Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

What else should we be doing? Alice says we should immediately spend 27 billion dollars to ensure every schoolchild in America gets a healthy, organic lunch. More recently, she added to this number with the suggestion that fresh flowers on every lunchroom table might also be a worthwhile idea. This is, after all, “more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security—this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.” Which is where Alice really loses me—because, well, for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings. And organic school lunches might be more important to you than crime in the streets in Berkeley—but in the underfunded school systems of West Baltimore, I suspect, they feel differently. A healthy lunch is all fine and good—but no use at all to Little Timmy if he gets shot to death on the way to school. In fact, 27 billion for organic food for Timmy seems a back-assward priority right now—as, so far, we’ve failed miserably to even teach him to read. What kind of dreams can a well-fed boy have if he doesn’t even have the tools to articulate them?