Alright, here we go. I work at Little Ceasers and I'm around food a lot! I prepare it, I make it, I cook it, I sell it, I clean up after it. The whole 9 yards.
After working in a food joint for awhile, I've come to realize that people (and I'm generalizing) are very picky and emotional about their food. I really don't understand why. Maybe it's just something we've been socialized into feeling. It kind of ties into the idea of when we shop for produce, we always search for that piece of fruit that hasn't been tainted, scratched, cut, bruised or anything. You know what I'm talking about....
Well, people are the same way about food that is cooked by someone else and they still expect perfection of their own standards. People like food quick, fast and perfectly prepared.
(Hence the zillions of fast food restaurants in America on every corner). Customers come into Little Ceasers expecting their pizza to magically be ready the moment they get their change and their receipt. And most of the time (key word=most), customers are in a good mood when they come in to order food.
However, that mood instantly changes the moment they are told their pizza will be ready in 15-20 minutes.
It doesn't seem like that long to wait for a pizza, in my opinion. But 15-20 minutes isn't instant and that's what people want: instant, perfect food.
Um, sorry...not really possible.
SOOOOOOO, my question is as follows: how have we, as a society, become so socialized into wanting instant, perfect food? It's obviously something that we all want and strive for. We have science now to help us create bigger, better, greener produce. We have fast food, we have huge stores like Costco that sells in bulk, we have more convenient ways of getting food than any other country. We want instant food, and perfect food ALL the time.
Things didn't use to be like that. Farming used to be the norm. It took months to grow food, we had to prepare our own meat and dairy, we had to make everything from scratch.
Now, we can get fruit and vegetables anytime of the year, and the only effort needed for harvesting food is making a trip to Fred Meyer to shop conveniently for food that has been fully prepared for us to take home.
What's happened to us?
Do we not have enough time to wait 20 minutes for our pizzas to be ready anymore?
A good read:
Staten, Vince. Can you trust a tomato in January?: everything you wanted to know (and a few things you didn't) about food in the grocery store. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
(For some reason, my computer won't underline the title. So the title: "Can you trust a tomato in January?: Everything you..." should be underlined in my citation.)
3 comments:
Britani - We tend to want everything fast, not just food. As a culture we're driving ourselves faster and faster. I don't know where it's all going, but it can't go on forever -- we have limits.
I also think that we now want everything instantly. Students used to take the time to search through libraries and volume after volume of encyclopedias to find a fraction of the information that we can get in under a second by searching on databases. With all of our advances in technology i feel we are becoming less and less patient as a society. I still do not understand why people get upset at a reasonable wait for food to be cooked. You would think that if they knew anything about food they would know that a good meal takes time to prepare well.
I understand that you want "it" right now... and sometimes "your way". However, sometimes you should take into account the quality of the item. And then there is the savoring every morsel idea. Faster is not always better.
--Elizabeth
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