Are Foodies Egalitarian?

Three weeks of driving around Sicily some years ago and two weeks in Rome this April taught my wife and me some things about Italian cuisine: it’s impossible to encounter bad food in Sicily and it’s hard to avoid it in Rome. We were, of course, not there just for the food—but since we’re foodies, this did matter. Dining well in Rome required a strategy: we stuck to the Michelin Guide for anything expensive, used locals for advice, and relied on our own intuition. The elderly gentleman who sold me some ties in Trastevere recommended lunch at a bar around the corner from his shop. Small and spare, it was full of local businesspeople and workers eating pasta and plates of chicory, and we had a wonderful lunch of fettuccine and tomatoes. When on our own, we looked for spots away from tourists, mostly pizza places with just a few other things on a chalk menu. If the pizza wasn’t properly blackened and blistered, we moved on. At the best of these, we had perfect pizza and a perfect octopus salad. Now assuming that food was, say, 20 percent of the reason for our two trips, the lessons we learned about Italian food cost us (airfare, lodging, and gas) many multiples of the price of Tyler Cowen’s nifty new book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.