When did food become such a luxury?

The industrial food supply will be the last bastion of the luxury economy, and we might mirror the cannibals in doomsday movies before we cede our idiosyncratic eating habits to austerity. Capitalism is amazing because it inspires unrelenting competition between brands and the branding of items that should be generic — organized and categorized by which boasts the best flavor, the most sustainably sourced ingredients, or fastest-ripening produce whose side effects might include the leaching of toxic chemicals into municipal food and water supplies. Luckily, the same system that instigated mass disease and physical and psychic atrophy can invent a market for “clean eating,” the branded backlash against factory farming’s poisoning and genetic modification of your food and soil and water and air. It’s a sinister mode of decadence — decadent minimalism, where overt virtue signaling meets seemingly neurotic purity fantasies, where customers dance in the glow of the glare on bulk bins. It is no longer enough to wear designer- or even label-free “quiet luxury” clothing; the new way to indicate class is to shop Erewhon with no regard for cost and bypass the genetically modified, aggressively low-quality gut-busting food the U.S. is now renowned for.