If you're getting your news from the same sources as I get mine, you probably know that nowadays a lot of people don't have time to cook a meal, or even to sit down and eat one. The world is scarfing down over-processed fries, Coca-Cola, and substandard burgers with processed "cheese" (not really cheese, more like chemicals diluting what used to be cheese), and quite frankly, I think that's not only a tragedy of culture, but a slap in the face to our ancestors, to our culture, to our nation, and to our capabilities as humans.
See, food and cooking are on the boundary of art and science. In the preparation of a delicious dish, scientific concepts such as chemical changes and mixtures are combined with more artistic elements of flavors and textures and scents to please the subjective senses of the audience. All of this is wrapped up in the cultural heritage and the experiences of the cook and the diners, another element more closely related to art than to science. In that way, a good meal goes right to the heart of the one eating it.
For me, food is even more. Most people out there, especially on a largely atheist website like Newgrounds, won't agree with me on this part, but to me at least, cooking and eating is almost a religious experience. When I am cooking, I am taking the ingredients given to the world by God's grace, the meat and the dairy products and the vegetables and the spices and the starches, and I make them into something else entirely, imitating God's work of creation, but in God's honor and not in mocking. Cooking and eating a delicious meal is a way to experience God for me. In that way, a shared meal is akin to a church service, and a chef is almost like a priest.
The fast food industry, then, is taking the art and the faith out of food. Certainly the science remains, and is in some ways enhanced by the formulaic and repetitive way in which the burgers and such are made, but art is not repetitive, and faith is individual. That individuality, that variation, is missing from fast food: every burger patty is the same, the fries are identical in all but size, the buns are strictly controlled to be alike, every Big Mac has the same formula of "two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, 'cheese', pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun". There is no "art" in the food preparation practiced in fast food restaurants: it's the same everywhere, produced for quantity and not quality. It's like when AfroUnderscoreStud did those Adolf Hitler:CAI493+D movies back in 2007 and 2008, only on a much larger scale, and dangerous to the culture instead of just annoying.
But the fast food industry isn't the only problem here. No, even in our own kitchens, the loss of our culture surrounds us. Hamburger Helper? Kraft Mac & Cheese? Take a good look in your cupboard, and see how many mixes are there that are meant to emulate actual dishes. Not much variation between them, huh? One Hamburger Helper tastes exactly like another of the same flavor, unless the cook decides to deviate from the recipe (which is rare, though I do it whenever I make Hamburger Helper, also rare). I like to refer to this when I talk about food and culture: Mr. Phillips' perspective on the issue of food as a part of culture pretty much mirrors my own. In that, he talks about the cultural significance in one community (the black community) of one specific food (macaroni and cheese). Extend that across hundreds of dishes, in hundreds of cultures and geographic locations, and you have a true culinary map of the United States of America. Make it thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dishes and families and locations and cultures, and you have the entire world. And many of the developed parts of that world are in danger of losing that local, regional, national culinary culture as easy access, mass-production, and homogenization overwhelm identity, effort, and the beauty and satisfaction of creation.
So when you're tempted to pick up a burger at Burger King, remember how much better food you can prepare at home with just a little time and effort. And when you're looking in your cupboard for food and see the "artificial orange lab experiment", as Mr. Phillips called it, look up a recipe for macaroni and cheese and cook it yourself. You'll be glad you did, and if enough people do it, we'll be on the road to cultural recovery. Until next time...
SoulMaster out!
Pixonimateo
tl;dr: western civilization is shit. yeah we all know
SoulMaster71
No, Pixonimateo. Western civilization is good, or at least it used to be good during some periods of history. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and for America, that period between WWII and the whole bullshit of the 1960s, all fine times to be white. I'm just opposed to the loss of culture by anyone.