Dear Katha,
Hmm … food appreciation in the schools. One problem with this is Schlosser’s assertion that school lunches are even more apt to be adulterated than fast food. Another is that American school cafeterias can’t seem to cook any food worth appreciating. (Not for nothing does my son love the Captain Underpants books, in which some grade school Cafeteria Ladies are among the chief villains.) Then again, I actually went to a public school in France for three months when I was 9, where they fed us amazing things like blanquette de veau. There was even a cheese course, if memory serves. Naturally, we (my American friend and I) hated our school lunches and went home and gorged on the last of the gallon jars of the peanut butter we had made her parents schlep across the Atlantic.
But I didn’t mean that the craving for familiarity is a constant, monochromatic human drive–only that almost all people have it some of the time. Food, like so much else in our lives (intimacy vs. autonomy, anxiety vs. boredom), is a dialectic. Sometimes you want to try Afghan food for the first time in your life; other times you want to eat Stouffers macaroni and cheese standing up at the sink in the ratty flannel shirt you got from your boyfriend way back in your sophomore year of college.
But your last dispatch did highlight one serious flaw in Schlosser’s argument about the “distinctively American” vices summarized by fast food. As you shrewdly point out, Americans have a wider range of food choices today than ever before. My town may not be full of great pizzerias or genuine, family-owned diners at which I can eat cheap hamburgers. But when I’m hungry, I can choose from Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Afghan, Moroccan, Indonesian, Salvadoran, Mexican, Texican, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Portuguese, Greek, miscellaneous Middle Eastern, and more–not to mention plain old French and Italian (Northern or other). And I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Now, D.C. may support a few more cuisines than most smaller cities in America can do–but not by as long a shot as before.
Your observation about how many more choices we have today doesn’t contradict my claims for the human love of the familiar nearly as much as it undermines Schlosser’s argument about the homogenization of our food culture. If McDonald’s has ground everything into grim sameness, how come I have food choices my parents hadn’t dreamed of at my age? Because it’s also a distinctively American fact that people come here from all over and settle in groups in edge cities and real cities and sprawling suburbs and every part of the country, and that they bring along change and interesting spices.
I was thinking this afternoon about the hamburgers and fries of my youth. We used to walk around the corner, my sisters and I, to a restaurant called the Esquire. (Think booths swathed in brown imitation-leather plastic and the name spelled out in gold script on the front windows.) It was run by a man who lived across the street from us, Nick Costa, and he made crinkle-cut fries better than any I’ve ever tasted; if you ordered them as take-out, for 25 cents, they came wrapped in tin foil in little red and white cardboard boats that I can see today with Proustian clarity. My children will never have an experience quite like mine at the Esquire–the intimacy of the way Mr. Costa dealt with his customers or the old-fashioned, almost courtly service that you found in even a fairly humble restaurant in those days. I was getting all ready to feel nostalgic and sad over the fact that, in place of this Edenic ideal, my children will have only memories of the sticky tables at Burger King and the infernal ball pit at the indoor playground at the McDonald’s near the zoo.
But then I remembered: Hey, they won’t have the Esquire, but they will have masses of great food I’d never even heard of before I was well past 20.
Well sure, Schlosser might respond: You and your fellow Bobos go to restaurants named after exotic fruit, but the masses get shunted into McDonald’s. There’s some truth to this. But I think it’s a cramped kind of truth. The hottest restaurant trend in the edge cities around Washington (and I don’t mean “hot” in the foodie, hard-to-get-a-reservation sense; I mean it in the bodies-through-the-door sense) is the rise of small, family-owned Central American joints that sell rotisserie chicken. The sweetness and disorder and restlessness of human appetite and human arrangements are every bit as powerful as the forces of mechanization and homogenization that Schlosser reviles. Or so I optimistically believe.
Anyway, McDonald’s already faces a horrible day of reckoning, which is the certainty that Americans will one day get hysterical over the possibility of mad cow disease and stop eating beef altogether. Schlosser’s book did at least convince me that it will be delicious to watch the food chains panic.
It’s been great fun talking food with you. Hope we can raise a French fry together in person some day.
Best,
Marjorie
