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.

Elite Business Class

Once in a while a human being has the unique opportunity to come upon something perfectly terrible, something that so epitomizes all that one does not desire, that there actually is pleasure in it. It’s like the experience of being perfectly burglarized. A messy burglar who tears the furnishings and trails dog shit into your house is no fun, but someone who discretely walks in, cracks the safe and steals every valuable thing you own is providing an existential service: the experience of total dispossession. Delta’s Business Elite Lounge at JFK provides one such experience. Yogurt covered pretzels (that old staple of an unstable diet), curried nuts (the gastrointestinal equivalent of the kinds of tornadoes that have devastated the South), chunks of Monterey Jack wrapped in plastic (requiring surgical extraction), packets of hummus (whose contents, in both consistency and taste, could be mistaken for toothpaste) and enticing-looking cookies (which recreate the childhood experience of mistakenly eating sand) are some of the delicacies that can be foraged in the lounge. Unfortunately, rationing is so stingy that hopeful-looking new arrivals quickly find themselves in a Darwinian struggle to survive from the minute the skeptical lounge attendant examines their “Elite” boarding passes. Lack of table space is one key aspect of the lounge’s design, enhanced by the fact that used glasses and indecorous little plastic plates are rarely tidied up, giving the lounge the aspect of an outer-borough dive bar at closing time. If he were alive, Luis Buñuel, who loved despoiled landscapes, might have used Delta’s Business Elite Lounge for one of his surrealistic masterpieces. If this is elite, one hesitates to imagine how Delta treats its plebian flyers—perhaps like the factory-farmed chickens, crowded into sunless pens, whose short, tortured existence is documented in the film Food, Inc.

Diasporic Dining XV: Dallas BBQ

People who eat at the Dallas BBQ chain of restaurants should be killed before they kill themselves and others. They are setting a bad example by making other people think they can live after eating large plates filled with incredibly greasy ribs and fries. People go to Dallas BBQ because of the large portions and cheap prices, refusing in effect to look a gift horse in the mouth and realize that beyond its tonsils is a gun pointed at them. Most of the patrons of Dallas BBQ are on exhibition to street traffic through a glass patio, which the architects of the restaurant undoubtedly created in order to showcase the merchandise, much like the prostitutes displayed in the windows of the red light districts of Amsterdam and Hamburg. Passing by Dallas BBQ is like going to the zoo, because the perception of the imbibing patrons with unearthly looks on their faces recalls the imperviousness of animals at feeding time. For anyone who has been addicted to drugs, Dallas BBQ will bring back memories of their favorite crack house or shooting gallery. Have none of the aficionados of Dallas BBQ ever heard of things like the Twinky defense, in which eating food with certain kinds of ingredients causes temporary insanity? Have none of Dallas BBQ’s followers ever heard of a film called Food, Inc., in which the massive production of chickens, which feeds chains like Dallas BBQ, is as cruel to the animals as it is to the intestinal tracks of those who digest them? The people who eat at Dallas BBQ look dumbfounded, like deer in headlights. Is that the way you want to feel after a meal?