Why Selling Poor Culture to Rich People at Exorbitant Prices is a Win-Win!

By CL Bledsoe — NOT ANOTHER TV DAD

An interesting thing about growing up poor is that if you wait long enough, the things you had no choice but to do to survive will become fashionable and overpriced. Food is the most obvious example. A few years ago, I was in a Whole Foods — “Organic! Flown in from Peru!” — when I saw a small bag of red rice for sale for nearly $10. When I was growing up on a rice farm in eastern Arkansas, red rice grew in the ditches around the fields. It was essentially a weed, because no one wanted it. If only we’d been growing it in the Himalayas! We could’ve sold them all kinds of weeds.

There are tons of examples of ‘peasant food’ becoming fashionable. Lobster, rabbit, gluten-free breads, even. I read an article recently about squirrel and ‘possum “making a comeback,” though that’s really giving them a lot of credit. Fashion is one of the most unintentionally amusing examples of rich folks coopting poor “culture.” Remember the Grunge look? Or jeans with holes in them in the 80s?

The reason that these things are poor “culture” is because poor people had no choice. Soul food, for example, was born of necessity. No one turned away other cuts and chose to eat entrails or snouts. It was all they had, all they were allowed. They had to get creative…