In February of 2023, as price inflation soared above six percent, and only a few months earlier hit a forty-year high, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal presented a solution for rising food prices: just skip breakfast!
Specifically, the WSJ writer, Gabriel Rubin, in an article titled “To Save Money, Maybe You should Skip Breakfast“ told readers that “Breakfast lovers might be better off just having a cup of coffee.”
The article prompted a backlash with write-up in the Guardian, for example, mocking the article’s blasé reaction to the very real problems of spiking food prices.
It wasn’t the first time out-of-touch journalists took to telling ordinary people to shut up and calm down about economic conditions. From 2023 through 2024, journalists and columnists developed an entire sub-genre of articles which gaslit readers about the state of the economy and repeatedly returned to the idea that workers shouldn’t complain and the economy has never been better. The hectoring, patronizing tone of these articles was unmistakable. For example, in late October 2024, just days before the election, CNN published an article with the headline “America won the war on inflation. You still think the economy stinks.” The message was clear: price inflation is not a problem, and you’re clueless if you think things aren’t great. Keep in mind that, at the time, the US had just emerged from a period of 24 months of falling real wages. But thinks were great, said the pundits. (The WSJ, true to form, also ran an article with the headline “The Economy Is Good. Why Don’t People Know It?“)
Now they’re at it again, except this time it’s to tell the plebs to “just deal with it” when it comes to import taxes (i.e., “tariffs”) that Americans will have to pay on foods sourced from places outside the United States.
For example, The Boston Globe this month featured an article titled “If you’re worried about food tariffs, adopt a frugal mind-set and cook smarter.” This article functions on about the same level of clueless old people telling first-time home buyers that they can afford that $800,000 starter home if they just “give up the morning Starbucks.”
To be fair, though, I doubt that the purpose of the article—given that it comes from The Boston Globe—is to make Trump look less bad. Rather, the article has the feel of a traditional leftwing harangue about how we ought to all “buy locally” and switch to a lower standard of living to save the planet. Ultimately, lower standards of living is what the Globe article is all about. This is fitting of course, since the purpose of protective tariffs is the raise prices, and this naturally lowers the standard of living in real terms.
So, the Globe author’s advice is basically a series of strategies on how to deal with fewer economically feasible options at the grocery store. Essentially, this employs a philosophy similar to that of Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” campaign which encouraged voters to plant home gardens in a misguided effort to lessen price inflation. The ultimate message was the same: do with less. After all, there is a reason most people don’t grow most of their food. Devoting time and energy to growing your own food means giving up a lot of other things you’d rather do. That’s fitting enough since, if Trump insists on this efforts to make Americans pay more for imports, Americans will indeed have to do with less.
This message could not be any better communicated by the image that editor’s chose to accompany the globe article. It’s a photo of a basket full of turnips. It’s quite fitting that an article about higher Trump taxes would feature turnips, an extremely easy-to-grow root vegetable grown by dirt-poor pre-industrial Europeans for many centuries. That was before international trade in agriculture essentially abolished famines in Europe. Turnips are a very fitting symbol for our new era in which we apparently have to pen articles about how to cope with higher taxes on food.
