After a long weekend of mediocre revelry and occasional insanity, a friend and I sat down outside the Hop on a fine rainy Sunday morning. I was satisfied with my French bread pepperoni pizza, although the pepperoni may have been ersatz, and the French bread was not French at all (perhaps it hailed from Luxembourg). Nevertheless, I anticipated a thoroughly enjoyable meal.
My friend, a tanned, virile type who comes from one of those tropical states -- Florida or Louisiana, I forget which -- had earlier visited the Bagel Basement for his late morning cuisine. Before him sat a fairly normal looking bagel, and next to it on either side were two plastic containers of alternately pink and blue ... goop. I'm sorry, but that's the only word that properly describes this viscous, mirky fare.
"What'cha got there?" I asked, putting on my most nonchalant airs, despite my burgeoning fear of whatever post-nuclear chemical concoction with which he was planning to smother his innocent bagel.
He pointed a crooked finger to his left. "That's lox cream cheese flavored with chili sauce." The drooping digit then manuevered itself toward the right. "That's peanut butter marinara salsa flavored with honey mustard sauce."
By the way, anyone out there who doesn't find those descriptions completely disgusting, stop reading now. We don't want your business.
I nearly gagged. I swear, the whole idea was repugnant. However, something that may have been, oh, I don't know, common sense, gripped me fervently. I looked down at my French bread pizza, its yolk-like yellow cheese slowly oozing oil.
"This food is gross," I said, spitting out the words like gristle.
"Yeah, dude," my friend replied. "The funny thing is, though, it all tastes pretty much the same."
It was true, it is true, it's the scary ultimate truth of today's food. Anybody been to EBA's lately? Noticed the subtle gustatory distinctions between the quesadillas and the tuscany bread? Or the tuscany bread and the breadsticks? Or the breadsticks, and, say, the pizza crust?
I didn't think so. That's because all EBA's food comes from a giant churning vat hidden in the steam tunnel or at least it often tastes that way.
It's the trend with all fast food these days -- make the food somewhat meaty, somewhat doughy and put some absurdly generic salsa-esque, mayonnaise-like sauce on the side. What is the difference between the Taco Bell stuffed taco and the Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza?
Well, the price is different, but that's not the point, you Keynesian fiends. The point is that the myriad of food selections once present in the great, bloated, capitalist's wet dream that is the United States of America is fast dissolving, or rather, coalescing into a single food product that tastes something like a cow, something like a chicken, something like a pig, wrapped up in something a little like bread but really it's like none of these things because it's made by somebody named Victor or Zelda in a lab on the still-radioactive outskirts of Los Alamos!
I exaggerate, people, but only out of love. One day not too far in the future we'll find ourselves eating a product called FOOD. All restaurants will sell FOOD, and it will evoke beef and burger and fried chicken fingers, and it will be so artificial and so nightmarishly unhealthy that our artieries will clog like Elvis' toilet before we're thirty years old.
Every meal we'll sit down to a hearty helping of FOOD, with maybe a side of DRINK and some SAUCE to dip it into. Ever see "Repo Man"? That's the sort of society I'm envisioning here, and quite frankly, I don't want to end up looking like Emilio Estevez and neither do you!
It's not too late. There are still vegetables out there, somewhere, even though it's mostly fried mushrooms these days. You can still find fruit if you go really far south. And then there's good ol' water, clear and plain as eighty years of healthy, drab living.
So on that fine Sunday morning, people, I'll tell you what I did: I threw away my French bread pizza and I bought myself a V-8. And it tasted like antelope urine. But that's not the point! Sure, garbage food tastes good, but it's gonna be the death of us.
I, for one, do not intend to let that happen.
