Crunchy Culture

The Drehers are funny; they like to laugh at themselves, and they will talk about their ideas and politics and religion (and yours) long into the night. Their older child, Matthew, buries his nose in automotive magazines; the younger one, Lucas, delightfully smears himself with macaroni and begs for sips of white wine. As the night wears on, both will be relocated to the living room for approved media intake (the original 1974 version of "Benji").

The Drehers are self-conscious and good-natured about living the "sacramental" life described in his book: Dreher writes in a breezy, slightly Southern style that is less dogmatic than a reader of political tracts might expect. He essentially lays out his family's entire domestic process, from their practice of natural family planning over birth control (Julie's expecting their third child in October), to what they eat, to Julie's decision not to work, to how they home-school their boys with help from a parents cooperative.

In the book he goes on at length about their religious beliefs, and what particular strains of conservative Catholicism appeal to their spiritual sensibility, and why. Theologically, they are a few clicks left of Opus Dei, but they are not fans of bland, mainstream parish Masses; nor are they interested in whatever remains of folksy Vatican II reforms and flying-saucer-shaped churches of the 1970s.

"We'll need bread," Julie announces, from the kitchen.

"Just bread?" Rod asks her. "Not water?"

"Just bread," she affirms, and off he goes to a Whole Foods several blocks away.

We find the Whole Foods blessedly empty, almost private, before the 5 o'clock rush. We walk the aisles and Dreher says that even this, the country's most successful crunchy-grocery chain, can unnerve him, makes him think too hard about the surface details of moral value. "There's still something holier-than-thou about this place," he says, passing the homeopathic aisle with its herbs and echinaceas and all-natural Tom's toothpaste. "When I'm sick, I want Sudafed. I'm a skeptic on all this stuff."

On food, however, he speaks with the zeal of a convert -- though he discourages putting gourmet ecstasies up there with religious experience. A good meal is nothing like the way the Virgin Mary acknowledged his 30 days of prayer to her, back when Dreher, raised Methodist, was in his twenties and looking for enlightenment after too much partying and drinking. The Virgin answered, in her way, and he later converted to Catholicism. Julie, raised Baptist, converted too, after the couple met.

Growing up in St. Francisville, La., a town of 1,700 people about an hour north of Baton Rouge, Dreher says he was a chubby, junk-food kid who got to watch as much television as he liked. Despite a world of hunting and fishing, he became (and remains) "an avid indoorsman." He turned his nose up at the vegetables that came out of his mother's garden. A buck-hunting episode with his father was successful, but fills him with existential dread in the retelling. He ached for his town to get its own McDonald's. (It eventually did; as crunchy as Dreher considers himself, he confesses still to an inappropriate but ongoing affair with the snack machine at his office.)

"My God, our moms were all told that it's better for you to open a can!" he says, retrieving a whole-grain Tuscan loaf from the bakery counter. "It would be overstating it to see them as victims, though. The fact is, if you're going to cook a lot at home, it takes time." Which is another benefit, he says, of Julie's decision not to work. In the middle of "Crunchy Cons," apparently with a laptop in bed so he can take notes, Dreher coaxes his wife into what is essentially a verbatim exposition of her take on the Mommy Wars. Short version: She opted out -- way out -- and left her job as a magazine editor and never looked back.

"My folks think we eat the weirdest stuff," Dreher says. "These are people who suck the fat out of the heads of crawfish, but still. . . . People have the strangest class associations on food. It's a difficult conversation to talk about the virtues of certain foods or certain kinds of housing. Pretty quick someone is saying you're an elitist, you're a snob."

He has seen something among the whole-grain muffins: