Viva Las Vegan-The Burger And The King
Holy Cow
Meet your meat. This is your brain on French fries in the United States of Unconscious Eating.
Hell Is Other People in the Buffet Line
Hell is other people, and you usually meet them at the buffet line in Vegas.
Are you an American—or an American’t?
Sacred cows do not make the best hamburgers.Visit Goa, India
The United States of Unconscious Eating
In the United States of Unconscious Eating, the food is terrible and the portions are never enough. Yet we Star-Strangled Bastards cannot get enough of what we do not want, do not need, and do not understand.
S.A.D.—the Standard American Diet—is Uncle Sam’s unhappy default mode: eating the same food over and over while expecting a different result. That is the in to our sane.
Our enjoyable discomfort has become a form of citizenship framed around the menu.
We are among the best-entertained and least-informed people on the planet. Our national id has A.D.D. We are free to change spouses, jobs, careers, and neighbourhoods—but the menu? Never.
This is your brain on French fries.
The Menu Has Replaced the Meal
The map may not be the territory, and the statue may not be the saint. But the menu is no longer merely the meal. The menu has replaced the meal.
We eat what we are: American. Food has become one of the most powerful symbols of national identity.
Meat and potatoes are, to a large extent, the glue holding the country together. The baseline trance of everyday dining presents one ritual choice: USDA Prime, Choice, or Select. Take it or leave it. America—love it or leave it.
Do not eat the menu.
Counting calories is like a hooker looking at her watch. We drive too fast to worry about cholesterol—or so the story goes.
Inside cloistered cars and cubicles arrives the licence of the brothel: the paradox of choice. More options have delivered less satisfaction, while false normality keeps everyone ordering the same thing.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Pleasure
Food is pleasure, ritual, seduction, comfort, status, and habit. The language of meat can become sexual because appetite does not remain neatly confined to hunger.
We want on-demand menus, anytime and anywhere. Yet the industrial American diet can become pornographic: cheap, processed, excessive, and emotionally empty.
Welcome to our shared hallucination of almost the right way to eat—our brains wired and fired together on French fries.
It is an American dream that can also become an American lie. Still, even a useful lie can inch the dreamer closer to the truth.
The true mystery of dining is the visible, not the invisible. It is the naked truth.
Meet Your Meat
The sacred cow was never only beef. It was the belief that appetite should not be questioned. Las Vegas simply put the national menu under brighter lights.