Dough à la Mode

I enjoyed William Grimes's piece today in the NYT Magazine Section in which he addresses the issue of spending lots and lots of money on a meal."How could you? In a world where millions of children go hungry, where famine haunts broad swaths of Africa and Asia, where the $200 spent on a bottle of Bordeaux could go far to alleviating a destitute family's misery -- how could you?"His answer, I think, is intelligent and helpful. It has two parts. You should read them.My favorite paragraph comes at the end:"That urge for the little extra, the luxurious touch that separates apple pie from pie a la mode, leads me to the other part of the moral argument against high living. It is not just the rich who indulge themselves when it comes to food. Everyone does. Millionaires may be the exception, but almost anyone can make a millionaire's pie, an old-fashioned dessert I ran across in a small-town cafe in Louisiana several years ago....Food is a convenient way for ordinary people to experience extraordinary pleasure, to live it up for a bit."