Journalist Mark Oppenheimer calls the elite Americans obsessed with locally grown and organic food “the new Puritans”—and like the old Puritans, they tend to have a Calvinist take on those less fortunate. “Most of the middle-class ‘liberal’ parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society,” he writes. The plight of the McDonald’s worker, like McDonald’s itself, is seen as outside their purview.
