Whole Foods' "cultural appropriation" of the chopped-cheese sandwich

“Vibrant” means poor and dirty and terrible, which is to say, the opposite of Whole Foods, which is expensive and clean and great. So when Whole Foods began selling its own version of the chopped-cheese sandwich — on Columbus Circle, no less, from a cart marked “1492,” for eight bucks — the culture warriors lost their damned minds. The usual noises were made: cultural appropriation, imperialism, etc., evil Corporate America selling a ghetto staple to white-bread tourists in an entirely anodyne corner of Manhattan.

But the real cultural appropriation here is being done by those black and brown critics of Whole Foods: If there is a definition of well-off white-people problems, it’s worrying about what’s for sale at Whole Foods. You think the poor and dispossessed and oppressed of this world care about whether that $25-a-pound roasted salmon is farm-raised or wild-caught? I think not. If you are close enough to a Whole Foods to get pissed about what’s in the deli case there, you are a 1-percenter, globally speaking. You have won the game of civilization, and if you aren’t happy with the state of your life, then you probably aren’t trying hard enough.

This phenomenon is a kind of social gout, a disease of affluence. This is what you worry about when you’ve run out of real things to worry about like famine, war, and slavery. As such, it is no surprise that this disease afflicts the people of New York City, which isn’t an especially rich city (the median income there is lower than the median income of New York State) but a city where the cultural tone is set by the rich, who congregate in six or seven of its neighborhoods.