Pornucopia

IN A MOMENT of lascivious weakness, I started paging through the new Williams-Sonoma catalog and got all the way to page five – five! – before my eyes bugged out. There, bottom of the page, right side, was a most uncenterfoldish photograph of a stand mixer -- a Hobart, hospital white.

It wasn't the Hobart itself that gave tingling pause. One was not born yesterday, after all; one has been around the block, in the course of which journeying one has seen Hobart mixers, in bakeries and bagel shops, among other places. Often they are floor-standing models, nearly as tall as a small person, and are plainly meant for mixing doughs and batters on a commercial scale. The Hobart in the photo, by contrast, was a baby Hobart, a countertop model.

No, it wasn't the image of the stand mixer per se that shocked. I have a lovely stand mixer, a KitchenAid in cobalt blue; it was a gift from my mother 17 years ago. It has performed tirelessly over the years and cost $182 at Farm and Fleet; I look at it every day and am pleased. I see similar models advertised now for $225 or so – not cheap, but not expensive, either, for a useful article that will last indefinitely. The baby Hobart, by way of comparison, costs $1,999.95. That is, by my reckoning, $2,000, minus a nickel. Plus sales tax – which, in San Francisco, would be about $170, which is nearly the price my mother paid for my whole machine.

The catalog avers that the Hobart is "designed to meet the demands of professional bakers." Fair enough, but I have noticed, in my snoopings, that professional kitchens often include plenty of KitchenAids. Are the pros cutting corners, or are they simply indifferent to name-brand snobbery, particularly when such snobbery means overspending by a factor of 10 and ruining the business? That is what we might call the new Republican math.

I adore Williams-Sonoma and am an avid, if intermittent, consumer of its first-rate food-gadget porn. But even I have my limits. In particular, I have trouble reconciling myself to the constant barrage of news stories that we are running out of money, don't have enough to fund this or that program or pay for some urgently needed retrofit, when the mail brings its periodic news that some device costing 10 times what it should is available to stylin' home chefs who happen to have a couple of extra grand lying around, which presumably quite a few do, else the plaything wouldn't be available. The polite way to describe this dissonance is to say it's a skewing of values; or, less politely, decadence.

Paul Reidinger