Bankruptcy (#3)
An excerpt from Daily Bread, a story of Spiritual Bankruptcy through the eyes of the food system
If you are just joining, note that this is an excerpt of a book-in-progress, titled Daily Bread, about the spiritual bankruptcy in America as seen through the lens of the food system. All passages are available for free in sequential order, though it is perfectly acceptable to read one without the other, should you wish.
While I may seem to preach against obtaining meals from outside the home, I do believe there are times and places for such gatherings, namely the family restaurant, which today is taking its last earthly breaths, as mine did not so long ago.
I’ve made my living from the restaurant industry for my entire adult life. What began as a simple mode of earning money became a drunken debauchery, until I chose to regain control in order that I may find meaning, a notion I then attempted to apply to the industry itself, with poor results. It was easy to see through the negativity of populist trends—anything related to supposed inclusivity, like fair wages, antidiscrimination policies (that were discriminatory) like hiring priority for women and non-whites (eye for and eye! the mob shouts violently in the street. But whose eye? I ask)—though it is virtually impossible to break through this scab on the skin to eradicate the disease at the core. These trends were merely symptoms of a great spiritual bankruptcy. The typical American agenda is to reduce anything to the sum of its parts, and treat them separately from the whole, as if life could be assembled by the click clack of a keyboard. Unfair labor practice is central to the commodification of food—you cannot fix one end without fixing the other, and no one was discussing the bottom (farmers, immigrant labor, the “third world”) while they were shouting for their own fair wages high at the top of the food chain. While a discussion on the meaning of “fair” in fair wages is certainly apropos, I will bypass it for now and merely say, I did pay fair wages, in fact I paid significantly higher than fair. However, there were but a few employees whose labor input matched my financial output—best to keep any antipathy there at bay. But it’s even better to begin at the beginning.
At the ripe age of eighteen, the restaurant industry appealed to me for its simplicity. One provides a menu, takes the orders, then fulfills them courteously, all within a relatively short time frame—lunch is during lunch time, and dinner is during dinner time, as is in normal society. An occupation such as this allotted me the time to read books and dream of something else. Nevertheless, something as simple as that occupation cannot be so if it isn’t simple all the way through, from the management to the cooks and dishwasher. The menu didn’t change during the years I was employed there, nor did its single purveyor, nor did the staff. The owner, a rather wealthy Washington D.C. metropolitan Jew, always wore the same embroidered black golf shirt as was required of his staff and was always polite. At that time, I hadn’t thought to consider any of this, being otherwise occupied with my own endeavors. I had no reason to question something that was working for me so well, until I realized it wasn’t. That place was always meant to be something I did before moving on to something else, and, while I hadn’t thought to wonder why the company didn’t change its single purveyor, I did wonder why the adult staff, those far older than I, didn’t leave it for something better. Afterall, though the owner appeared to be a nice man who may have paid fair wages—what did I know then of fair wages? —we sold pizza, fried food, sandwiches, and wilting salads… I couldn’t see why anyone, let alone an adult, would wish for such an occupation, but for the Hispanic line cooks with limited options due to their immigration status.
Then I began to consider the customers. It was obvious that the mothers brought their toddlers in because they were free to throw pizza onto the ground and draw on the walls with the wax crayons we provided. It became less obvious why adults would come there to eat without children. One couple comes to mind, a rather cultured duo who were always so gracious to us servers, tipping generously, which was curious being as we were a drab and apathetic bunch. They came every Tuesday, and, for all I know, still do. Of course, on Tuesdays we did offer two large pizzas for the price of one, but it seemed to me this was more an occasion for them than an act of economy. They always began their meal with sodas and a large cheese-fries. They were obese, but very learned with a professorial air, and seemingly just as comfortable suppering on thick slabs of foie gras washed down with Dom Perignon as they were with their pizza debauchery. I now believe we were simply their guilty pleasure. But, comparing the sophistication of those learned and cordial gluttons to our normal adult customers who were relatively cheap, rude, and entitled—the type who would send back a pizza because it didn’t “have as much cheese as last time,” then refuse it when it was remade because they “aren’t hungry anymore,”—I grew ever more conscious that the restaurant was a gathering place for those who dieted on food of the lowest common denominator. Further, while I had no notions of business, in time it began to occur to me that this idea of the lowest common denominator would be applied to goods as well. For, is it not easier to order everything one needs from one place? Would it not also be cheaper, as one’s purveyor could offer a better price to a customer procuring so many products simultaneously? I certainly did not possess an elevated palate at the time, therefor could say nothing of the quality of frozen chicken tenders, pizza sauce, or precooked spaghetti noodles—it was fine by me. However, because I had already seen the lowest common denominator parallel between our customers and the goods we purchased, it occurred to me that our purveyor would also be following such a constitution. Our purveyor’s business, exactly, was to mesh with ours: to provide the quantity items at the low price, which is an equation that can continue to be followed to the eventual source. And there were no issues with this between customer and purveyor—I imagined the wealthy Jewish restaurant owner posing for a picture with the purveyor, both smiling and shaking hands. Simpatico. Brothers. But I found issues with this, despite, still, having no refined palate. Because the palate, I knew then, was of no recourse—this was merely a series of lowest common denominator business transactions, which either began, or ended, with the lowest common denominator customer. It was a circle of mediocrity. Of course, the wealthy Jewish owner and the purveyor were ignorant to this, and I heard the owner remark on several occasions how good his food was. But it wasn’t his food. He made none of it. He paid people to put it together, like cheap furniture. And his people did so consistently. Consistency, for his business, was what defined quality: consistency of delivery, consistency of product, consistency of preparation.
This kind of consistency is impossible in nature—nature does not keep the Rich Jewish Pizza Man’s schedule. There are growing seasons. This businessman relies on the same product every day of the year, but it’s impossible for farmers near him to produce all the products he thinks he needs year-round. So, the purveyors of his purveyor are responsible for figuring out how to keep the products flowing. They traverse the globe, going into warmer and more moderate climates to buy up the raw products that will eventually turn into the Pizza Man’s food. But the crops from those farms will differ from the crops of a farm in a different agricultural zone. So, the company brings all the raw ingredients to a centralized location and does things to them in order to achieve consistency. Of course, those manufacturers also need to make their food taste good, because it doesn’t taste good, and for two basic reasons: (1) The farmers need to deliver huge amounts of crops, so they concentrate on maximizing yield, not flavor, by using seeds that have been genetically modified to achieve this by responding to several generous dousings of petrochemical fertilizers. Growing thousands of acres of a single crop year after year after year is unnatural. These fertilizers are used because the soil has been depleted of the nutrients necessary to sustain life, therefore can no longer support the required yield. (2) Consistency. Nutrients and nutrient levels of crops vary from farm to farm, especially from varying agricultural zones, like corn grown in Maryland compared to corn grown in Mexico. For the food derived from this corn to yield the same result, the manufacturer has a centralized facility that accepts all the raw ingredients and processes them together, measuring things like sugar content and acidity and adding precise amounts of various additives to ensure consistency in product year-round, and from year to year. This matters very much to the Pizza Man, because people come to him every single Tuesday of their lives and purchase the same thing from a menu that never changes, all prepared and delivered to them by a rather cheap, unskilled workforce that can complete their individual tasks because they are few and never change. The couple comes every Tuesday to the discount feeding trough for the same product—they look forward to it. If their cheese fries and pizza are different each week, they don’t know what to look forward to. It doesn’t matter, really, how good the food is—in terms of high calorie food, high calorie is the measure of quality—as long as they can fill their gullets. But if any inconsistencies become noticeable, it distracts the customer. They’ve come for the same cheese fries they had last week—they were gloriously caloric—but this week there’s a difference in taste. That won’t do—you do not want them to notice the food. In fact, you only want them to notice the feeling they get from the food—fullness. They tasted the fat, salt, and sugar with their first bites, taken years ago, and ate until utter satiation. From that point forward, they feast on memory alone, always chasing that first experience. Fat. Salt. Sugar. They’ve come for the abundance of the diabetic trinity—it is of the utmost importance that the Pizza Man does not change this unholy matrimony.
You may perceive the above being problematic to only the ones who partake in such unhealthful practices. Alas, no, for I have not yet hit on cost. Like for any addict, the frequency of return often becomes costly, so it’s best for the Pizza Man to keep prices as low as possible in order to shore up the occurrence. He can do this because his purveyor is able to support it, then his purveyor is able to support it, then his purveyor is able to support it, then… but, indeed, no: The United States Government is at the end of the line, financing fast food and the people who serve it, thus enabling the largest health crisis ever known to man. You see, Uncle Sam subsidizes the major crops of Big Agriculture—by the billions. For the Pizza Man, that means the corn and soy for feeding the cows that provide milk for his cheese—and the starches to keep the pre-shredded stuff from sticking together—and corn again for the high fructose syrup to sweeten his purchased dough and canned sauce and the holy grail: tomato ketchup; soy, again, to emulsify and preserve the cans of red sauce and provide viscosity to his salad dressings; and the wheat for his dough. The list of chemicals used in our food derived from subsidized corn and soy could truly go on for quite a while. I do not intend, nor would it be conducive to the portrayal of this problem, to continue to list the gross quantity of foodstuffs effected by poor and detrimental practices within a corporate farming industry supported by the United States government. There are thousands of books, documentaries, television programs, radio shows, and newspapers that detail this already. My aim, dear reader, is to postulate on a subject that posterity will certainly judge us by, not only for vanity’s sake—would you like your statue torn down and thrown into the harbor?—but for the sake of posterity itself. Would not both the slave driver and the generations he’s driven have gained something from a similar perspective? And didn’t they? We are quick to judge the past, but slow to judge ourselves. A reckoning is upon us, readers! So let us continue to reckon…
We don’t pay the true cost of what is for sale at the supermarket because it is artificially low. So low, that we devalue the food we’re buying—we don’t respect it, we waste it: to the horrific tune of forty percent across the land. It’s cheap enough to buy again, and again and again. And we do.
The subsidies paid by the United States are only to American farmers, not the farmers of the tons upon tons of imported corn, soy, and grain… and even with those subsidies the American farmers are poor, because the advantage goes to the large corporations that control them. But the true cost of our food is not paid for by our dollars, or the government’s dollars, but by the sweat and tears of generations of men and women, in our country, and others, and the land such practices is destroying. We’re stealing from them with every cheese fry we put into our mouths. Who would work twelve-hour days bent over with fingernails in the dirt and backs scorched in the open field by the relentless sun in exchange for poor health and scant pay? People desperate enough to do so. People who are clinging to their indigenous land, and cherished ways. People whose land and ways have been taken from them. People running from a kind of violence the privileged will never know, will never see, could never imagine.
Telling the story of the suffering of the ones you cannot see will not create in us a lasting change. This exact suffering has existed since the dawn of time and will continue. However, in previous times our needs were more apt to cause suffering in others than our wants, while today it is our desire for endless commodities that hurt both the people of the world and the world itself, far more than our needs.
It’s difficult not to see a perversity in current social movements fighting for justice when the people demanding it are no less guilty of injustice than the people and institutions they’re fighting against. Is justice for one different than justice for another? No. But to defend the history of mankind: scales of justice do not exist, as our collective and total guilt would cause a chronic imbalance. The advocates for justice do not wish to promote the very opposite of what they rally against, although they do with the purchase of the bag of genetically modified snacks procured from the convenient store during their march; by wearing clothing made of plastic fibers derived from petroleum and woven by sweatshop workers, while they march down the asphalt streets of nature displacement and environmental injustice… I do not mean to stifle their rallying cries—go forth ye noble crusaders! —though, above all, they should discern the immeasurable importance of understanding true cost and take whatever pains necessary to remediate them to retain purity of cause.
Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered America in pursuit of amassing enough wealth to fund his crusade to reestablish Christian sovereignty over the Muslim-conquered Holy Land, to fight the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. This is, perhaps, the most popular example of the above notion. You may see the actions of Columbus as the precursor to all American immorality, which they may have been. But, dear reader, you may be missing the full truth. Traversing the oceans in the year 1492 on a tiny wooden boat while facing a relentless onslaught of unknown dangers with a skeleton crew of imbeciles to ward off the antichrist and global apocalypse is a better cause for unjust and unknown consequences than our desire for a genetically modified corn chip, with known unjust consequences. Yes, I am comparing your purchase of a bag of corn chips to whatever you think Columbus is responsible for. No one wants the bag of corn chips to cause atrocities of mankind, but it does. Yet we still purchase it, likely because it does not represent the atrocities of mankind in the eyes of society, therefor we are conveniently free from association. It is easier for us to represent the opposition with empty gestures, than to sacrifice for it. Our consumption is action, our gesture is inaction. It is no wonder why the prevalence of injustice remains. We, the American consumer, ensure it, by neglecting the reality of the commodities we purchase, and by neglecting to pay the true cost of the privilege of our reliance on someone other than ourselves to provide it to us. If we do not wish to become the Columbus of our contempt, then it is necessary to have the forethought to consider the consequences our actions may hold on posterity.