Well, at least there’s me and B.R. Myers, a vegan and brilliant literary critic, who tears into foodie-ism with zeal in “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies” in this month’s Atlantic.

The essay is great fun. Omnivore blogger Cliff Bostock writes, “The essay is every bit as hyperbolic and sermonizing as the foodie movement he attacks, but it is nonetheless a great read.” New York Times food critic Glenn Collins highlights it as what he’s reading this week.

Myers has read the latest by Anthony Bourdain, Kim Severson, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), and he couldn’t be happier that that reading assignment is over.

He finds that all of today’s foodie writing flows from the spring of Pollan’s “moral logic,” which, in Myers’ reading, goes like this:

The refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans—from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself.

It’s not the first time Myers has critiqued Pollan. He identified the danger in Pollan’s line of thinking in September 2007:

Pollan is free to present his appetite as a sort of moral-o-meter, the final authority for judging the rightness of all things culinary. He shoots a wild pig, for example, hugely enjoying the experience. We even get a spiel about how hunting makes people face the inevitability of their own death.

This is nonsense, says Myers. What has become socially acceptable as being a “foodie” is nothing more than elitism and gluttony. What’s new is that “for the first time in the history of their community,” these gluttonous elitists are left “feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street.” There’s no guilt about eating so much, so well, and at such cost. No one sees that there’s a problem with being so fixated on food, thinking about it all the time, or pursuing it as basely as Bourdain does:

Bourdain starts off his book by reveling in the illegality of a banquet at which he and some famous (unnamed) chefs dined on ortolan, endangered songbirds fattened up, as he unself-consciously tells us, in pitch-dark cages. After the meal, an “identical just-fucked look” graced each diner’s face. Eating equals sex, and in accordance with this self-flattery, gorging is presented in terms of athleticism and endurance. “You eat way past the point of hitting the wall. Or I do anyway.”

Francis Lam opens his rebuttal to Myers with an admission: “Look, I hate ‘foodies’ as much as the next guy.” Hannah Wallace, who writes about food for The Faster Times, is on board, too:

Myers has a point: many so-called foodies are elitist and would rather brag about their latest meal at Per Se (and eating ortolan, apparently) than work to make organic fruits and veggies affordable and accessible to low-income communities.

And Robert Sietsema, lashing back against Myers in the Village Voice, has to admit as well that there’s some truth in what Myers says:

Foodism is an unstoppable cultural phenomenon that has outgrown its metaphoric britches. Just like any other human endeavor, its manifestations must be submitted to sane judgment on a case-by-case basis. Good ideas and bad ideas abound, and it’s the job of the thinker, writer, and dining enthusiast to submit these ideas to analysis, and, yes, moral judgment.

Well, here I am, being a thinker and writer, wanting to submit these ideas to analysis and moral judgment. (I’d be more of a dining enthusiast if I could afford more frequent enthusiastic dining.) And what I want to ask is this: As the ranks of foodies grow in Lancaster County, how will our community change?

There is a growing focus in our community on food.

There are blogs: We have Keely Childers Heany’s Note to Self blog on Susquehanna Style. Kathlene Sullivan’s Food-Love-Lancaster blog on Fig. Carl Kosko’s Lancaster Culinary Journeys. Holly High is blogging her way through the Mennonite Community Cookbook on 7 Sweets and 7 Sours, in a Central PA version of Julie & Julia. Every so often we get a fresh post from Ten Pints.

There are institutions, beginning with the sporadically active Lancaster Buy Fresh Buy Local. There are local community-supported agriculture coops (CSAs). There’s Expressly Local on King Street. My friend Antonia Hinnenkamp has East King Culinary. Amy Crystle offers weekly bundles through Everyday Local Food (I’m a happy customer).

Apparently there are even local listservs about food.

And then there’s the growing national attention on Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine—witness the August 2010 issue of Bon Appetit.

It’s easy for me—and, I expect, most readers of this blog—to imagine how much good could come of all this: Better, more nutritious food for all segments of our community, with a positive effect on the environment. More healthy options for dining out. Protection for the traditional agriculture that is such a part of our area’s heritage.

But Myers’ Atlantic article, cheerless as it is, causes me to pause for a moment. I think of John J. Jeffries, which is wonderful but, you cant deny, elite. I rewatch the Fox 43 segment on Susquehanna Style‘s Silver Spoon awards, which gives eating a red carpet treatment. I recall the Buy Fresh Buy Local $60/person dinners. And I wonder if Myers is right to bring up a concern. If we stopped thinking and conversing about this, couldn’t this all devolve into a circle of local elitists congratulating themselves for all the good they’re doing by eating delicious and expensive food?

I’m an American, and therefore an optimist, so I think we’ll see positive outcomes rather than the negative ones that are possible. Still, as foodie-ism continues to erupt in our community, it makes sense to me for us to recognize how precarious a position we’re in. Are we talking about food that’s better for people and the environment, or a convenient disguise for elitism and gluttony?

What about you? Do you share any of Myers’ concerns, or is this a whole lot of buzz about nothing?

There are a lot of statistics in the article that cannot be broken down to the local level, but there was one question I knew I could answer: What percentage of adults in Lancaster County were married in 1960, compared to 2008?

I asked this question because it was surprising to me to learn that, nationwide, only about half of all adults are currently married, down from more than two thirds in 1960. (We’re counting adults as individuals 20 years of age or older.) I was curious to know what those numbers were for Lancaster County, to compare how we stack up to the nation as a whole. Here’s the answer.

Table: Percentage of Adults Who Are Currently Married

It’s uncanny how Lancaster County has remained exactly ten percent higher in this regard over the past half-century. We may be moving slower, but we’re following the same trend as the nation as a whole.

This leads me to a reader poll: Is marriage obsolete? When Time asked this question in 1978, “when the divorce rate was much higher than it is today,” 28% said it was. In this new study, that number has grown to 40%. What do you say?

[poll id="14"]

What’s this paywall, and who will it affect? It’s a $20/year charge to out-of-towners who read Lancaster obituaries like they’re going out of style.

As reported by Bill Mitchell of the Pointer Institute:

Monday morning, the website for a midsized paper in southeastern Pennsylvania became the first to go public with the paid content system of Journalism Online, the startup engineered by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and others.

LancasterOnline, which serves the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, began informing people who live outside Lancaster County and read its online obituary listings that visiting the obits page will cost $1.99 a month after they’ve viewed seven pages each month. Annual subscriptions cost $19.99.

Screenshot of the notice all obituary readers now see when they visit LancasterOnline.com

Media analysts seem to think this is one of the most ridiculous ideas they’ve heard when it comes to online revenue models. For instance, Mark Potts writes:

Are they serious? Are there really that many people people visiting the Lancaster site to read obits? Really?

The folks in Lancaster claim to have done the math that proves there’s a substantial out of town audience for obits, though it’s based on a lot of guesswork (and probably proves, once again, that journalists really aren’t that good at math). Notably, Lancaster seems to base its projections on traffic numbers from the not-so-reliable Google Analytics rather than on data from the site’s internal logs, which would be much more precise. That seems odd.

According to Mitchell’s story, LancasterOnline estimates that 100,000 out-of-market visitors to the site read obits each year. And the site reckons that more than 10 percent of them do it—yes, read obits—several times a week. Okaaaay. Taking the math further, Lancaster estimates that nearly 90,000 visitors to the site read the obits at least once a week, and 17,692 visitors read the obits four times a week.

These numbers are preposterous. Remember, this is little LancasterOnline, not NewYorkTimes.com or WashingtonPost.com. I find it hard to believe that Lancaster has that sort of constant, repeat traffic to its obits—or else it’s got an audience with a truly obsessive fascination with grazing news about local deaths.

He’s joined by Steve Buttry, who writes:

If I were seeking to kill off newspapers (I’m not), I would try to persuade them to charge people to read obituaries online. Apparently that’s the plan of Journalism Online, a profiteer seeking to cash in not only on newspapers’ death wish but on the deaths of their readers.

Journalism Online’s sucker in this fantasy-based paywall experiment is the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (oh, the irony in that name; I will call it the Old Era for purposes of this blog).

David Brauer joins in:

Laugh if you want — and I’ll admit, I’m tittering — but any small-town newspaper publisher will tell you obits are a pretty big deal for readers. In this case, LancasterOnline is making money coming and going (if you’ll pardon the pun): they charge survivors to place death notices, and now they’ll charge out-of-towners to read them.

(When the younger generations start dying, we’ll just inform everyone via social networks.)

This sure sounds like a low-revenue road test to me, but Lancaster Online’s editor thinks they can squeeze $100,000 out of the oldster demographic that keeps up regularly with far-flung deaths.

All I have to say is that the people who came up with this scheme are nothing like the cultural creatives who are engineering Lancaster’s future. This is preservationist, reactionary, and, I suspect, based on data that is (excuse the pun) dead wrong.

The ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano, Iceland is an amazing sight. This NASA photograph was taken on Saturday (May 8th).

PPL customers can now get electricity from wind mills

Welcome to the new economy. Having to pay more for the same old stuff causes revolts. Having the opportunity to pay more for what’s innovative and sustainable engenders loyalty.

What I’m talking about is PPL’s new Green Power Option. You should do it. Go to communityenergyinc.com/ppl and choose how much of your household electricity you’d like to come from the renewable sources of wind and hydro. The options start at an extra $2.50 on your bill. Amanda and I are signed up to get about half of our electricity through green power. That will be about four tons less of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this year.

I jumped at the opportunity to enroll in this program. I appreciated having a similar option through PECO when I lived in the Philadelphia area, and I have no clue why it has taken PPL so long to offer a green option here. The idea is simple: If it costs more to generate electricity sustainably, give people the option to pay the extra expense.

The green electricity PPL is offering is generated by Community Energy. It so happens that the company is the one that partnered with Temple, Villanova, and my college, Eastern, when as a student body we decided to get 100% of campus electricity from sustainable sources in 2002. I covered the story for our student newspaper as it unfolded.

Electricity generated by PPL comes primarily from four types of sources:

• Nuclear
• Coal
• Hydro
• Oil and natural gas

Participating in the Green Power Option gives PPL a financial incentive to continue its emerging set of renewable energy projects. PPL says that about 10% of the electricity it markets comes from such projects. While PPL claims the Frey Farm Landfill as one of its projects, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority’s website says that what electricity it does not use to power the facility itself, it sells to Met Ed, not to PPL. That’s a shame, because the LCSWM waste-to-energy system is sleek and innovative.

For now, I’m just happy that it’s finally within my reach to power my home with energy from green sources.

First United Methodist Church as it appeared in 1946

One of the first exercises that the students will do is to complete a GIS database of all the religious communities practicing today and sort through the architectural spaces in which they worship. Then, we will move backwards in time, consulting Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, archival documents, photos, and genealogies from the Lancaster County Historical Society, the Franklin and Marshall Archive, and the Historic Preservation Trust. …

The complete list of places of worship in Lancaster adds up to 170. For the first assignment, each student will be assigned 10 of the listings and must conduct an architectural inspection.

Yes, Ethan, Wheatland is on the list. No, Ken, LCBC is not. Also on the list is the Unitarian Universalist church, all three synagogues, and the mosque.

Also, don’t miss Dr. Kourelis’s post on the Lancaster Building Conservancy, which I mentioned recently in relation to the Turkey Hill Experience, in which he writes:

It’s a wonderful project, the brain child of preservationist Ben Leech. I met Ben for lunch last week and got to know him a little. The Lancaster Building Conservancy and Ben’s other blog, Old Weird Lancaster, constitute for me a new kind of historical activism or grass roots architectural history. Blogging and the web have provided a platform for exciting and innovative projects. …On this blog, I’ve occassionally been critical of photographic projects (like Flickr communities) because they lack documentational discipline. Ben’s LBC is quite the opposite. The weekly drawing provides the foundation for a well-researched and articulate analysis. I hope Ben’s images have a post-blog afterlife. I hope they turn into an exhibition or a book.

Writing of an F&M professor reminds me that I’m curious to learn what Trexler Proffitt is up to with the local stock exchange idea he has been researching.

19 East King, bank drive-through. Future site of a Subway.

Tim Mekeel reports in today’s Intell that a Subway restaurant is building a new building downtown near the square so that it has somewhere to move into. It will be just east of the vacant Amazon Cafe storefront and just west of the vacant 21 East King storefront. The Subway will go where an abandoned bank drive-through currently sits.

There are some obvious negatives here: it’s a chain restaurant, it’s new construction on a block in need of renovations, and the storefront windows are going to be full of loud, annoying corporate advertisements. Not to mention that there was a Subway restaurant that is now the Green Man Cafe downtown, and hasn’t been renovated to look like anything other than a Subway restaurant.

Do you think there are positives that outweigh those negatives? Will you be eating at the downtown Subway? Where will you go instead? (Isaac’s, which also serves sandwiches, is local, and is just around the corner?)

Here’s a snapshot of the trending of Lancaster County births since 1994.

Lancaster County, PA birth rate, 1994 through 2008

From page 20 of "Lancaster: A World-Class Destination for Business"

The increasing hustle and bustle of Lancaster’s arts and music scene is what led Ken Mueller to move to the city recently from Elizabethtown. It’s nice to live in a place where such a variety of people—from government officials to artists to business owners—share the same committment to the city, Mueller says.

“In Lancaster, there’s a real pride where everyone wants to do what is best for the city,” he says. “I think people coming into the city will be pleasantly surprised about what they find here.”

One such person is Daniel Klotz, who moved with his wife to Lancaster three years ago after living in New York City. The transition was easy for the couple, Klotz says, because Lancaster offers all the amenities of a big city without the cost and lengthy commutes.

Klotz believers there is a critical mass of talent and investment in Lancaster and that the good things going on in the city will only continue to grow.

“It’s all starting to come together,” he says. “I think there’s an opportunity for something really big to happen here.”

Thanks to Christina Reardon for writing this story, and for the opportunity to appear in it.

What Is Growing in Lancaster City

Here are a few of the things going on in the city that I think will only continue to grow:

• We Are Lancaster (If you missed it, I contributed an answer to their “Why Lancaster” series)
• The Creative Works of Lancaster
• Lancaster, PA Tweetups
• NewsLanc

What else would you add to this list?