Diasporic Dining: Fast Food Inc

Fast Food workers across the nation went on strike on Thursday (“Hundreds of Fast-Food Workers Striking for Higher Wages Are Arrested,” NYT, 9/4/14)  And if you walk into one of the chains--Burger King, McDonalds, KFC or Popeye’s, to name a few--you might see what the brouhaha is all about. Many of these outlets bear a strong resemblance to detention camps replete with a resident Sonderkommandant barking at inmates to speed up processing of the lines of potential corpses coming in for their daily feed. The fact that many fast food outlets are manned by minorities also creates the image of the plantation, since the wages paid by these outfits amount to the equivalent of slave labor. The movie Food, Inc. dramatized an infernal process that's camouflaged by the genius of modern packaging and design. There used to be a rumor that through the miracle of modern genetic engineering animal parts rather than animals were being farmed. The prospect of such genetic engineering may lie in the future. But in the meanwhile the conditions under which animals are raised for slaughter on an assembly line like cars, with the precepts of both economy of scale and division of labor removing any residue of human connection, leaves an ineradicable imprint on the process of modern consumption. The food, those serving it and those being fed all lie at the bottom of a modern food chain in which the natural world (and man’s organic relationship to nature) is increasingly excluded. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal--the title of the Eric Schlosser’s book, is more apt today than ever.

Paris Journal IX: The Air France Business Class Lounge at CDG

Air France Business Class Lounge at Charles De Gaulle

One of the hidden jewels of France is the business class lounge at Charles de Gaulle. The lounge has a delicious selection of cheeses, including an excellent brie, potage au legumes, abundant cornichons, roast veal and Lay’s Chips a Ancienne, all served buffet style. Save up your frequent flier points and travel to Paris (the business class at JFK is no slouch either and makes Delta’s new addition look lame) and stay in the lounge if you want a taste of la vielle France. Then come right home, aller et retour en Francais. The truth is that the food and just about everything in Paris sucks. If you want to eat a casserole composed of beans, sausage and a fatty duck leg (confit de canard), then give them cassoulet but the City of Light is a far cry from the days when Hemingway marched down the Champs Elysee with victorious Allied troups and repaired to The Ritz.  L’Arc de Triomphe, Le Place de la Concorde  and Le Jardin deTuileries are all on the skids and have been hurting for quite some time. Today the municipal market off St Germain is the equivalent of your average suburban mall, with the Gap and other chains proliferating and the venerable old pomme fritte or French fry is nowhere to be found (with the exception of American fast food joints like Burger King and McDonald’s). OK, everyone is always going on about Le Louvre, the Louvre, the Louvre. Yet even the Louvre has been turned into a shopping mall. It’s not worth the 45 minute ride in from the airport.

Diasporic Dining XIX: Bulimia for Idiots

The IHOP in Englewood Cliffs, NJ—the pancake special offering unlimited stacks for $4.99, assorted syrups including but not limited to maple, the rack of Smucker’s jellies, thick New England Clam chowder, the club sandwich sitting on a mountain of soggy fries—is a recipe for vomiting, a paradise for bulimics who don’t even have to bother putting their fingers down their throats. Add to this a discussion of Chuck Palahniuk’s "Guts," a gastrointestinal story if there ever was one, and you have the perfect setting for literary deconstruction, or, in medical terms, triage. In the intimacy occasioned by the overcrowded seating area, the text becomes the menu, in which the very ingredients that create our sense of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and profane, Levi-Strauss’s “raw and cooked,” come into question. Fast food restaurant chains like IHOP, Denny’s, and naturally Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s are much maligned because of the poisonous nature of the food. But few realize the value they serve as metaphoric Petrie dishes for the process of ingestion and regurgitation. The presuppositions of culture coalesce in a windswept parking lot, with the harsh but inviting white light and the cheerily uniformed servers with their mechanized first-person-plural responses. Here, like in the Large Hadron Collider, the initial conditions of longing for what anxious Americans call comfort food are recreated, one day at a time.