Food Porn, Gone With the Wind, and White Trash

I went to Anton’s graduation.

It was a total blast.

Short, sweet, punchy and followed by a reception catered by the Culinary Institute of America’s finest.

Anton, who is one of the handsomest guys I know, looked amazing at the ceremony:



But not even Anton in his all his hunky, starched white-chef-coated glory could hold a candle to the (ohmyGAWD) food!

FOOD PORN:













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I also read another 100 pages in Gone With the Wind.

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Gone With the Wind presents the reader with a dilemma: If, say, Eva Braun had written a sweeping epic novel about the rise and fall of National Socialism, filled with Aryan nostalgia for those simpler times of Jew-baiting, window-smashing, and Leni Riefenstahl movies, would I really want to read it?

The answer is no.

And yet, Gone With the Wind is undeniably a great book. Scarlett O’Hara is right up there next to Elizabeth Bennett and Jo March as one of the great female fictional protagonists of all time, leaving characters like Becky Sharp, Natasha Rostova and even Jane Eyre far behind in the second tier.

Margaret Mitchell’s writing is vivid but simply constructed. No complex sentence constructions. Style never gets in the way of story.

You can think what you like about the story, but the fact remains that it is a narrative that continues to compel the behavior of millions of Americans to this very day, more than 150 years after the events it describes.

On those rare occasions when the Civil War bobbed up as a topic of conversation, my dear friend Eleanor, Alabama born and bred, would archly correct, “You mean the War of Northern Aggression.” Because that’s what white people living in the Deep South—Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia—continue to call it to this very day: The War of Northern Aggression.

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Margaret Mitchell bandies about the phrase “white trash” a lot in Gone With the Wind.

“White trash” is roughly analogous to what Hillary Clinton was talking about when she introduced the term “deplorables” into the political discourse, thereby torpedoing her Presidential ambitions.

In fact, white trash is a favorite theme of Southern writers from William Faulkner and Harper Lee to the contemporary wave of revisionist writers like J.D. Vance.

What does it mean exactly?

One must glean meaning through inference because I don’t think anyone has ever defined white trash.

From Margaret Mitchell, we learn that in class terms, white trash are lower than slaves. Thus, they are particularly hated by members of white plantation culture because they give lie to the myth of racial superiority: These people are white, and yet they are clearly inferior.

(One continues to see this rift today between self-styled liberals, most of whom are upper-middle or upper class in terms of education and income, and poorer whites. Of course the self-styled liberals have no idea that they are buying into a subtle form of racism here.)

What’s particularly odd is that not only are they white, they are largely the descendants of immigrants from the British Isles, the normative culture in the U.S, and the standard against which other immigrant cultures are judged. They have easily pronounced Anglo Saxon surnames.

And yet they are outsiders. Marginalized even. Their pleasures are the subordinate, anti-intellectual pleasures of a permanent lower class: listening to country music, watching Nascar, buying lottery tickets. Elvis Presley is their patron saint. They don’t even have the advantage of having an ethnic culture that hip members of the intelligensia might want to learn more about or emulate.

It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon.

Making whiteness visible to whites—exposing the narratives, the discourses, the cultural assumptions—is an essential part of moving forward into a post-racial society, I suspect. Reading a book like Gone With the Wind can be a very useful part of this process in that the novel sheds considerable light into the ways that racial and class identities are so closely intertwined in the U.S.