Dr. Frank's What's-it

Dude, if there isn't a substantive bone in your body, don't you think it's time for calcium supplements ;)

quote: "Of course, the Whole Foods Experience isn't just a San Francisco thing. But I suspect it is more extreme here. You take a dubious marketing gimmick ("organic") and turn it into a Lifestyle. Then you turn that into a kind of cult. Whatever else that is, it's extremely Bay Area."

Thus my reference to the low-carb phenom in the last post. I guess it's not limited to the Bay area after all, eh?

All that exclusionary tolerance paired with nauseating narcissism is to be found all across the country if you hang with the right people. Out here (most of the rest of the country) you can decide whether you want to immerse yourself in it or not, unless maybe you are going to college.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

Or, as I always like to say:

When your mommy said you were special, she lied.

"I think the Special Food Culture is kind of like that, though it's more a matter of social and psychological, rather than mere physical, proximity."

If you taste Chatuau Mouton-Rothschild and Charles Shaw blinfolded one of them makes you wanna do Balki Bartokomous's Myposian Dance of Joy and the other tastes like flabby watery backwash.

While "organic" is, in fact,the "dubious" marketing ploy that you say it is, in that is has no real meaning; it does serve as a signal to consumers that what they are purchasing is made with on a different part of the cost-quality spectrum (which I've just invented) than a typical generic product. As such I think it does a pretty good job. I just don't think it makes any sense to try to evaluate the validity of other people's preferences. Let's just all maximize our own utility and leave it at that. Of course that's just my oppinion.

Yeah, Josh, but when you have a blog, you have to think of *something* to put on it every now and then...

ha!

well,i think its pretty standard for people to capitalize on anything once they find out it sells. especially if its people's own indulgence in themselves.

by the by,i know its more about the people but i have s.f news if it makes you feel any better. down the road from me(i'm almost positive it was there,though i could be confused)there was once a very small organicy natural food type store.

it is now a bigger 7-11.

I don't know, I really thought the phrase "smells like ass" was substantive. That is, assuming "substantive" means "funny and true as hell" (don't have my thesaurus handy, sorry).

On a slightly bitter note, where I'm from (Williamsburg, Brooklyn), every time an "organic" store pops up in the 'hood it means your already astronomical rent is about to go up yet again. I guess the line of reasoning being "If you can afford expensive crappy food, you can afford an expensive crappy apartment". Nice.

All this talk about organic vs. traditional food has forced me to return to the pipe. the pot pipe. i had quit for three weeks of hyperactivity and diminished appetite, but the stress of this entire debate has forced me to start smoking again. I only smoke organic pot, none sprayed with insect repellent or PCP.
The question remains, however, would dr. frank eat a crystal clear tomato? i saw one in the "RIGHT NOW" video by van halen and i got simultaneously hungry and repulsed. I don't know what I would do if I was served a crystal clear tomato, and in case it ever happens I would like to have a definitive answer to the question, "WHAT WOULD DR FRANK DO?"
please dont brush this question aside as childish banter, frank. i'm serious. i need to know what the person who coined the phrase "you're not fooling anyone/it's overdone (over/done?)/swiss family robinson!" would do in that situation. thanks.

I appreciate your very nice words about me, all the more since I had an allergic overreaction to your post that I probably should have just kept to myself.

It seemed to me like you were just about exactly as dismissive as you suspected others to be, and were denigrating a lot of good on the basis of a little annoyance.

You make the 'special food culture' an example of class. But the way 'normal' food is raised and marketed is, too, just comfortably far away where it needn't overly concern us: farm workers and migrant workers raising and slaughtering our food at some superfarm or megaslaughterhouse for a pittance, supermarket cashiers selling it to us for another pittance. (sorry stupid lecture cut short here.)

If some precious fools are annoying about buying organic food or having more on their mind than dollars per pound, forgive them and the rest of us. Don't let their attitudes get in the way of thinking about what might be right about what they're doing.

That's a struggle in the Bay Area, I know, I used to live in Oakland, and I'd get annoyed at feeling like I was Attila the Hun for expressing doubts about tenet X, Y, or Z of accepted thought -- to the point where I sometimes adopted not-X, not-Y, or not-Z out of sheer cussedness. But now I think that wasn't a particularly good approach either.

i have a nephew named thomas... trippy.

Frank,

I agree with you on assessing the symptoms of the Bay Area culture (outsiders might think Dr. F came up with that "The Best Place on Earth" tag in a fit of contrarian pique. He did not -- it's the title of a non-ironic series on the top-rated local t.v. news highlighting why the Bay Area is so great). I think a big part of the cause is that residents need some justification for putting up with the outrageous price of housing there. I mean, if being able to shop at the Berkeley Bowl or Monterey Market weren't so goddamn important, why the hell would anyone get a 40-year mortgage on a $800,000 2-bedroom house that's going to fall over during the next Big One? The view (sorry, if the house has a view it's gonna be $950,000)? The fabulous traffic on I-80 (not "the 80", that's what Angelinos call it)?

All the hot air blown into the various Bay Area subcultures is necessary to keep the real estate bubble from bursting. People sacrifice so much to live in the Bay Area that they need to persuade themselves constantly that they made the right choice -- it eventually becomes a mantra, or the sort of thing you see people mumbling to themselves in psychiatric institutions on t.v. shows while they rock tensely back and forth, back and forth, back and forth...

Back when you and I were growing up in the Bay Area, Frank, normal people could buy a house and live a normal life there, so people could have a more balanced sense of things. Nowadays, the Bay Area demands so much of its residents that it warps people's view.