Hmm...

[ksmith]

So yesterday, justinelavaworm discussed a panel she and matociquala, among others, participated in during which discussions of class were attempted/danced around/not quite followed through on. Then I saw this line in today's entry in Jane Espenson's blog:

You know how, in this country, the most visible, and most reliable, indicator of a person's social class is the condition of their teeth?

and I started thinking about outward indications of social class.

Not sure about teeth. A former manager, who came from upper-middle PacNorWet money, had one of the worst sets of choppers I had ever seen. But then, he had a casual attitude about a lot of things, including money. In a way, this casualness typed him as surely as Jane's perfect teeth.

Hands are supposed to be another indicator--their condition and the style of manicure. Shoes. Hair style. Weight.

I don't have time to go into this now, and I'm not sure what I'd say if I did except that I find it all pretty interesting.

Comments

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Yup. Decent fruits and vegetables--when they can be found at all (do NOT get me started on the taste of the average US tomato and I have had garden-grown as well, thanks)--are not cheap.

Then there's the luxury of time. Healthy cooking often takes more time than people have.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Most tomatoes are wretched. You'd think they'd taste better in CA, but they don't mostly. A lot of other vegetables do taste pretty good still tho. Shopping seasonally helps a lot to cut costs, and eating frozen or farmer's market produce helps too. And both frozen and farmer's market veggies tend to taste better than the average supermarket produce I can buy, even in CA. Shopping seasonally and using farmer's markets tends to take more time or planning than just hitting the supermarket tho.

I still can't figure out why more Californians don't glory in lemon and lime deserts tho... The lemons I get when they're in season are mindblowingly good.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

The tomatoes we used to buy from the farmers markets when I was in high school... I can't describe the taste, the aroma. Eating one was a religious experience. I used to eat them like apples--they didn't even need salt.

Asparagus is usually pretty good. Pears are hit or miss.

A good lemon curd filling is to die.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

I'm spoiled. Before I moved to CA, I grew up about a 15 minute drive from a fruit orchard and veggie farm that had an on site farmers market large enough to treat as your grocery store's produce section. Their pears? To *die* for. Their apples? Ditto. Peaches (provided there were no late frosts or severe droughts) that blew your mind. Everything smelled like itself. The raspberries sucked, but only in comparison to the wild ones. Darn things are sooooo perishable. The tomatoes were nowhere near as good as a friend's homegrown ones, but they still had scent and flavor and made supermarket ones unpleasant. I'd never tasted a truly good lemon til I moved out here, so I thought I didn't like them.

Now I know better.

A fresh Eureka lemon (the same thing you get in grocery stores everywhere) has a skin that may not be anything close to all yellow, but it'll smell flowery and lemony, and just rolling it on the counter before you juice it will leave scent on your hands for hours. Some Meyer lemons (little thin skinned lime sized things) will knock you over with scent from a couple feet away.