I like the locally grown ($4) heirloom tomato as much as the next guy. My family, we drink organic milk ($7) by the gallon. Just last weekend, I dropped a ($28) biodynamic grass-fed rib-eye steak into my reusable market bag. These things are all delicious. But despite what I—and lots of people like me—want to believe, I'm not a better or more righteous person for having bought them

this might not go over so well. It might seem a bit misguided to some and self-righteous to others, not to mention irritatingly navel-gazing, and also kind of Communist. (Note to the Ayn Rand freak who keeps sending me mocking e-mails: You might want to quit here and go outdoors and bad-mouth some poor people.) In any case, let me say right up front that the problem is me, not you. Or maybe it’s me and you, if you are one of the hundreds of people I see every week at the Greenmarket in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Or if you frequently find yourself bellied up to the salad bar at Whole Foods. Or if you’re not the type of person who reexively does a giant yugga-da-yugga-da-yug when told that the grass-fed steak you’re about to buy is $28 per pound. Maybe instead—like me—you plaster on a dopey smile and lay down the money for that steak, then put it in your reusable satchel, along with your heirloom tomatoes and your locally grown baby beets and your various leafy greens. Maybe you stop to return your empty bottles and pick up two more gallons of organic milk, and then you hang around for a while with the rest of the Greenmarket crowd, listening to bluegrass and trading recipes for fig tarts. And maybe you feel good about yourself. Why shouldn’t you? It’s a beautiful fall Saturday; the leaves and the produce and the very air around you seem to exist courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic; and here you are among like-minded souls, each and every one of you doing your part to oppose the sinister corporatization of the world’s food chain. Bite me, Archer Daniels Midland, it’s pattypan-squash season!

And yet, something feels off. There’s an uncomfortable self-awareness creeping in, a nagging bell going off inside me as I gaze around at the Greenmarket crowd and think, Huh, look at that, we’re mostly white and mostly rich. We have a lot of money to spend on Jerusalem artichokes. And while this is great news for us and good news, too, for the farmers supplying this stuff, isn’t it a little weird that we tell ourselves that buying expensive food qualifies as a meaningful social act, that we’re creating a better world through shopping?

I know, right? Save it for the coffeehouse poetry slam, César Chávez. This is a money column. Give me some advice on how to allocate my 401(k). All I’m trying to point out, though, is that there’s a growing class chasm everywhere you look these days, and it’s especially stark when you think about something as basic as food. And all those purple potatoes people like me buy at $10 a pound—in addition to putting a little money in a farmer’s pocket (which is an undeniably good thing), they also represent consumerism at its most rarefied. And while we buy this food for excellent reasons—because it tastes better than what we’d find in a supermarket; because the range of choices is infinitely greater than it is in the produce section at Safeway; because the experience of going to the Greenmarket and milling around with your neighbors and chatting up the misanthropic beef guy or the lesbian cheesemakers is a much more pleasant experience than being shuttled through a human maze where every turn leads to corn syrup—it also seems, at least for me, that one of the biggest reasons I’m willing to pay ludicrous prices for this food is that it confirms my sense of myself as a do-gooder.

So why do I feel like what I really am is less a do-gooder than a charter member of the virtue-buying class? I suppose part of it is because people tend to define themselves through their purchases, and in grim economic times, as flagrant consumption becomes morally suspect (seriously, when you see some guy in a massive SUV now it’s like looking into the eyes of a serial killer, is it not?), we invest certain purchases with exaggerated moral value. I’m not just some lucky duck who can afford to choose between all these delicious foods, I’m part of a movement! I’m a locavore! I’m helping farmers and I’m reducing carbon emissions and I’m ensuring that my kids will never be touched by pesticides! Except I’ve also grown elitist and judgmental, and/or occasionally ashamed, when it comes to regular supermarket food (I’ve actually apologized to someone for feeding his kid Dannon yogurt), and for my monthly tab at the Greenmarket, I could lease a BMW. I imagine there’s a better way to use my money.

as in all areas of life, though, guilt isn’t really the most useful emotion. I recently called the writer and activist Raj Patel, who this spring published a great, lively, challenging book called Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He’s the kind of guy you’d expect to have some harsh things to say about, as he put it, “the paid-up members of the chattering class,” though he was anything but a left-wing puritan scold. “Americans have a way of thinking that shopping can change the world,” he said, “as if when we feel guilty it’s all a matter of going to Whole Foods and buying the right labels.”

“Um, yeah. That’s me.”

“But we should stop feeling guilty and instead feel angry,” he went on. “We need to do more than merely shop. Because good food is a right that everyone should enjoy. Our snobbery makes us think that low-income people can’t possibly enjoy food the way we do, as if their taste buds have been ruined by McDonald’s. But that’s pure elitism. Pleasure should be the birthright of everyone, not just limited to the bourgeois circle jerk over heirloom tomatoes. The radical moment is when you take this idea and do something about it.” The bourgeois circle jerk. That left a mark. And yet, much as I’d like to be a part of something more than that, I know enough about myself to realize that I’m about as likely to become radicalized around food as I am to start weaving my own hemp underpants.

Shortly after I spoke with Patel, I e-mailed Michael Pollan, guru of the local-food movement (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, etc.), to try to get a sense of whether he, too, was irked by the fetishization and misplaced sense of righteousness that’s taken over the organic crowd. “Sure, there’s some self-satisfaction,” he wrote back. “But in some small way, these people are doing good, and if their self-satisfaction is annoying, that seems like a small price to pay.” When I asked him if he had any suggestions for what to do to take the edge off the class guilt, he said, “Buying at a farmers’ market is a little like a gateway drug to more hard-core actions. There’s a lot of information exchanged when city people meet farmers and learn about their challenges (ridiculous regulations, land prices, etc.). There is in other words a subtle process of politicization going on, amid all the self-congratulation and warm feelings.”

Patel, too, had mentioned the “low-hanging fruits” of activism—signing the petitions to help farm workers that are always circulating around Greenmarkets; making the five-minute call to local reps to say that you’re interested in everyone eating well, not just those who can afford to, and asking what they’re doing about it; giving a little time or money toward community gardens that produce food for people in low-income areas. “But it’s also important,” he added, “to recognize that the good feelings you get from eating these foods are just that, good, and not to deny that. So much of the way we eat is joyless, but joy is what sustains us—joy is a serious business. That’s what this movement is about.”

All right, then, bring on the Humboldt Fog cheese! I’m ready to spread some joy! I’m also going to keep in mind, though, that buying biodynamic greens doesn’t automatically place me in the EZ-Pass lane to heaven. And I’m not actually better than my fellow man because I know my pluots from my plumcots. And if I can afford to feed myself and my family this well, then I can afford to give a little something to help someone whose luck isn’t as good as mine, but whose taste certainly is.

Thus ends the sermon. My apologies for the righteousness and the lefty flimflam. For what it’s worth, the column on how to allocate your 401(k) will indeed be coming soon, probably right after the one in which I urge you to join hands in front of the Fed and not leave until Ben Bernanke agrees to make hugs our official currency.

joel lovell is GQ’s story editor/correspondent.