Let me preface this post by saying that I believe in spending a little more money on higher quality food.
When the average American family and individual only spends 9.7% of their annual disposal income on food (down from 20% in the 50’s), I get scared. That’s an average. That means there are lots of people spending even less than that on food.
And there are a lot of people spending more. Like the man in the leather jacket and dark designer jeans at Leopoldo’s at Jean-Talon Market last weekend. The man looked intimidating, think Italian mafia with an aura of confidence. I’m standing in line with my box of over-ripe, juicy mangos and a bunch of persimmons that will cost me $2 when I noticed a sign saying that the fresh white truffles from Alba had arrived.
These are a luxury item. You shave the tiniest bit on top of pasta. There’s nothing worse than too much truffle. But there’s nothing quite like just a little. The season is short, they’re hard to hunt (there are specially trained pigs that help), and they don’t have a long shelf life while fresh.
But there are Italian and French families in Montreal with some pocket change who visit Leopoldo’s and Chez Nino in Jean-Talon Market every November when the truffles arrive. There’s no price listed, but I’m sure it’s astronomical. I’m debating asking the man with the brown ponytail if I could just smell one…when I see him carrying something carefully in his hands to the weigh scale by the cash register.
Leopoldo’s is not a big store. The line is wrapping around the narrow aisle by the counter. I see the man who works there with the ponytail every time I go, and I’ve never seen him look this nervous. Actually I’ve never seen him look nervous at all. But holding what I thought was a clove of garlic cupped inside his hands in a wrapper, he certainly looked nervous. After weighing the item, he zigzagged back through the line to the customer in the leather jacket.
“It comes to one fifty,” he said.
Why would the man go out of his way to weigh the item for the customer while there was a big line, just to tell him that a clove of garlic cost $1.50? I thought.
The customer nodded seriously. He got out his wallet. The salesman looked around uncomfortably while trying to give the impression that he wasn’t uncomfortable. The customer handed over three $50 bills in front of the whole lineup of people who were somehow managing not stare like I was.
The salesman handed over the small package and the man thanked him in a businesslike way before walking out of the store with his $150 bundle of white truffles.
I lifted my jaw back up from the floor.
What do you do with $150 of white truffles?? Was he planning a pasta dinner for 20? A wedding? An anniversary? Or was it just an average Sunday meal with family?
Maybe for him that wasn’t an extravagant expenditure at all. Maybe to him it was a little treat.
$150 used to be my monthly rent. It’s more than people I know spend on food in a month. It’s less than other people I know spend on food in a day.
And it’s three times the amount I spent on a steak last week, which is still more than I’d ever spent on a steak in my life.
But, see, I was in Aruba a month ago and I had the most amazing steak I’ve ever eaten. It basically changed my thoughts about beef. It was an Argentinian grass-fed 39 oz bone-in Porterhouse grilled slowly over charcoal.
Salt and pepper and that’s it.
So when I got back to Montreal, I wanted to see if I could find as good beef here. I went to Atwater Market and bought a $50 organic T-Bone. I could have gone for a more aged steak, but I thought that darkened meat would be a completely different flavour and wouldn’t be a fair comparison. The T-Bone cost $50. It was just as massive as the plate-sized steak I’d had in Aruba. And I grilled it the Argentinian way – slowly – on my BBQ. It was wonderful.
But it wasn’t better than the steak I’d had in Aruba, which had cost $50 including three side dishes. I won’t be buying the local version again. I could buy two whole grain-fed chickens and a turkey thigh for that money. I could by bags and bags of organic chickpeas for homemade channa masala. I could buy 3 lobsters. I could donate it to Moisson Montreal.
But I realized that I’d come a long way since my rent was $150. Nowadays, $50 doesn’t seem so astronomical. I’m pushing up that average food budget expenditure figure (the Canadian version). I just wish the people who could afford to spend more money on higher quality food would do so, instead of buying factory-farmed rotisserie chicken at the grocery store, commercial cakes and pies with ingredients I can’t even pronounce, and spending $50 a week on frozen pizza. The pizza might seem like a steal, but it’s maybe not something your body needs all the time. And the people who can’t afford to spend more…well, they become able to spend more.
Maybe some day they’ll have someone hand them a precious package of white truffles too. If that’s what they choose to spend their money on, anyway. And I hope they appreciate it – and how much their life has changed.
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