The Feast Isn't Over

I was admittedly a shade or two under the influence, but after watching The Menu—Mark Mylod’s horror-tinged satire of the gentrified dining “experience” that has overtaken most restaurants (and too many home kitchens)—I thought, That was the greatest cheeseburger commercial of all time. I can’t explain this without spoiling it for you, which I guess means I think you should watch it. If nothing else, it’s a great opportunity for Ralph Fiennes to play Voldemort with a nose.

That said, it genuinely is the greatest cheeseburger commercial of all time. We need more of them, commercials for cheeseburgers. Commercials for bolognese and for oxtail curry. For a good croque or panang. Sure, I’m being a little facetious, but I’m also thinking back to Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s 2021 masterpiece (fuck it, why not) about a retired chef (Nicolas Cage) in search of his stolen truffle pig. Pig is more than a commercial, of course; while it might not be as fun as The Menu (there’s no schadenfreude), it’s certainly bigger, better, deeper. But they share a reverence for what is “real.” The pleasure of watching Fiennes tenderly grill a thick, greasy burger—no frills—and layer it with American cheese hits the same note as watching Cage lift a sachet of herbs to his face, or carefully slice potatoes to an eighth of an inch, or baste a squab one spoonful of jus at a time. The closeups in these scenes aren’t “food porn” so much as food prayer, a contemporary grace.

To say grace is to do away with bullshit. To pray is to give up lying, even if only for a few seconds. Both of these films skewer the contemporary notion that food is for Instagram or TikTok rather than for eating, a notion that wouldn’t be possible without the gentrification of pretty much every aspect of culture. Just as urban gentrification is a function of replacement—not only the physical displacement of lower-income residents, but so too suburban living that looks like urban living—gentrified dining is the replacement of food as pleasurable to all senses with food as pleasurable to the eyes: that is, for an audience. Gentrification is a way of performing life rather than living it, and modern American dining (“culinary entertainment,” as I’ve seen it described) is a way of performing going out to eat rather than enjoying the food in front of you—which is, of course, why most food in restaurants is lackluster, pretentious, drowning in “white space” (hardly a damn thing on the plate), and as far from satiating as possible. “None of this is real,” Cage’s character tells another chef of his “deconstructed” creation, his menu, his restaurant—even the chef himself. There’s no relationship between what’s on the plate and what grows out of the ground, what someone raised and cared for: the reason, after all, that people pray before eating. This is what the earth gave us.

With my first taste of freedom, I went after food. I was sixteen and had an appetite. With my retail wages I bought a guitar, and then I bought candy. I hadn’t eaten breakfast since sixth grade and had stopped eating lunch in my freshman year, and began living off sugar until the school day was over: five pounds of gummy bears every few days; a movie-theater sized box of SweetTarts every day, then two every day; Reese’s cups, eggs, pumpkins, and Christmas trees; a smattering of suckers and “family size” bags of Jolly Ranchers. I think the only thing that saved my teeth was an aversion to soda, though when I got home I did have an enormous glass or two of Sunny D (still called Delight back then) to help wash down spoonfuls of Skippy straight from the jar (mixed with swigs of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup straight from the bottle), as well as an entire can of Pringle’s and a box of Velveeta Shells & Cheese. When I got my driver’s license, this routine was replaced by another: a twenty-piece McNugget with four sweet-and-sour sauce packets, a large order of fries, and a strawberry shake. Every day. Later, this meant polishing off a large stuffed-crust pizza by myself, over lunch, or a full rack of Famous Dave’s for dinner—with all the sides.

These days, of course, I don’t eat this way. I can’t eat this way. Though I do enjoy how a gummy, now and then, wakes up those old cravings, and it’s fun to give into them—to really feel the pleasure of eating absolute garbage. To revel in “mouthfeel.” Even if it’s junk food and most of its ingredients aren’t “real,” it feels more real to me, more pleasurable, than having a creepily robotic server stand over me in some crowded, dark, deafening restaurant and give me the sales pitch for a plate I’ve already ordered and is awaiting dissection and evaluation. Another way of saying this is that I recognize junk food as pleasure; I don’t recognize the pleasure in talking about my dinner as an “achievement.” And as more and more around me is replaced with what I don’t recognize—new habits, new behaviors, new “norms,” new locales, new terrors, new lows—and as more and more of this unrecognizable world hides behind a textureless, odorless screen, I find that food is one of the few things remaining that offers endless, inexhaustible, and meditative pleasure—a pleasure worth gratitude.

How is this different from “just getting old?” It probably isn’t. I’m writing this the day after another magazine has disappeared, after another publisher has laid off people who’ve worked hard to make manuscripts into books. After another place for writers to get paid has folded. Every day it seems as if there’s no room left in the “literary world” and that more and more people are shoved off a sinking ship, and meanwhile I’m aging with only this one talent, this one use. I know I’m more sensitive to this than I should be. I’ve lost a lot in the last year: a beloved pet; a person I shouldn’t have trusted; and, just this month, one of my oldest friends to cancer. It’s the oldest cliché about death but every day I wake up and re-realize that she’s gone, that she’s never coming back. Her voice is gone, her laugh is gone, her smile is gone, her hands are gone. So it’s easy to feel as if everything I care about and have cared about is vanishing or getting thrown away.

But that’s the deal of life—the deal I’ve been dealt, as has everyone before me and as will everyone after. Life is grief, which sounds more melodramatic than I mean it to. Part of grief is remembering, reminiscing, and I think that’s what I like about work that prays, work that’s tired of everyone’s bullshit. There’s a reverence in remembering. This is how it was, this is how it tasted, this is how it felt, this is who we were and this is what we cared about. This is what mattered. This kind of grace is clarifying, and maybe worth saying more often. I don’t need to be young anymore, but I do need to age gracefully. What this means is recognizing, when I can, that what was real then is still hanging around today, that what was there is still here, still real. And if it’s not, well—I carried everything with me that I could.

---

Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems less and less reliable, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3