Beauty and ketchup

-In the guise of a beauty post, here's an interesting career trajectory narrative. What privilege can do, and what's required of the individual. Sarah Brown, Vogue's Beauty Director (and we'll just pretend to know what "beauty director" means) offers a nice, frank discussion of how she got where she is, complete with legs-up (her SoHo-gallery-owner mother handing her an ArtForum internship during high school) and scrappiness (stints in retail, persistent maintenance of professional connections). All of which leads me to think that rather than acknowledging "privilege," what people should do is be open about how they got where they are. Because along with Dalton, Vassar, and internships, it was also "privilege," in a sense, that Brown's parents encouraged her to work for pay during college.

-Once again, the myth of some kind of significant caste that only eats local/organic/artisanal is perpetuated, this time in a NYT piece about the guilty, processed-food pleasures with which this caste cheats on occasion. When well-educated, coastal elites are eating at most only a smattering of farm-fresh ingredients, and are relatively slim and healthy for reasons having next to nothing to do with farmers' markets, lovely as those may be. A while back, I defended those who would draw a distinction between fattening haute food and more readily-available crap food items against charges of elitism. Either upscale Manhattan restaurants are contributing to the obesity crisis or they're not. The grease they peddle is too pricey to be consumed by most on a regular basis, and those well-off enough to be at the latest high-end comfort-food establishment night after night are also so committed to being thin that they're only ever picking at what's served. Yet this latest story made me wonder. We need high-end chefs' permission to admit that any non-overprocessed ketchup tastes wrong?