I'm not an asshole, I just act like one on television

    So based on David Bianculli's review, I watched the first couple of episodes of NBC new show Next Great Restaurant, and it took only those two episodes to help me re-realize why I am refuse to watch almost all network reality TV. I don't know if it is their budgets, their casting, or their audience, but cable televisions reality programming (minus MTV) has just that dusting of panache necessary to keep me from feeling manipulated. Or, their manipulation is just subtle enough that I am kosher with it. At least on Bravo and whatever network Project Runway is now on, they just show you that they are using Glad Press-n-Seal, I don't have to hear the facetious opinions about how great the stuff really is. Next Great Restaurant really is great if you can bear through its bluntness to see the deep, ontological problems it presents about our country.

    The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.

The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in  a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place).  The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.

The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.

Where is you vomitorium, next to the bathroom?

    I have wanted to write a post about our culture's Epicureanism for quite a while, and unfortunately this article in The Atlantic is not only more thoroughly researched than I have the capacity or discipline to carry out, but also references Livy which immediately trumps any sort of allusion I intended to make. Fortunately, I still have half an original idea left to contribute that the writer, B.R. Myers, does not cover, so I shall proceed ahead, mooching off his thorough and no doubt slightly soul crushing work (the man has read multiple books with titles like Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, multiple). Before I begin, I should say that I had no idea people took food so seriously, or, I should say, I knew plenty of people made far too much money off of food, and plenty of people took the consumption of food to be some kind of religion, but I suppose I never realized the depth of their shallowness and utter lack of irony, but a lack of irony seems to be one of the real hallmarks of whitepeople, so I should have known better. To be so sanctimonious about say, a steak, seems more than a bit misguided, but as Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in organic offal.

    Because the West has been fraught with ontological tension as soon as Athens found out about Jerusalem, or vice versa, a tension exists in the food world, and at its heart it is this: eating luxuriously until you want to vomit (and maybe do vomit) is good, but being fat is bad. Nothing in the modern world  is worse than being fat. It is, far and away, our Cardinal Sin, worse than the only sexual taboo we have left, pederasty, simply because when you are fat, you are fat all the time, and pederasts cannot constantly molest children. Being overweight to most people goes far beyond any sort of venial, corporeal sin to a moral sin; the fact that a sin against the body can be raised to the level of a sin against the soul shows how superficial and bodily we moderns are (that it is a contradiction not believing in a soul, but still believing you can sin against it also should not fall on deaf ears). Our Gods are eating well, living well, and being healthy; no culture before ours placed as much emphasis on health as a end, not a means. The Romans no doubt valued health in its soldiers, but it was not so they would look good and live long, it was so they could more effectively kill barbarians (and often their fellow citizens). Medieval Christians valued health, but it was because man is made in God's image, and because they had an understanding that sins against the body, if left unattended, could become sins against the soul; the corrupt body had to be kept as clean as possible lest you corrupt the Holy Spirit residing within you. Gluttony was ranked a Catholic sin, but was by most enumerators the least severe of them, and was linked to a sin against the spirit, not just the body.

    Moderns have no such problem making this distinction, and multi-million viewer television shows exist simply to exorcize people of their fatness. Millions of people every week tune into The Biggest Loser to watch people become morally better as they lose weight (it should duly be noted that a previous iteration of this show existed, Extreme Makeover, but people obviously found it distasteful that the participants should become more moral without having to work for them. Gastric bypass surgery was not sufficient penance). That they think these people are better after losing weight is a testament to modern superficiality.

    If being fat is immoral, then what is viewed as the highest morality is not healthfulness, but some vague respect for food and Epicurean pleasures. Fat people are, to borrow from Woolf, out of proportion. That, and they do not eat at morally correct eating establishments. Fat people, or most Americans, eat at places like Applebees and The Olive Garden, while moral foodies eat their own chicken's eggs, or the eggs of chickens that were laid very close to them. To a certain foodie set, lying, stealing, and betraying those closest to one are hardly as bad as eating at the wrong restaurant. I am acquainted with a large enough set of people who would be wholly comfortable breaking bread with an adulterer, but would not sit down to eat with a person that consumes 'fast' food. These people do not see their moral bankruptcy, and  in fact find themselves to be morally superior to others because they shop at a farmers market and eat organic. Myers links the foodies in with gluttony, but I do not think he has gotten the sin correct. To me, it is pride that the foodie is guilty of. Pride in their morals, self-satisfaction, and the inability to see beyond themselves. The foodie sees the whole world through the compass of food. Other places have no culture outside of food, and one can understand everything about a place through its food; it is an odd sort of revision of Marxism, where even economics takes a back seat to consumption. To the foodie, prayer before a meal is just time to sniff and salivate, and the idea of food having a spiritual aspect to it is transformed to vague, Pantheistic, Transcendental ideas about Nature and God, whatever the hell those mean. It is this, the moral superiority of the foodie that is most irksome and sinful.

    In The Gay Science, Nietzsche distinguishes Epicurean and Stoic times, and links the Epicurean with extreme sensitivity and intellectual curiosity; basically himself with his delicate stomach and penchance for migraines. Watching Anthony Bourdain eat the eyeballs of cats, and whoever it is on Man vs. Food eat god knows what he eats, I do not see a good deal of sensitivity or intellectual curiosity.