Last week in the NYT, the cookbook writer Joan Nathan channelled William Morris, the early English socialist and founder of the arts and crafts movement, as she exalted eating fresh and local in the winter on Martha’s Vineyard.

Nathan spends a couple of days with a local caterer… “Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or two as she gathers ingredients is a lesson in how to eat locally even in the coldest days of winter. Because she seems to know everybody on the island who raises, catches or forages for food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative economy of eating, one in which modern capitalism takes a back seat to a looser, island-grown style of bartering.” Italics mine.

Gosh how easy it is to be romantic on Martha’s Vineyard, the playground of the superrich. The median price of a house on the island is $700,000 even allowing for the recent decline in real estate. The base population of MV is 15,000 which balloons to 75,000 for a couple of months in the summer. Rich pickings for those who serve the rich and famous as I know because I once lived in a similar summer community on the Connecticut shore. The server network is like the staff on an old feudal estate: the members are buddies and help each other out and some like Buhrman have their own organic patch with not only veg but animals as well.

Thing is that most of us chickens need the despised modern capitalism to survive and if Nathan and Buhrman thought about it, they would recognize that their fantasy of profitless food does too.