Yesterday I was writing out our potato salad recipe for a national culinary magazine. It was kind of comical.

This is like, the most traditional dish in America. The recipe calls for boiled potatoes, mayonnaise, relish, mustard, parsley, and vinegar. But I couldn’t hide the fact that this recipe, while totally functional, doesn’t capture the kind of food that we find interesting to make or eat.

A better recipe for potato salad operates in many more dimensions than the final mixing. In the deeper potato salad, “mayonnaise” means making mayonnaise by hand with great eggs you buy from farmers that raise pastured chickens. “Relish” starts with cucumbers and a well-loved pickling solution. Mustard is a time-consuming process. Even the potatoes, which at first can seem like a commodity, are a lot different when they come from an independent farmer like Weiser Farms.

I’m sure that this kind of potato salad, where every ingredient is made by hand from scratch, is the ancestor of the potato salad we buy in plastic cartons at the supermarket. I also know that “real” potato salad, done right, is livelier, more fulfilling and more delicious than something composed from factory ingredients.

Of course, it also takes a hell of a lot more time. And clearly, potato salad made by our neighbors who grew the ingredients and then made everything from scratch is going to be a lot more expensive than potato salad made in the industrial supply chain. Even though dollars spent on your neighbor’s labor stay in the community, at some point you have to determine the upper limit you’re willing to spend on potato salad.

I do prefer my neighbors’ potato salad, the one they grew and made from scratch. I think it’s a better value than the cheaper stuff, even at five times or ten times the price. I’m also comfortable that it’s not “elitist” to value the work of my neighbors more than the work of industrial corporations. Particularly when my neighbors do a better job — their food is better, and when I slow down and pay attention to my palate, I can’t miss the difference.

That belief is probably in the minority, though. Reading people’s food experiences online and in the media, one sees that even in the community of foodies and professional critics, many folks focus solely on surface-level flavors, and are not attuned to the unique vibrancy of food hand made from fresh ingredients. And if the people most interested in food aren’t pursuing that dimension of eating, I’d think the population at large is even less interested in paying a premium for it. Understandably so: if my experience of “mayonnaise” is basically “fat plus salt”, then I won’t find the hand made stuff any better than the factory product, and certainly not worth any more.

On the other hand, I’ve lived in the same San Diego neighborhood for over 10 years, and the opportunity in this area to eat real, live food is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago. I’m surely grateful for that, and hopeful that the trend continues. It matters to me, even in potato salad.