Let Them Eat Cake

'When two tapas restaurants opened in my neighbourhood in quick succession, attracting a funky crowd prepared to pay big prices for tiny morsels, the gentrification was complete. The buzz in the street was palpable. Now as I watch the gutting of a '60s-era Chinese restaurant to make way for new tenants, I'm ashamed of the secret joy in my middle-class heart. Perhaps the neighbourhood will get a delicatessen that sells good bread.' Adele Horin 'Social housing not code for estate' The Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition January 22- 23 2011, News Review p18

Red rag to a bull, statements like this, the last sentence in particular.

I'm not going to point out that Adele Horin seems to have left herself out of the 'gentrification' process, which is pretty typical of those who cry gentrification, meaning, some other middle-class heart has moved into my lovely working class niche and now it's not exclusive anymore.

No, what gets me is the linking of getting 'a delicatessen that sells good bread' with 'gentrification'. What does she mean? That the working class might not get 'secret joy' out of a deli or a good bakery come to that? Does she mean that either a deli or good bread is an automatic signifier of gentrification?

There's also an assumption that 'a funky crowd prepared to pay big prices for tiny morsels' will always be middle class and again that the mere presence of such means the suburb is going to hell in a hand cart. Maybe, just maybe, some working class young uns are also funky and happy to pay a higher price on occasion for 'tiny morsels'.

Sounding pretty classist to me.

Brillat-Savarin's aphorism Tell me what you eat; and I will tell you what you are is getting pretty creaky these days. I say this having just come back from a weekend in what had traditionally been a working class to lower middle class beach holiday area in NSW, Great Lakes/Forster-Tuncurry. While there's plenty of caravaning and cut-rate motels still doing a roaring trade, there's also a burgeoning upper middle to really really rich  population buying up big and building even bigger beach houses for permanent or holiday stay, centered on the Bluey's Beach area. The little strip of shops at Bluey's now boasts a very inner-city/Northern beaches cafe cum mini provedore, a bottle shop with an extraordinary range of beers and 'gourmet' dips, snacks, etc., a pizzeria that's funky and swanky, but also a very traditional fish and chip shop. The clientele across all theses shops cuts across class, and I bet no-one from the longer established holiday maker set is complaining about the up-scaled burgers, wraps, smoothies and coffee (gees, it's even Organic!). No, I reckon they are all secretly joyful that where the moneyed mob goes the food is likely to also. It's sure as eggs that while they - the un or less-moneyed  - were the only ones coming holidaying it would not have been profitable for the gourmet foodmakers to move in.

So, next time you see someone wanting to set up a deli in your little piece of working class heaven, don't grope about it, look at it as a step towards the democratisation of good food.