I have ordered avocado toast a few times in my life, and its mark-up has never particularly appalled me. It is bad value in the same way Starbucks coffee is bad value, or a $20 lipstick, or any of the other extravagances that fly beneath the radar even of those who are trying to save money.
This month, these items again fell under the moralising gaze of people higher up the economic food chain. “When I was trying to buy my first home,” said Tim Gurner, a multimillionaire property developer, “I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.” He joined Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman, who told low-income Americans in March they should forego smartphones in order to buy health insurance, and those who ask why people “on welfare” insist on smoking. Avocado toast widens the criticism to a larger income bracket, but the principle is the same: you are where you are not for any structural reasons, but because you are a feckless individual.
The mean apartment price in New York City is $1.4m. The median household income is $50,000. There’s an awful lot of toast in that shortfall.
Even to call it extravagance is wrong. There is, in fact, an extraordinary economy exhibited by those who understand the disproportionate value of small gain: the coffee in the morning that can carry a mood; the $2 app on one’s phone; a cigarette; a drink with friends after work. These are what make life tolerable when the yacht, or the one-bedroom apartment without mould in the bathroom, is beyond reach. This war by the rich against the small pleasures of the poor – that if you can’t afford the basics, you don’t deserve to have even the tiniest thing that is superfluous to need – puts people in a category other than human. Oh, reason not the need.
Love-hate figure
I find myself shuffling Amazon founder Jeff Bezos between categories, from villain, to bad-but-not-the-worst, to his unlikely status this week as hero. He hates Donald Trump, which is in his favour, but Amazon was criticised by the Independent Book Publishers Association this month for potentially denying publishers and authors income by promoting third-party vendors. Then a few days ago, Bezos announced he was giving $1m to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the largest single donation ever made to the organisation, and an “institution-changing gift”, said its executive director.
Under Bezos, the Washington Post has been consistently excellent, most recently breaking Trump’s leak of information to the Russians. (Although its Facebook feed is dominated by lurid Sunday People-type teasers, all child abuse and cruelty to animals.) It hasn’t cut costs, and its chief revenue officer told the New York Times this week that the paper is more profitable than ever. At least with Rupert Murdoch you can put your back into consistently hating him. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos is trickier. The fact he sometimes uses his power for good shouldn’t obscure the fact he has too much in the first place.
Nun better
The new Netflix true crime documentary is a seven-part series called The Keepers, which I inhaled in a week. It is better than Making a Murderer – more shocking, creepier – but it is also subtler in a way that defies categorisation. A group of women in late middle age decide to rectify an almost 50-year wrong and investigate the unsolved murder of one of their high-school teachers, a nun. There are twists and turns and amazing revelations, but the thing that blows my mind is the touching portrait of the women, as dogged, eccentric, grindingly determined, and supporting each other in the face of stonewalling from the Baltimore police and corruption from the Catholic church.
They are, by television standards, of an age and provenance considered deeply unglamorous, making them the most gratifying heroines on TV.
