Colin the chicken

I am not sure that I agree w/ Bittman that this clip from Portlandia is "howlingly funny." 1) A little bit of Portlandia sure goes a long way. I've seen a few clips on the Facebooks, and that's plenty (the feminist bookstore  bit is a nice example of the handjob business model* for indie bookstore. 2) The joke here is that the people care too much about where their food comes from. The inference is that we should care less or more about where our food comes from -- "hook me up with those Tyson nuggets, brah -- don't wanna be like those twerps in Portland!" Or conversely, eating meat can be justified by some  extreme level of intimacy with the animals you are eating and their growers, but not otherwise.  I'm not really comfortable with either position. 

*A bookstore that is basically a storefront where you ask for a book, and invariably they tell you they don't have it in stock, but they would be happy to order it for you is a business that is providing a service you can provide more conveniently for yourself, at home. 

Comments

[Kevin]

The subtler joke here is that - for all the focus on being an informed food consumer - the characters really don't know the practices of the farms they claim to care about, to the point where they have to visit them.

And it's true; it's hard to find a menu in Portland that doesn't include "Smith Valley beef" or "Jones Farm broccoli," but it's become more status symbol than real information. I'd wager you could make up a bunch of fake farm names and no one would blink an eye, because they'd be too embarrassed about showing their food ignorance just because they'd never heard of "Whispering Glade organic chicken."

Having lived there, I can tell you that after a certain point it just becomes like that sketch in Absolutely Fabulous where Jennifer Saunders wears the word LACROIX across her blouse just so people will see it and know it's a LaCroix. And none of it has anything to do with knowing how to cook or season that organic chicken ot that flat of muddy, just-picked beets once they make it to the kitchen.