Some thoughts on reading "Food and Wine"

I was terribly giddy when I stole the magazine from the downtown YMCA. I was thrilled to thumb through the pages of elegant culinary photography and metropolitan wine recommendations. The chance to gaze upon a lifestyle that I thought I no longer longed for. (Remember the return from New York City? When I "decided" I was more than what I would up as in the city? I guess I never quite gave up that hidden wish for a glamorous uptown life.)

But after I read a few articles, I found myself bored and resentful. Sure, you recommend affordable bottles of reputable wines; sure, you try to democratize wine knowledge. But you still present and laud a lifestyle reserved for the moneyed sophisticates. Here's a cheap (excuse me, inexpensive) bottle of wine, but if you're a true connoisseur, you ought to visit Turin, Italy or Mendoza, Argentina.

I don't know what I expected. This isn't Food and Wine for the Politically Conscious and Slightly Broke.

What I really wanted to say was that it brought up some questions of class, and in talking about it with Jordan, he brought to my attention that, having known these kinds of people, he never aspired to be like them. And I countered with, but I'd want that lifestyle under the condition that I could redefine what it means to be wealthy; politically conscious, fiscally generous, socially cool. But he countered with that's what they want as well, but they still come off as, well, rich and snobbish. They want to not be defined by the sum of the parts, but by the parts themselves. And we agreed that, indeed, a person is rarely viewed as anything other than their wealthy class, and negatively so, and that, well, maybe the wealthy shouldn't expect anything else. Almost as if they'd chosen the label and accompanying stereotypes.

But last night, sitting on the toilet, thinking this through, I realized this can't be a just way to view things. Because if I expand the reasoning to, say, the opposite perspective, I would hate to be viewed only as a poor Riverwest kid, or a middle class Midwesterner, scorned because although I didn't choose these things, I could certainly change them, right?

Because once I expand beyond class, which Americans are so fond of imagining is fluid, I land in trickier, and often less changeable, and more historically persecuted territory. Race. Religions. Could I quietly accept being essentially blamed, hated even, for being a halfie? (Didn't I abandon a burgeoning interest in Jill Scott for that very reason?) Choosing to conform to a group and not define myself as an individual, transcendent of my label?

It's hard to say I despise the wealthy yet conscious people presented in Food and Wine, especially because I still secretly yearn for that very lifestyle. Jetsetting to Italy for a great Barbaresco wine with rooster agnolotti? Sure!

Is it enough to say I'd love to try the life, critique it, then build a knowledgeable, cynical, warm amalgam life in opposition to that which I tried and rejected?