediscover dung. Yes, dung. There’s something earthy and authentic about manure. The Masai tribe of Ethiopia, who star in numerous Kodak commercials, make wonderful hair sculptures with the stuff (they also make cocktails of cow blood and cow urine, but we’re a few years away from that). In the Americanized version, dung could be rubbed on boots from the L. L. Bean catalogue, where it would emit an aroma consistent with the great outdoors.
When the dung craze hits, consumers will be able to tread in Swiss goat manure, Ukrainian wild boar manure, and Madagascan lemur droppings. The variety is key here, for one of the features of our gourmet craze is that we must take a simple item and turn it into a thousand items. You can’t just walk up to a counter and order coffee; you instead face a menu of 657 different kinds of coffee, and once you have chosen from among them you walk up to the coffee-fixins table and confront dozens of creams (skim, half & half, cinnamon, vanilla . . .) and a comparable number of sweeteners (honey, sugar, unrefined sugar, Equal . . .). That’s so each of us, and not some distant corporation, can be in control of his own coffee-inspired ingestion beverage.
It’s the same with dung. It doesn’t really matter what flavors of dung become popular, so long as they are expensive. For this is at the heart of the craze for upscale coffee, water, bread, pasta, and other gourmet items. The key is not the flavor; it’s how expensive everything is.
In the 1960s, sociologists took a look at rising affluence and predicted that soon we would all become so rich that we would scale back the work week to, say, three days out of seven. All the rest would be leisure time. If you can afford to buy a week’s worth of bread, coffee, pasta, water, and other basic items after a mere two hours of labor, why work such long days?
But as Americans have grown richer, our expectations have soared even higher than our incomes. So we have ended up feeling compelled to work more, not less. And rather than treating ourselves with leisure, we find it necessary to treat ourselves with costly consumer goods. Once upon a time, all you expected out of a loaf of bread was that it would give you something to hold on to as you ate bologna and mustard. Now we want breads that will purify our bodies, identify us as possessors of refined taste, and improve our souls. So naturally the new gourmet breads cost more.
And so, as we grow richer and more refined at the same time, we become more and more nostalgic for the products associated with poverty and the state of nature. That’s why the most refined sweetener these days is unrefined sugar. And that’s why dung is the logical extension of current trends. Soon friends will walk up to each other, sniff, and remark:
“Pacific manatee dung?” “No, actually, Yellowstone wolf droppings. Collected it myself.”
“Cool.”
DAVID BROOKS
