Review: The Menu

What the hell was that? Seriously: WTF? Is it avant garde or just somebody’s fever dream of combination revenge/suicide porn? Can’t say what the motivation was behind it, but there was no real story to tell other than a step-by-step ratcheting up of colorful absurdity leading to a final conflagration. I mentioned in my review of The Glass Onion an emerging trend toward depicting the wealthy as pathetic figures rather than aspirational ones. “Soak the rich” is transforming into something far more ugly (wait for it: heads on spikes soon enough). That seems to be the whole point of this otherwise pointless exercise of a film. Spoilers ahead.

The film trots out its cast of tired character archetypes: the sybarite and his last-minute date (a philistine), the haughty and dismissive food critic and her snobby companion, the politician and his wife who tolerates his infidelities, the trio of gauche, misbehaved tech bros, and the washed up movie star/producer and his coattail-riding personal assistant. Collectively, they are yet another set of Shitheads (to reuse the indelicate term from The Glass Onion), each willing to shell out $1,200 to experience a specially curated menu by the master chef while inexplicably being held hostage on yet another private island. (Seems the private island in the post-Epstein era has entered the public mind as the forbidden delight of the jet set.) But it gets worse, obviously. The chef and his minions apparently have come to abjection and remorse over their enabling of multiple groups of Shitheads over the course of time (multiple menus for years?) and have at last concocted a menu culminating in murder/suicide of all present at the dinner. That’s the story worth telling?

Each of the dinner courses is preceded by a creepy monologue by the chef to provide a narrative behind each item of haute cuisine. As absurdity gains momentum, the monologues turn to moralizing and accusation with the dinner party eventually recognizing that the chef is a maniac and the private island is an inescapable trap. Each Shithead has his or her moment before the mirror and is forced to recognize his or her awfulness, stripping away façades to reveal wildly distorted characters. Like I said: revenge porn. The sole exception is the philistine, who weirdly outwits the chef by sending back her dinner as unsatisfactory, ordering instead a cheeseburger and fries, and taking them to go. The chef’s strict personal integrity demands he comply, apparently, which contrasts with his otherwise ironclad control over the kitchen and dinner party. However, I had already checked out of the film. Its internal logic no longer mattered, which is why I wasn’t bothered when the rest of the guests wanly accepted their fates with essentially no self-preservation instinct. Sure, whatever.

Offered Without Comment 20

From the May 2022 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hari Kunzru’s “Easy Chair” column:

These days, I rarely have to delay the gratification of my cultural desires. I expect them to be met, if not instantly, then with all reasonable speed. I am grumpy to find that some obscure documentary is only available on a streaming service I don’t subscribe to yet. If I want to know the source of a lyric or a line of poetry, I type the words and am annoyed if the answer doesn’t appear right away. My hungry young self would consider me incredibly spoiled.

In most ways I prefer this to how things were, but with the enormous gain in access, something has been lost. Scarcity produced a particularly intense relationship with culture, and gave deep significance to subcultural signals. When you found something you loved, something that had taken time and work to unearth, you clung to it. Often you felt as if it was your secret, your talisman. If you met someone else who liked it, it was both exciting and threatening.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 03

I continue against my better judgment listening in fits and starts to Jordan Peterson on YouTube. No doubt he’s prolific, influential, interesting, infuriating, and by all accounts, earnest. I often come away frustrated, recognizing how I’ve been fed an extended line of BS in some sort of confidence game run by an overconfident intellectual bully. Because he’s the host inviting others onto his own platform, at least of late, everyone is very polite and disagreement — if it occurs — is quite tame, which allows Peterson to elide corrections smoothly. (Live conversation runs that way: piling on top of what was already said displaces and obscures ideas because memory is limited and the most recent utterance typically assumes primacy.) I avoid some topics on Peterson’s webcasts because they’re simply too far outside his expertise to be worthwhile, which he openly admits then stomps right in anyway. For example, Peterson has a series with the caption “Climategate” (putting the conclusion before the discussion, or is that biasing his audience?). Episode 329 (which I do not embed) is titled “The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong.” His guest is Dr. Judith Curry. I should have avoided this one, too. In the course of the 1.5-hour episode, Peterson repeatedly offers a characterization of some aspect of the climate emergency, to which Dr. Curry responds “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way.” Better characterizations may follow, but that’s neither the tone nor the takeaway.

One of Peterson’s contentions is that, if indeed humans inhabit and treat the surface of the planet problematically, the best way to address the problem is to raise out of poverty those billions of people still struggling to survive. Then they, too, will be ontologically secure and positioned to start caring more about the environment. Sure, just like all those secure, multimillionaire CEOs care while running corporations that extract resources and pollute. (Incidentally, someone in a recent DarkHorse Podcast Q&A asked if Peterson’s hypothetical solution makes any sense. Disappointingly, and perhaps because DarkHorse hosts are chummy with Peterson, they said it depends on how the solution is implemented, which I take to mean that the stars must align and everyone start rowing in unison. Yeah, right.) Peterson follows up his climate solution with the indignant question “Who are we to deny those struggling to raise themselves out of poverty their chance?” Which brings me round to the title of this multipart blog.

Survival is by no means an idle notion but poses a struggle everywhere, even in the affluent West. Just ask the burgeoning homeless population or those laboring frantically to keep mortgages or rent paid so they don’t also become homeless (unhoused is the new euphemism, fooling exactly no one). Even a casual look history reveals that competition among peoples and nations to survive and prosper has wildly uneven and shifting results. Some “succeed” earlier than others or not at all and winners may in time lose their preeminence. Never has there been an all-men-are-brothers approach to competition, though temporary alliances may form. Someone (us, not them) or something (profit, not unspoilt nature) is inevitably privileged. In this context, Peterson’s “Who are we to …?” question is a non sequitur, though it may pull on heartstrings because of quite recent embrace of the idea of equity. A glib answer might be that “we are we, not them,” so of course “we” get available spoils before anyone else. Doesn’t the leader of a pack of wolves eat first? Isn’t that dynamic repeated throughout nature? Aren’t humans embedded in nature just like all other species? Don’t we privilege human life above, say, food animals we farm for sustenance? (We eat them, they rarely eat us until we die and microbes — but nothing else — consume us. Or we give ourselves up to flames, denying even the microbes. We’re selfish that way.) It’s also why the rare individual who gives away all his or her money to charity and winds up penniless is regarded as mental. For nearly all of us, it’s always me (or my progeny) first. Another way to put this that Peterson should understand is that hierarchies exist in nature. Hierarchy and privilege are impossible to disentangle, and attempts to redistribute equitably borne out of ideology tend to devolve into tyranny.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I heard another webcast where the interviewer (Nate Hagens I believe) asked his guest what do you value (i.e., privilege) above all other things? (The word all invites an unbalanced reply.) The extended answer rather took me aback. The guest values life in all its profundity yet declined to privilege human life. In the context of the webcast, which was about the climate emergency and anticipated human die-off and/or extinction, that answer sorta made sense. Should humans survive, even if we eventually sacrifice everything else (our current operational strategy)? Or do we leave the Earth to hardier competitors such as cockroaches and rats? Most people (humans) would unhesitatingly choose us over them as, well, um, always. It’s a strange hypothetical to ponder. Taken to its extreme, if one doesn’t privilege one life form over another, then what’s the problem with criminals, scavengers, and parasites winning the battle for survival? Or more colorfully, why not give zombies and vampires their bite at the apple? They may be undead but their basic strategy for propagation is undoubtedly a winning one.

Review: Glass Onion

A few years ago, Knives Out (2019) unexpectedly solidified the revival of the whodunit and introduced its modern-day master sleuth: Benoit Blanc. The primary appeal of the whodunit has always been smartly constructed plots that unfold slowly and culminate in a final reveal or unmasking that invites readers to reread in search of missed clues. The two early masters of this category of genre fiction were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both succeeding in making their fictional detectives iconic. Others followed their examples, though the genre arguably shifted onto (into?) the TV with shows such as Perry Mason, Columbo, and Murder She Wrote. No surprise, Hollywood transformed what might have been a one-and-done story into the beginnings of a franchise, following up Knives Out with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (subtitle displayed unnecessarily to ensure audiences make the connection — wouldn’t a better subtitle be A Benoit Blanc Mystery?). Both movies are entertaining enough to justify munching some popcorn in the dark but neither observes the conventions of the genre — novel, TV, or film — any too closely. Spoilers ahead.

I harbor a sneaking suspicion that Benoit Blanc is actually a bumbling fool the way poor, rumpled Columbo only pretended to be. Although I can’t blame Daniel Craig for taking roles that allow him to portray someone other than James Bond, Craig is badly miscast and adopts a silly Southern accent others complain sounds laughably close to Foghorn Leghorn. (Craig was similarly miscast in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but that’s an entirely different, unwritten review.) So long as Blanc is a nitwit, I suppose the jokey accent provides some weak characterization and enjoyment. Problem is, because the film is only superficially a whodunit, there is no apparent crime to solve after Blanc figures out the staged murder mystery (sorta like an escape room) just after the vacation weekend gets started but before the faux murder even occurs. Kinda ruins the momentum. As a result, the film digresses to a lengthy flashback to establish the real crime that Blanc is there to solve. Maybe good mystery novels have partial reveals in the middle, reframing the entire mystery. I dunno but rather doubt it.

The plot is by no means tightly knit or clever as a whodunit normally demands. Rather, it employs lazy, pedestrian devices that irritate as much as entertain. Such as one of the characters (the real murdered character) having an identical twin who substitutes herself for the dead one; such as trapping attendees on a remote island without servants or transportation but largely ignoring their suggested captivity; such as uncovering an orgy of evidence better suited to misdirection and framing of an innocent; such as mixing faux violence with real violence, though none of the characters appears even modestly afraid at any point; such as bullets being fortuitously stopped by items in a breast pocket; such as sleuthing and detecting — done by the twin, not Blanc! — being presented in a montage of coinkidinks that demonstrate more luck than skill. I could go on. The worst cinematic trick is reprising scenes in flashback but altered to insert clues viewers would have noticed initially. Those aren’t reveals; they’re revisions. Moreover, instead of inviting viewers to rewatch, this gimmick jams supposedly unnoticed clues down their throats. How insulting. If Benoit Blanc is really an overconfident, dandified nincompoop, I suppose it’s better and more convenient (for bad storytelling) to be lucky than good. He doesn’t solve anything; he’s just there to monologue incessantly.

The weekend party is hosted by a character patterned after … oh never mind, you know who. I decline to provide the name of that real-life narcissist. Members of the entourage are mostly sycophants, originally good friends but later ruined in different ways by proximity to a hyper-successful fraud. As a group, they’re known as The Shitheads, which just about sums it up. Critics have observed a shift in entertainment toward depicting super-wealthy pretty people as heels of the highest order. Not sure what makes that entertaining exactly. I enjoy no Schadenfreude witnessing the high and mighty brought low, much as they may deserve it. It’s just another lazy cliché (like its inverse: the dignity of the downtrodden everyman a/k/a the noble savage) trotted out in the absence of better ideas.

Catastrophism and the Ancient World (redux)

Didn’t expect to come back to this one. Five years after having blogged on this topic, I was delighted to see Graham Hancock get full Netflix documentary treatment under the title Ancient Apocalypse. No doubt streaming video is shaped in both tone and content to fit modern audiences, not modern readers. We are no longer people of the book but instead people of the screen. (An even earlier mode, displaced by the onset in the Gutenberg Era, was the oral tradition, but that was a different blog.) As a result, the eight episodes come across as tabloid-style potboilers, which regrettably undermines Hancock’s authority. Having read two of Hancock’s books exploring the subject, I was already familiar with many of the ancient sites discussed and depicted, though some reports are updated from his books. The main thesis is that archeological structures and cultural origin stories all around the world point to a major human civilization now lost but being gradually rediscovered. The phase of destruction is unaccountably saved until episode eight, namely, a roughly twelve-hundred-year period known as the Younger Dryas marked by repeated, severe climatic events, most notably the Great Flood that raised sea level by more than 400 ft. Suspected causes of these events range from the breaking of ice dams and subsequent breakup of the continental ice sheets to multiple meteor impacts to a coronal mass ejection. Could be more than one.

Several YouTube reviews have already weighed in on strengths and weaknesses of the documentary. Learning that others have been completely absorbed by Hancock’s books is a little like discovering a lost sibling. Intellectual brethren focused on decidedly arcane subject matter is quite different from mass market fandom (or as I once heard someone joke, “You like pizza? I like pizza! BFF!”). Of course, beyond enthusiasts and aficionados are scofflaws, the latter of whom come under specific attack by Hancock for refusing to examine new evidence, instead adhering blindly to established, status quo, academic consensus. Although some would argue the principal takeaway Ancient Apocalypse is filling in gaps in the story of human development (a cosmology or better origin story), my assessment, perhaps a result of prior familiarity with Hancock’s work, is that officialdom as instantiated in various institutions is an abject and unremitting failure. The Catholic Church’s persecution of numerous proto-scientists as heretics during the Middle Ages, or similarly, what has recently become known derisively as “YouTube science” (where heterodox discussion is summarily demonetized in a pointless attempt to shut down dissent) should be concerning to anyone who supports the scientific method or wants to think for themselves. Whether refusals to even consider alternatives to cherished beliefs are a result of human frailty, power struggles, careerism, or sheer stupidity someone else can decide. Could be more than one.

A couple wild suggestions came up in the reviews I caught. For instance, lost knowledge of how to work stone into megaliths used to construct giant monuments is said to be related to either activating resonance in the stone or indeed a completely different form of energy from anything now known. A similar suggestion was made about how the World Trade Center and other nearby structures were demolished when 9/11 occurred. Specially, purported “directed free-energy technology” was deployed to weaken the molecular coherence of solid metal and concrete to collapse the buildings. (Video demonstrations of iron bars/beams being bent are available on YouTube.) For megaliths, the suggestion is that they are temporarily made into a softer, lighter (?) marshmallow-like substance to be positioned, reformed, and rehardened in situ. Indeed, material phase changes under extremes of pressure and temperature are both obvious and ubiquitous. However, to novices and the scientifically illiterate, this is the stuff of magic and alchemy or straight-up conspiracy (if one prefers). I’m largely agnostic when it comes to such assertions about megalithic structures but those theories are at least as tantalizing as evidence of existence of a lost civilization — especially when officialdom instructs everyone not to look there, or if one does anyway, not to believe one’s lying eyes.

As observed in my earlier blog on this subject, the possibility nay inevitability of destruction of our present civilization, whether from forces external or internal, would make putting aside petty squabbles and getting going on preparations (i.e., prepping for human survival) paramount. Good luck getting humanity all together on that project. Are there secret underground bunkers into which the financial and political elite can flee at the propitious moment, abandoning the masses to their fate? Again, conspiratorial types say yes, both now and in the ancient past. Good luck to any survivors, I guess, in the hellscape that awaits. I don’t want to be around after the first major catastrophe.

Eight Billion Day

According to some estimates, historical trends bring us to 8 Billion Day (human population) today (November 15, 2022), despite a slowing birthrate. Took only 11 years to add the next billion from 7 Billion Day and only 4 years to add the half billion from 7.5 Billion Day. That doesn’t look to me like deceleration; perhaps the last 3 years of Covid pandemic is the hinge of the trend reversal. Previous milestones are 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, and 6 billion in 1998. Projections are 9 billion in 2037 and 10 billion in 2058. Whereas past numbers are fixed, the future is IMO quite unlikely to produce those numbers on schedule if at all. Factors are many and unpredictable, such as the rise in excess deaths a/k/a all-cause mortality already being reported (but quietly lest panic ensue).

Various economists, demographers, and business leaders bemoan that many countries have already fallen below replacement rate, which poses a dramatic reduction in skilled, experienced labor as members of the Baby Boom retire and die off. Worse than that, however, is the recognition that in growth economies (now ubiquitous across the globe), the only way forward is to have a growing population, young people at the bottom supporting old people at the top. It’s a perfect Ponzi setup, replicated many times over in various institutions and destined to fail spectacularly as more women (in particular) are educated and opt out of motherhood entirely in favor of careers. Given that the Covid era has proven to be a baby bust, one can only wonder whether birth rates will spike as fears subside (which produced the Baby Boom after WWII) or population decline will be a permanent feature of society. I offer no predictions. Further, with myriad variables competing for primacy among doomers who forecast dire consequences of human behavior accumulated over several centuries , I admit being at a loss to know what to hope for. More people (and thus, more subsequent suffering) or fewer?

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

The Inversion Fallacy

A recent episode of the Dark Horse Podcast introduced what appeared initially to be a new bit of lingo: the Inversion Fallacy. I’ve discussed logical fallacies and hidden biases in the past, and this one bears directly my multipart blog series “Dissolving Reality” from 2015 where I put forward the Ironic and Post-Ironic mindsets. The Ironic is more nearly the reversal of meaning yet tracks with the Inversion Fallacy. Without getting too hung up on the pointless minutia of terminology (trying to distinguish between, say, reversal, inversion, transposition, contradiction, and opposition), inversion means to turn something upside-down or on its head. It’s also related to devil’s advocacy, topsy-turvy argumentation, and is not … is too! squabbles where a thing becomes its opposite. Several pundits and commentators have lost my readership because of frequent forays into disingenuous reverse argumentation. I simply lack patience.

As described on Dark Horse, the Inversion Fallacy occurs when a thing or idea is treated as equivalent to its inverse. One example now commonplace in Wokedom is to accuse someone of being racist and then insist denial is proof of racism. (Also heard this particular example called a Kafka Trap, also on Dark Horse). As math, the equation would be either x = 1/x or x = –x. Inversion is the former, reversal the latter. The x = –x formulation (the Ironic) suggests that an idea or thing automatically invokes (i.e., brings into being) its opposite, especially through the use of sarcasm. Here’s the old joke illustrating the point:

Professor of linguistics hold forth before a class of undergraduates, “In language as in mathematics, a double negative is a positive. But in no mathematics or language does a double positive equal a negative.”

To which a student replies dryly, “Yeah, right ….”

The modest advantage of the x = 1/x formulation is that when x = 0, the equation has no meaning because dividing by zero is … undefined. The obvious example is the oft-quoted (and misquoted) Vietnam War nonsense, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That’s dividing by zero in a nutshell.

The difference between the two formulations does not IMO prevent the fallacy from working. My suspicion is that multiple ways of observing, describing, and naming the fallacy exist. An attribute of the Post-Ironic is that the tension between thing and not thing is expanded to include a fluid spectrum of competing positions. Whether reversal or inversion, Ironic or Post-Ironic, the common element is the necessity to set aside obvious cognitive dissonance and enter a state of flux where meanings cannot be fixed. Just a few blog posts ago, I cited George Orwell’s famous formulation: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” Requires Orwellian Doublethink to accept those propositions.

Lingua Nova 03

Arranged from short to long.

A collective noun not in use but probably should be: a harassment of technologies. Needs no explanation.

From the Episcopal Church: the church key. A euphemism for a bottle opener for alcoholic beverages with bottle caps.

From various YouTube channels offering cinema reviews: memberberries. A cheap form of fan service, typically citing familiar nostalgic bit, lines, or characters to trigger a pleasing memory of previous TV shows and films. Generally used derogatorily.

Not new but new to me at least: ramekin. A small dish in which food can be baked and served. Reminded me of the far less commonplace hottle, which is a single-serving glass carafe for hot water, tea, or coffee. Here are representative pics:

From nowhere in particular: the poverty draft. An open secret (arguably, not really lingua nova) that recruitment into the U.S. military is aided substantially by the poverty of potential recruits. Thus, joining a branch of the armed services is not necessarily because of ideological agreement with its functions or an earnest desire to serve but instead — at the risk of life and limb — to get education and training not otherwise available or to expunge debt from more traditional educational institutions.

From Thomas Chatterton Williams (whom I might criticize for a number of reasons, but I’ll abjure): the Age of Theory. The modern age (pick a start date) has been called many things. I tend to call it the Age of Abundance since that quintessential characteristic is now decidedly on the wane. (Age of Oil and Fossil Fuel Era are essentially the same thing.) Age of Theory refers to PoMo reliance on theory and abstraction as a means of understanding and interpreting nearly everything. I’ve blogged quite a bit about living in our heads as distinguished from living in our bodies (i.e., being embodied). My book blogging through Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is most on point (see the McGilchrist tag).

From Peruvian writer and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa: the truth in the lies (translations vary — sometimes given as the truth of lies). Although Vargas Llosa is referencing fiction (writers writing about writing), the notion that a lie can reveal a more significant truth is at the heart of communications. Whether through advertising, public relations, entertainment, politicking, or propaganda, shaping opinion with use of subtle-to-obvious (mis-)framing or with straight-up lies and falsehoods is the contemporary information landscape, though many attempt to adhere rigorously to truth and reality. Separating malefactors from truth-tellers is the warrant and responsibility of any sovereign intellect — a formidable and ongoing task in an increasingly deranging public sphere.

Fast Food is Dead

/rant on

Despite its obvious satisfactions, fast food has always been a guilty pleasure for anyone with … taste. Redirecting the evolved culture of the table to standing in the parking lot, eating in one’s vehicle, or skulking off with the feedbag to eat in isolation (typically in the blue glare of the TV) always felt somehow illicit, like getting away with breaking some unspoken rule regarding how people ought to manage to get sustenance in a civilized fashion. What was lacking in quality and self-respect was typically made up in speed, price, and consistency. If one simply needed something to stuff in one’s face while on the road or in a hurry, familiar fast-food options were easy to settle upon rather than go out of one’s way and/or commit extra time to eating at a diner or mid-tier restaurant with actual waitstaff. Back in the day (get off my lawn …!), one could fill one’s hands (and belly) with a burger, fries, and drink for around $5 within a few minutes of ordering at the counter. The comfort food itself was predictable and gratified the senses, being suffused with all the ingredients now understood as irresistible hyperstimuli: salt, sugar, and fat. Exactly no one thought of fast food as quality, but boy did it satisfy immediate cravings.

Well, that era is over. Although still ubiquitous in a degraded landscape overun by franchises (franchise hell is what I call it), the fast-food option has stopped supplying food that is any of cheap, quick, or savory. I’m no aficionado of fast food, but I’ve certainly consumed my share. Over the decades, prices have increased substantially, quality has suffered, and worst of all, it’s no longer fast. The saving grace of fast food was getting it into my grubby paws quickly and chowing down eagerly, followed predictably by the sensation of it sitting uncomfortably in my gut as a giant, undigested mass. The last few times I’ve indulged, the wait at the counter has been 30+ min! I’ve never done it, but I suspect anyone ordering fast food through one of the food-delivery apps on their phone pays extra and waits for roughly an hour. The two obvious factors causing delays are (1) the implicit and wrongheaded (says me) demand to keep the drive-through lanes moving before serving those inside the restaurant (term loosely applied) and (2) the cost-saving reduction of staff to a skeleton crew functioning constantly in crisis mode. I recall how decades ago an entire school bus of “diners” could be unloaded into a fast-food joint and all be served relatively efficiently. That could never happen today with six or fewer people behind the counter trying vainly to take and fill orders. There are no fry cooks anymore flipping burgers, though fries are still dropped into the fryer on site.

Quality suffers, too, as the food, if it can even be called that anymore, is increasingly some chemical concoction of nonfood prepared elsewhere, flash frozen, and reheated on site. The resulting upset stomach, often nearly to the point of vomiting, relegates fast food to an option only for those with iron bellies — formerly an attribute of youth but now considerably less so because of the precipitous rise of autoimmune disorders and food intolerance/allergies. Dunno what’s to be done to restore the past glory days (?) of fast food, and I’m not in the business of solving this dilemma, if indeed either a dilemma or solutions exists. Reports indicate some large portion of the public gets most of their meals from fast-food restaurants, and some unaccountably get nearly all their meals that way. Profitability also seems not to suffer even as patrons suffer long waits and considerable gastrointestinal distress. If the death of fast food is another example of the race to the bottom (of what?), it shows no sign of having yet sunk to the floor.

/rant off