I recently spent time at the Charleston Wine and Food Festival. I’m by no means a food festival veteran or expert, but what I saw and tasted was simply magical. I might even be willing to give up baseball trips in order to park myself in Marion Square for that fateful weekend each March.
As I roamed the tasting tents, visited pop-up shops and meals, and watched cooking demonstrations, I was overcome by one misused word in our culinary vocabulary:
VALUE
McDonald’s and many other fast food restaurants laud their “value menu”, so named due to the fact that most items won’t run you much more than a buck. Of course, what you get for your dollar is a dollar’s worth of food: highly processed, usually unhealthy resemblances of hamburgers, biscuits, and desserts.
Contrast that with the value I saw in Charleston. Sure, the tickets are a hefty fee, but worth every dollar. The same is true when you patronize your local eatery, helmed by creative chefs making names for themselves cooking up local ingredients, in season and raised sustainably. Your checkbook may be lighter than after a meal at Burger King; but there’s better value to be had at City House.
Don’t let fast food multinationals fool you into thinking there’s a lot of value in a sawbuck’s worth of calories. Bypass the order-by-number convenience and sit awhile. Order the chef’s specialty, try something new, and bask in the value you get from $40 well spent.
Value menus only offer discounts, not value. And when it comes to food, you always get what you pay for.
At Batch, we’ve never claimed that we’re a way to get a discount on local goods. Sure, each Batch we ship is worth what you pay (usually more). For us, this is a way to discover local goods (including five new cities that are part of our Tour of the South). We stand behind each item we ship, knowing full well that you’re getting the value you pay for each bag of granola, every candle, and all the pancake mix you’d like.
All of our purveyors work hard to put value into every grain, every jar, and every sip. Their story is intwined with the product you get in our batches. There is no story when someone hands you food in a greasy sack out of a window while your engine idles.
I left Charleston with a renewed sense of Batch’s commitment to value, no matter which city we find ourselves in. And I hope you value a subscription with us. We promise to always deliver a fair or exceeding value for what you pay in both the quantity and quality of goods you receive.
Who’s hungry?