What is Middle-Class Elitism? And What’s Wrong With It?

The Guardian is a great* newspaper but also an uncommonly infuriating rag. Take, for instance, this paragraph in what was an otherwise unobjectionable article about Elizabeth David:

Now I should be quite clear from the outset that I’ve always been a little ambivalent about David. She famously moved food writing out of the dark didactic corners of domestic science and began to write beautifully and poetically about food as a sensual experience, but she also in her early career wrote unashamedly for the posh and focused attention away from British cuisine and on to Mediterranean food. I find it hard to read her work without enjoyment but it also defines a kind of “holidays-in-Provence” middle-class elitism.

Right on! Middle-class elitism is itself a curious concept – paradoxical at best, downright nonsensical at worst. And, of course, absurd when it is condemned in a newspaper read by the middle class. Then there’s the sillyness of the supposition that one should feel guilty about enjoying Mrs David’s writing as though this were, in its way, awfully infra dig.