|
|
 |
What
comes up for me is like I'm in junior high school again and
the middle class kids are laughing at my clothes and they're
looking at my sandwich and they're saying, 'What's that?'
And it's that kind of feeling I think that the people in the
neighborhood think they're going to get — that these
people are going to be looking down their nose at them and
they're eating white bread.
—Oak LoGalbo, Artist
Sometimes it's the humblest, everyday things which display
what class you are. Take the kind of bread you eat: even
though Americans 5 to 1 prefer white bread, whole wheat
has the greater cachet, and tends to be consumed by more
highly-educated people. What seems like an amusing statistic,
however, can have great repercussions, as we learn in a
visit to a town where foods like seitan and tofu have never
gone out of style. In Burlington, low income folks are at
war with upper middle-class counter-cultureites over who
will build the new downtown grocery. Will it be Shaw's,
a national chain of supermarkets, or the Onion River Co-op,
a smaller, community-based health food store? While the
Co-op promises that it will accommodate the tastes of the
masses, many Burlingtonians are suspicious of a place they
consider too expensive and judgmental of those who opt for
Wonder Bread, cigarettes, and red meat. People Like Us
listens in on the acrimonious class-conscious debates, and
imparts some lessons on which classes wield cultural and
political power in America today.
|
|
|
|
|
