On the Need to Eliticize Pollan

Interesting piece in Salon today, on a movement to give people in poor neighborhoods better access to food markets of all kinds. Among its manifestations is People's Grocery, described here:

Though it would be easy to rest on its laurels, the growing organization -- it now boasts five full-time positions -- is thinking bigger than just one truck and one store. People's Grocery devotees pride themselves on addressing a complex, interconnected set of food-related issues. At the top of the list is advocating and practicing sustainable agriculture and urban farming, with a goal of creating a locally based food system, ideally while generating jobs and stability in their communities.

All of which situates groups like People's Grocery not in opposition to the affluent, consumer-based charge led by Pollan and Waters, but rather as the grass-roots flip side of it. "They've been pioneering quite a bit," Ahmadi says of the food luminaries. "But that hasn't quite trickled down to the challenges of healthy food in West Oakland."

OK. But whence the assumption--it seems the discussion of Pollan over at Salon, in which he was demonized as an uber-snob for suggesting we might reconsider what we're willing to spend for eggs may have had some bearing on this--that Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is a "charge" at all? Let alone "affluent and consumer-based." I read this book a couple of months back. It isn't a book meant to lead a charge. It's an interesting book about four meals meant, in part, to undercut many of the assumptions people make (including those they make about "organic" foods). Yes, he's a well-off white guy living in Berkeley. Yes, he does sound, at times, like a bit of a snob. But nothing about his book suggests that he thinks the poor should be paying more for their eggs. And he'd obviously--how is it possible to think otherwise?--think programs like People's Grocery are an excellent, elegant idea.

Indeed, the Salon article quoted here, even while using Pollan's name (in the "Next Page" teaser, for example) as equivalent to "elitist foodie," struggles to make this work: People's Grocery is "not so much in opposition" . . . Right. How about not at all?

So anyway. Was my reading of Pollan too casual? Or is Salon struggling for an angle, here, to which their readers will respond?