In Asheville, can you have your cake and eat it, too? The Magnetic Theatre’s Food and How to Eat It achieves a fabulously amusing mix between “Portlandia” and an afternoon educational special. It’s also relevant to this tasty, artsy mountain city whose employers don’t offer the bounty that its restaurants do. Foodie culture is heightened camp, and Food and How to Eat It plays this up from a variety of angles, including CSA boxes, expensive new concept restaurants fit for Instagram, and competitive tailgate market vendors. Look around town and you’ll find the supposedly gainfully employed designer who can only afford a CSA subscription because her parents bought it for her for Christmas. The one time that guy you follow on Instagram went to that concept restaurant and it was the one time he splurged at all last fall. And maybe your hard-working neighbor mentioned yesterday that artisanal goat cheese is just fabulous, but not a priority if on food stamps. From the top of the show, Food’s audience is reminded that Asheville has both a splendid food scene and a lot of artists. Denizens of Asheville tend to eat well despite the primarily tourist economy, but tourists nearly always eat better, because all this organic eating doesn’t come from one’s budget organically. No, it requires lots of creative budgeting to partake in Asheville unless you don’t live here. Even jobs that would pay well in other cities simply don’t offer marketable salaries because employers don’t have to be competitive with one another here. Restaurants, however, do have to be competitive here, often on a national level. In the culinary world, Asheville has become a delightful weekend trip and tourists can afford to stay in nice hotels or swanky weekend rentals and B&Bs, and eat, drink, and be entertained superbly, likely better than at home where they actually have health insurance through an employer and can build up a savings account. Nearly all the artists, actors, dancers, writers, vaudevillians, singers, and nondescript creatives you see on the streets of Asheville have regular jobs, too. And they’re not typically paid at the level you’d expect from the outside. But don’t be misled: This sketch show isn’t a soapbox. The strong ensemble—Scott Fisher, Katie Langwell, Valerie Meiss, and Glenn Reed—magically makes apple boxes into all kinds of stage settings seamlessly. The four actors share writing credits with director Steven Samuels and associate producer Lisa Yoffee. Yoffee and Meiss collaborated on the clever props. Katy Hudson’s sound design is effectively unobtrusive and Mary Zogzas’ sound design is deceivingly complex and well rendered by Zogzas herself, who doubles as board op. Kristi DeVille’s charming choreography pops up throughout the evening. Everybody has an entertaining bio. Food and How to Eat It plays Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. through July 18 at The Magnetic Theatre’s dedicated black box space on 375 Depot Street. Tickets are $18 in advance online—less than the cost of a cheese plate at several establishments, certainly.