Set fire to the vanities of your artisanal barbacoa taco consuming friends, for the insightful friend has provided a biting critique of the Millennial “foodie” self-deception.
Enjoy!
Cappuccino as Collapse
A defense of millennials and the cultural scene they’ve helped establish is that restaurant food quality is much higher than it used to be, more varied and interesting than even twenty or thirty years ago. For all the obvious examples of institutional and social decline, at least now our coffee is more artistic, our restaurants more creative and diverse. As evidence, compare an average cappuccino of the nineties, with its stiff, flavorless foam, to a cappuccino in any urban third wave shop of today, its silky surface decorated with a pleasing tulip pattern.
But the value of a smoother, tastier coffee tends toward zero when viewed within the larger socio-historical context that gave rise to an increased demand for dining out and more refined techniques for commercial food and drink production. The higher quality cappuccinos abundantly available today represent the socially and economically destructive shift to a service economy, in which manufacturing power and handcraft traditions are exchanged for destabilizing labor patterns and a growing focus on convenient gratification of jaded senses.
As social conditions deteriorate, and working and middle-class prospects diminish, food service takes on greater importance, and what remains of social and cultural energy is directed toward "elevated" dining experiences that play into the desire for regressive satisfaction of urges, crass entertainment masquerading as advanced artistry. These higher craft caps emerge from a backdrop of deindustrialization, credentialism and urban population churn in which college educated debt heavy front of house service workers channel their frustrated and overinflated artistic aims into products that almost immediately turn into waste, while back of house operations are staffed by mass immigrant populations, with supply chains stretching all over the planet pulling resources from exploited workforces in even more desperate and impoverished environments.
The main reason baristas can still find work as of now is because they speak English; without this advantage in basic communication, their labor value would drop even lower and their specialization of coffee products would lose all their appeal to business owners, who, despite the apparent push for inventive and dazzling culinary offerings, prefer less costly employees, and look at reducing labor costs as much as possible relative to almost all other business expenses. If there wasn’t still a need for efficient English communication and a veneer of community in a mostly English-speaking market, the point-of-sale workforce would more closely resemble the construction and agricultural and backhouse prep kitchen markets, with poorly assimilated immigrants toiling at cheaper rates in seasonal patterns, typically before returning to their home countries or cycling through other low-wage industries.
Food service work is generally low-skilled and highly fungible, even when it produces latte "art" or creative spins on ethnic cuisine, and derives its already strained economic viability from shifting populations working remotely (mostly on horseshit), dual income, atomized nuclear families lacking know-how in the domestic sphere and a rising percentage of stimulation hungry singles who spend their dwindling discretionary income on spectacular experiences to compensate for their cratered social lives and dim futures.
The third place, the decline of which is pathetically lamented by everyone still pining after a more idealized consumerist environment (they miss HANGING OUT, i.e. consuming and wasting time) already marks a breaking apart of home and work and a withering of neighborhood cohesion and extended family networks that reinforces impractical educational efforts and chaotic population movements, leaving people with little else to do but self-stimulate as they wear down in increasing isolation, at which point a misty eyed recollection of being surrounded by strangers glutting themselves with pseud food in formulaically designed urban spaces repurposed out of formerly productive work sites appears to them as a lost era of healthy social activity.
Millennials improved food, and by improved I mean they made it more superficially sophisticated and titillating to novelty seeking adult babies, because they couldn't improve anything else; they weren't outfitted to work on anything but trying to satisfy intensifying oral cravings born of social and moral collapse.
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I don’t believe people should *have* to work themselves into tatters just to survive, although at the same time there’s really no cosmic guarantee that they won’t have to, it all depends on the harshness of our surroundings, over which we have some control but not total. Leisure is great, I’m a huge fan myself, but the restaurant/takeout complex doesn’t quite qualify as leisure to me, not on this scale, but rather fits into a much broader destructive tendency of outsourcing domestic life skills and neighborhood commercial and social patterns to both chain enterprises and their “small business” counterparts that effectively work the same way, with ruthless economizing and patronizing regard for a churning and novelty seeking customer base.
As for the way out: I don’t have one. Sure, some unionization would be useful, maybe you could cut down on some of the exploitative practices, some of the surveillance and wage suppression. But really I think you’d need to somehow set things up for generations of relative social, cultural and practical continuity, where skills, practices, and relationships actually stretch unbroken over decades, and not just hope that a constantly changing mass of disposable unskilled workers can slightly improve their circumstances with a little factory style solidarity. Getting paid a little more and not being constantly spied on is great, but after that, you’re still an Amazon warehouse worker or a line cook, and the question is, how did you end up like that, and that opens farther reaching questions
Hi Caleb, an excellent analysis of -part of- the overriding problem of alienation in the contemporary developed world. I have only two reservations about your piece:
1) The emphasis on moral degradation at the core of this issue. Yet everyone deserves some time for relaxation and enjoyment, in company or individually. It's not morally reprehensible to want to hang out some. Overindulgence is distinct from leisure, IMO.
2) [Which relates to the former point] What's the way out of this situation? Given that you identify the twin impulsers of this as international commercial structures (aka global capitalism) and human weakness, and we're not gonna get a better human nature any day now, then the way ahead is to change the social system.
You know where I stand on this and I won't labor (ho ho) the point again, but for those interested, a recent article on how unionized workers fight back against their alienated condistions is here
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/worker-surveillance-technology-emotions
And another which bundles up all these issues into a call for an actual change to the system through an analysis of the very phenomena Caleb so ably identifies above
https://jacobin.com/2021/05/covid-restaurant-service-workers-emergency-unemployment-relief