I want to start this post off first by thanking Hyun and Bryan for their work on the guest posts last week. They did a great job and I’m looking forward to getting a chance to try out some of those recipes – the photos looked fantastic.
So I imagine the more clever among you have probably figured out by now that Amanda and I were out of town last week. We spent the time away at a family reunion in Colorado – more on this later in the week, some pics to come too.
Instead I’d like to use this opportunity to rant about one of my bigget pet peeves – food options for the captive audience. In this particular instance my feelings are motivated primarily by airports and air travel, but this topic extends to so many different circumstances: car travel, train travel, events like concerts or sporting events, any kind of situation where you’re stuck in one place for an extended period of time with particularly limited food choices. Concerts and sporting events are less of an issue, for me anyway, because they are more voluntary and usually don’t take up as much time. Air travel, car travel, etc., are all but unavoidable at some time in your life, and often span one or more typical meal times.
You pretty much always know, or at least should, that going into these situations you’re going to be out of luck when it comes to any sort of morally sound, or even relatively healthy options for feeding yourself. Sometimes it’s certainly worse than others. Of course, it’s best to supply as much of your own food as possible I think, but many circumstances just don’t allow for this option – you simply won’t make it past security with it.
So already the people providing you with your food in these instances are selling to customers with a drastically lowered standard than they might normally have. Nobody is ever really going to expect a great meal in an airport, with great ingredients, made with care, and therefore people will be less inclined to be upset about the fact that they didn’t even get anything close to resembling good food. The people providing your food know this – they know it very well – and it shows. They simply don’t care because you don’t have a choice, and you’ll be forced to keep spending your money there regardless. There is no competition in such a market.
Amanda and I had breakfast – or, I should say we tried to have breakfast – at Dulles airport on the way out to Colorado. Name and shame time – we “ate” at the Firkin and Fox. Now, I am a pretty steady believer in “the Grandma Rule” (as explained by Tony Bourdain in his awesome new book – Medium Raw) – basically, different situations do call for different standards, and if you’re not paying a lot for your food you’d be foolish to expect haute cuisine. But we spent $45 at this place for french toast, an egg wrap, and two bloody marys. Even accounting for staff expense and general overhead, that should be plenty of money to at least provide us with halfway decent ingredients. What we got instead was absolutely inedible. My toast was hard as a rock, her eggs tasteless as styrofoam – we couldn’t get through the meal, even knowing we had 6 hours of travel ahead of us. The drinks, too, were so bad we had but a sip or two – and if nothing else gets my point across, the fact that we actually bought alcohol and left it sitting there on the table should speak volumes.
I don’t even remember the last time I’ve left food at a table like this while still hungry. It wasn’t just the food either, the service was plain piss-poor. I tend to hate making a deal out of situations like this – I’m actually pretty sensitive to coming off as a total food snob (I’m hoping my blog – or the fact that I even have a blog about food – doesn’t betray me completely on that point).
Knowing in a situation like this that complaints aren’t likely to go far, I reacted just by getting us out of the situation as fast as possible. Amanda had her own way of dealing with it.
Our server didn’t care – or even seem to notice – that we had barely taken a nibble. I’m not going to even get into how atrocious the service itself was, but I assure you it was a failure all around. Never again.
As a consumer who believes that the vote of my dollar is a powerful tool, I feel downright abused when I’m taken advantage of in such a fashion. I just can’t see any reason at all why it has to be this way, and I’m choosing now to give as little as possible to support such infrastructure – even if it means going without from time to time, as best as I can.
I don’t believe that we should accept the fact that all food in such circumstances – food for a consumer without much time to spare, or without large sums of money to throw around – needs, of necessity, to be such awful crap.
Michael Pollan will tell you that farmers deserve more money for their product, and I believe – with conditions – that this is true. But I don’t believe that the weight of that should all fall on the consumer. I actually think it’s a bit naive to imagine that it even could. I think farmers deserve more but I feel that the primary reasons for their general lack of financial prosperity are a more direct result of middle man symptoms – meaning, anything from the government subsidies that give certain farmers an unfair edge in the market, to regulatory expenses, to transportation, marketing, and so on. All these things drive up the bottom line for farmers, particularly small farmers, and they’re often the reason why they are forced into farming using methods they would prefer not to use in order to remain economically viable.
Airports and travel hubs should be a vast market for local farmers, in the same way that we are seeing other large institutions – schools, colleges, prisons – become so. All it really takes is for some on service side to start caring about the product they provide, and for consumers to be more discerning and selective in their choices – changes we are seeing take place elsewhere in the food landscape on a daily basis.
Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow food, will tell you that meals simply should not be eaten on the run, that all food should be given the time it deserves, and I again believe – with conditions – that this is true. But it’s simply not practical to eat this way 100% of the time. And I don’t think we should have to surrender so much of our time – at every single point of food consumption – in order to eat well (healthy, clean, good, and fair food).
I fiercely support the idea that on a general level we should all be spending more time with our food. But there will always be exceptions. When you’ve got a flight to catch, you’re not going to be likely to get to the airport 3 hours early for a 9 course tasting menu. Though this does cause me to wonder – if offered the right restaurant, chef, and product, maybe you would?
I realize that my idealism is showing here in this post, really I do. And I also realize I haven’t proposed any great awesome miracle solutions. I wish I had some. But such is the situation in so many circumstances we find ourselves in, and I know that many of you share this frustration with me. How do you deal with it? What do you think could be done, either long term or short? I worry for a time in the future when I will find myself in these situations with a child, because I cringe at the thought of even giving them the opportunity to eat some of the things that pass as food in these places. Surely, “suck it up and deal,” is not the only choice we all have?
