The recent (and possibly still-residually ongoing) kerfuffle or brouhaha over Cracker Barrel’s self-“rebranding” has enabled me to clarify my sense of both the place of proprietarily named entities in the American metapolitical landscape and my own place in the social hierarchy implied by this landscape. I received my first news of the “rebranding” via a well-reasoned critique of it presented by the Reformed-Protestant lay theologian Jon Harris on his podcast, Conversations that Matter. Harris framed the “rebranding” mainly as a mistimed exercise in modernization and urbanization. In his view, the corporation was vitiating its “brand” mainly in aiming to purge its restaurants of their early-twentieth-century rural décor so as to make them look more or less identical to the ever-vaguely mid-twentieth-century-style diners favored by most other midmarket chain-restaurants and their freestanding competitors. He emphasized the commemorative and didactic functions salutarily served by the established décor; he mentioned that, for example, an ancient piece of farm machinery nailed to the wall might remind a middle-aged customer of some similar implement employed by his grandparents and prompt him to point this out to his children, thereby providing a much-needed link between the generations of an American family of rural lineage. He praised the restaurants’ built-in stores along similar lines—viz., qua repositories of rural-artisanal modes of manufacture of products of everyday household use. Next I encountered the flurry of “takes” from the mainstream conservative punditry, which interpreted the “rebranding” essentially as a replay of Bud Light’s “trans influencer”-centered marketing campaign of two or three years ago—viz., as a “virtue-signaling” sally of unregenerate “wokeness,” a middle-finger to the “brand”’s established customer base, and an attack on “white America.” Finally, I saw a recapitulatory City Journal article by the MAGA movement’s unofficial spokesman and “thought-leader,” Christopher Rufo, an article that predictably put the seal on the punditry’s appraisal but more strikingly devoted at least as many column inches to its author’s lack of any history as a Cracker Barrel customer and any desire to dine at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. At each of these three moments, the “take” in point clashed stridently with both my personal metaphysics of Cracker Barrel and my thitherto-settled assumptions about my fellow-Americans’ collective metaphysics thereof. I had never thought of the décor as intended to serve any specific purpose or function; indeed, during my three to five visits to as many Cracker Barrel restaurants I had barely taken notice of it. I suppose I had regarded it as exactly analogous to the meaningless obtrusive bric-à-brac tacked to the walls of certain chain restaurants whose popularity peaked in perhaps the mid-1990s—notably, Ruby Tuesday and TGIF; but by the same token, now that I have taken in Harris’s presentation on Cracker Barrel, it occurs to me that the bric-à-brac at those restaurants may not have been so meaningless after all, for were these restaurants “themed” to evoke a fairly specific milieu-cum-epoch—viz., that of the vaguely bohemian cafes and bistros of Anglo-America of the gay (Eighteen)-Nineties, the “age of ragtime”? Anyway, in my recollection the typical piece of Cracker Barrel décor is a seventy or eighty year-old rusty metal advertising sign or cookie (not cracker) tin—something seemingly selected at random from the holdings of an undiscriminating junk shop. As for the stores, I have only once lingered at one of them long enough to get even a suspicion of a sense of their inventory, and that sense was not of anything even shallowly rooted in rural-agrarian America. I seem to remember the artisanal goods consisting mainly of things like peculiarly scented soap and candles—products “coded” essentially feminine and only accidentally rustic. I also recall that the store had an impressive selection of candy of unusual but tempting flavors (say, black-cherry licorice); and last but perhaps most I remember that it was the first place in decades at which I could purchase Blackjack and Teaberry chewing gum, brands thereof that had already only been sporadically available in “retro” packaging even in my boyhood. And I had been introduced to these brands by my parents, for whom they had been bits of classic “50s nostalgia,” the livery of the sorts of souvenir-like items one would have expected to find on sale at the checkout register of a 50s-themed diner of the 1980s—in other words, mini-totems of the very milieu-cum-epoch that Harris reckoned the “rebranders” were now attempting to evoke at the expense of the rural early twentieth-century one. I was also somewhat taken aback by the conservative commentariat’s interpellation of Cracker Barrel as the extra-domestic culinary first resort of unregenerate (if saintly) rednecks, because while I had certainly never supposed any Cracker Barrel restaurant to be in the running for a Michelin star, I had no less certainly never regarded the chain as being particularly low-status. I had regarded it, I suppose, as occupying a place securely in the middle of the American chain-restauraturial hierarchy—far upmarket of any of the “legacy” fast-food chains, a bit downmarket from Macaroni Grill, Smoky Bone, and Buffalo Wild Wings and more or less level with the Olive Garden, Chili’s and Applebee’s. But in the light of the peremptoriness and unanimity of the just-mentioned interpellation, I gather that my sense of its place in that hierarchy has been colored by my personal metaphysics of the Cracker Barrel brand and that this metaphysics is not exactly typical. In the first place, like almost all phenomena that have supervened in that metaphysics since the onset of my adolescence, in my mind Cracker Barrel has about it an inexpungible aura of novelty, of up-to-dateness, of (yes, more anti-shades of Harris’s presentation) pristine chrome-plated modernity. For you see, I first encountered it as a very late addition to the iconography of family voyages along the U.S. Interstate Highway system, specifically to the iconography of those massive not-quite-perfectly square green signs that one passed five or ten miles before each major exit on intercity stretches, the signs that advertised the entities of interest to be seen or visited immediately upon egressing from the highway at that exit. Each advertisement on these signs consisted of an icon or glyph that was generally a more schematic version of the piece of commercial art via which the advertised entity drew attention to itself on the signs placed immediately in front of it on the road or street leading from the interstate exit to it. (Doubtless this observation strikes most readers, or at least those who have spent any time on the intercity stretches of the U.S. Interstate Highway system, as superfluous; on the other hand, it has been so long since I have spent any time on those stretches that I dare not assume these sorts of advertisements are as common as they were thirty to fifty years ago.) Because we never left the highway except for fuel and the occasional snack, I never became acquainted with any of the entities at first hand barring a smattering of the gas stations and outlets of well-known fast-food chains. By far the most frequently occurring of such icons or glyphs barring the two just-mentioned types was the one for something called Stuckey’s, whose bright red name against a virtual bumper-sticker background of white reliably appeared on the green sign for virtually every exit on Interstate 75 between central Florida and northern Georgia until about 1987. At first—meaning from about 1980 to 1983—I assumed that Stuckey’s was simply a more regionally situated instantiation of the sorts of classic 24-hour family restaurant-chains exemplified by Denny’s and Perkins’ (what, incidentally, ever happened to such chains as Denny’s and Perkins,’ restaurants of a type that all Americans of all “classes” could agree to regard as worthwhile and indeed indispensable qua places of safe 24-hour resort and refreshment?); an assumption that made me ache with frustration that we never stopped at one of them; at length—meaning in about 1987--I somehow learned that Stuckey’s was in fact a regionally situated souvenir-and- candy store, a discovery that made me more than figuratively sigh with relief that in never having been to a Stuckey’s I had not missed out on anything special. And so when, at even greater length—meaning in 1989 at the earliest—the Cracker Barrel glyph began jostling Stuckey’s from pride of place on the green signs (or, perhaps, ousted it from the signs altogether, for I have since learned that Stuckey’s went out of business right about then), I could not but assume that it, Cracker Barrel, was another chain of such establishments. And however strange or laughable this may seem to the typical present-day American reader, because Cracker Barrel was new in the area and because ever since my infancy everything new in Florida had seemed to hail from either far up north or far out west, I could not help thinking of Cracker Barrel by default as a Yankee establishment, as a vendor of specifically northern-originating sweets and bric-à-brac. To be sure, I was familiar with the use of “cracker” as a jocular pejorative for a poor white southerner—for tarnation’s sake, my own Waycross, Georgia-born maternal grandmother’s family nickname was “Cracker”!—but it did not occur to me to associate the occurrence of “cracker” in the name of the company with that pejorative. And why should it have done? Are not crackers consumed with gusto throughout the Anglosphere? Is not the priciest stone-ground wheat thin or savory table-water biscuit as much a cracker as the cheapest saltine? And of course white rusticity is by no means confined to the American deep and new south. The rusticity I then ascribed to Cracker Barrel was not that of a tumbledown deep-southern wooden bungalow with an outhouse in back but of a spacious, three-storied New England bed and breakfast like the one that formed the setting of Bob Newhart’s second sitcom, a milieu not completely devoid of oddballs and yokels, to be sure, but fundamentally almost genteel or yuppieish. Of course a single glance at Cracker Barrel’s mascot, that hirsute old coot in overalls whom the recent coverage has informed me bears some unmistakably redneckish name like Uncle Cletus, would have disabused me of this misconception, but this fellow’s lineaments had been simplified almost out of existence in the versions of the logo on the interstate signs. Anyhow, I continued to see these Cracker Barrel glyphs occasionally over the next four or five years, mostly or perhaps even exclusively during trips to and from my native city of Tampa and nearby Sarasota, where I was attending college. And then, in 1994, I moved to Baltimore, where for at least the next dozen years I lived a life more than figuratively devoid of even a sign of the chain, for I was carless and hardly ever left the city except by train. So throughout those years my mental image of Cracker Barrel as a quasi-genteel New England bed and breakfast minus the accommodations remained frozen in place. Of course throughout that period that image stood in potential to be thawed into some completely different shape by hearsay, by oral reports from visiting or commuting non-city dwellers. But as near as I can recollect, no such person ever mentioned Cracker Barrel within my earshot. “But what about references to the chain in the so-called media and so-called popular culture?” you may be inclined to ask. But here, too, there was radio (and television and internet) silence—or almost total silence, for I do recall hearing in circa 2008 on Danny Baker’s BBC London radio show (which I “streamed” daily at my office job) a song by the Fountains of Wayne in which Cracker Barrel was rhymed with Will Ferrell. The song was one of those classic autobiographical pop tunes about life on the road on a concert tour, and it presented stopping for a meal at Cracker Barrel as something one repeatedly did as a matter of course during such a tour, just like watching a Will Ferrell movie (presumably on some sort of portable DVD-player, as we were then after all still in the “pre-streaming” micro-epoch). Now, I am to my inestimable credit no student of the oeuvre of the Fountains of Wayne, but from the tone of that song and a few others of theirs that I have not escaped hearing, I gather they were not an unreconstructed hillbilly act (just as I gather from my blissfully slight acquaintance with his filmography that Will Ferrell is no Hee-Haw comedian). So by the time I heard this song I must have known that Cracker Barrel was a restaurant, but I still thought of it as respectable-Yankee-rustic in theme. The first substantial modification of my original Bild of Cracker Barrel, an altogether favorable one, came a year or two later, when Baker’s sidekick, the American expatriate Baylen Leonard, remarked during an episode of on air-banter that during his return trips to his homeland he always went straight from the airport to the nearest Cracker Barrel, where he would order and consume heaping platefuls of its country fried steak, its mashed potatoes, its applesauce, its corn bread, its macaroni and cheese, etc. My absorption of this catalog was nothing short of epiphanic and rapturous, for it instantly catalyzed the conclusion that Cracker Barrel was nothing less than a sort of rich man’s Po Folks. And I could not have been more delighted by any other conclusion about anything, for Po Folks had been one of my most cherished extra-domestic dining venues of my mid-teen years. I believe I even celebrated my fourteenth birthday at a Po Folks. Po Folks was a chain of unabashedly unrespectable-southern-rustic themed restaurants established by the second-tier country-music superstar, John Anderson, in about 1970. (Cf., naturally, the opening of the now-sorely missed Kenny Rogers’ Roasters in ca. 1992 [but note the snobward trend of the American Lokalsgeist over the intervening twenty-odd years: despite its founder’s Nashville bona fides, on a culinary level KRR was a rich man’s Boston Market that unabashedly flaunted the Gallicism rotisserie and made no pretense of presenting its menu as a jot more homespun or a jot less Yankee-ish than that of its chief competitor].) It offered large portions of such staples as fried chicken, biscuits, cornbread, and country-fried steak (known in some places as chicken-fried steak owing to its envelopment in the same kind of batter used in the preparation of southern-style fried chicken), the last of which I tasted for the very first time at a Po Folks, upon which it became one of my favorite restaurant entrees, although I have yet to alight on a country-fried steak as delicious—as wide, thick, and tender, and covered as generously with gravy of as sublime a hue and texture (a sort of beach-sand beige and crème anglaise-like butteriness, respectively) as the ones I enjoyed at Po Folks in the mid-1980s, and in ca. 2009 it looked as though I would never enjoy a country-fried steak of such excellence again, for by then I could not remember having seen or heard tell of a Po Folks in well-nigh on if not well past twenty years. So you can readily imagine that on concluding that Cracker Barrel was a rich man’s Po Folks, I was eager to dine at a Cracker Barrel as soon as possible, and so when my parents and I were planning their next summertime visit, I made sure we selected as our usual destination for a rental-car powered day trip a site within an interstate exit or two of a Cracker Barrel. And so it came to pass that after working up a hearty appetite tramping about Antietam Battlefield for an entire morning and the better part of an afternoon, I found myself tucking into my first meal at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. And that restaurant did not disappoint me. This is not to say that the food quite measured up to my memories of Po Folks’(s): my country-fried steak, though “undoubtedly delicious,” was a couple of millimeters thinner, its plate-footprint about a square inch smaller, its gravy a trifle duskier and more vitreous in consistency, than my PoFolksian ideal; en revanche, though, the range of side-dishes, and the permutations and combinations in which they could be combined with entrees, seemed much more extensive; and in inflation-adjusted terms it could not have a penny costlier. And so I thereupon resolved never to let slip another opportunity to dine at a Cracker Barrel. Unfortunately, as I have remained carless and many miles from the nearest interstate throughout the intervening fifteen years (yes, even since moving back to Florida in 2020), the grand total of such opportunities now stands at a measly two or three. And during the more or most recent of the dining-events resulting from those opportunities, in December 2023, the service was positively atrocious; but of course, “for reasons we needn’t go into,” restaurant service was lousy pretty much everywhere back then (and, incidentally, hasn’t gotten a whole lot better pretty much anywhere since). In any case, in its exposure to my view of the signature décor and furniture, that first onsite Cracker Barrel dinner of 2010 did finally make it unmistakably clear to me that Cracker Barrel was a Southern-rustic-themed chain. But I did not by any means infer therefrom that the Cracker Barrel was a restaurant aimed at or prevailingly, let alone exclusively, frequented by poor Southerners, but this non-inference may have been less a function of my personal metaphysics than of my age. You see, I am just old enough to have grown up in an epoch when “hillbilly culture” was still regarded affectionately by Americans of all—or, at least most—socioeconomic strata and ethnic “heritage”; old enough, that is, to have been unable to avoid daytime reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and to conceive of the Country Bear Jamboree as one of the most entertaining and popular spectacles on offer at Walt Disney World. In my day, or at least the earliest part of it, one would no more violently shy away from dining at a restaurant called Po Folks if one was not a redneck than one would shy away from dining at a restaurant called Mama Mia if one was not of Italian ancestry, and at a Po-Folks dinner or robo-performance of the CBJ one would probably have been more likely to find oneself sitting next to a doctor or lawyer with a surname like Caputo or Horowitz than to a ditch-digger or farmhand with a forename like Billy Bob or Cletus. So perhaps even in 2010, I was failing to keep pace with the times, failing to “read the room,” as they say. But I am inclined to doubt this, per my earlier remarks on the Fountains of Wayne and my present observation that while Baylen Leonard happened to hail from a technically deep-Southern locale, Bristol, Tennessee, a tiny dorflet on the Virginia border, he also happened to be one of the leading lights of the gay nightlife of London—London, England, mind you, not London, Ontario, let alone London, Tennessee (for I presume that as Tennessee has a Bristol it also has a London that is equally dwarfed by its namesake). So I was much taken aback by the right-wing commentariat’s reaction to the rebranding—taken aback, that is, vis-à-vis Cracker Barrel specifically, because as I said, I had already been through that sort of thing before in connection with the Bud Light kerfuffle, when I had been bemused along exactly identical lines. In other words, it had come as news to me then that Bud Light was the preferred tipple of actual rednecks. For I had always thought of Bud Light as a mid-tier frat beer, as the “go to” brand for campus Greeks too lightly allowanced to spring for Molson but rich enough to brush off the so-called Beast, Milwaukee’s Best. To be sure, I myself had never been a frequent consumer of Bud Light simply because I had never been a frequent attender of midmarket fraternity parties (or upmarket or downmarket ones either; whence my comparable paucity of fraternization with Molson and the Beast), but I had never considered myself too good to consume a bottle or can of Bud Light’s official rival, Miller Lite, and indeed ever since the early oughties at the latest Miller Lite had been my “session beer” of choice (not that I had learned to call it a session beer until the late teens at the earliest)—the beer I would switch to once I thought the imbibing of another eight or nine-percent pale ale or milk stout might cause me to stumble over the fragile handrail separating the observation platform of genial tipsiness from the gorge of full-blown drunkenness. But then in 2023 Conservative, Inc.’s most curmudgeonly pundit Matt Walsh came along to lambast the trannification of Bud Light qua semi-official MAGA brew with every rhetorical cudgel and nightstick at his disposal—but not before avowing at even greater length and with much greater vehemence that he himself had never drunk and would never drink Bud Light, that it scarcely deserved to be called beer, that it was really just lightly alcoholized carbonated sugar-water with the taste and consistency of diabetic piss, etc. And the synthesis of Walsh’s dyspeptic dismissal of Bud Light with Rufo’s po-faced abjural of Cracker Barrel has compelled me to draw the inference that however stubbornly the received notion that the left’s “bicoastal elites” have a monopoly on cultural snobbery may persist, the right’s chattering classes are at least as culturally snobbish as their left-wing counterparts, an inference that cannot but compel me sadly to conclude that I am, to employ a bit of pre-internet redneck text-messaging code, TSOL. “But why should your withers be wrung by the just-mentioned inference? Nay, why should this inference not be cause for you to rejoice? For after all, are you yourself not the epitome and quintessence of a cultural snob yourself? And if so, ought not the discovery that all of today’s pundits, regardless of political affiliation, are cultural snobs, double your pleasure, so to speak?” Correction, or, rather refinement: I am a paleo-cultural snob, meaning that I think it’s important to be snooty and discriminating about old-timey cultural-type things like music and painting and belles lettres and not at all important to be snooty or discriminating about things like food and drink. “You talk as if being snooty and discriminating about food and drink was—or were—a new thing.” That’s because it is a new thing! I mean new as in less than a century old, of course. Look, I am trying to keep this essay short at least by my standards, not to mention almost folksily colloquial thereby, so I don’t want to get bogged down in the fifteen-thousand word digression that would actually be required to prove my point. So let me just hand you a blank prescription or blanket recommendation to take a quick shufti or dekko or gander at any document of everyday life hailing from before the middle of the twentieth century and try to find any sort of detailed information about any sort of victual or culinary preparation therein. I guarantee you you will search in vain. Take Pepys’s diary, for instance. In virtually every entry he’s exclaiming that he’s just had the best lobster or the best chine of beef or the best venison pasty “in my life” but that’s all he says about the dish in question. From this diary you will learn a great deal about how the English navy of the 1660s was managed and organized—probably, indeed, much more than you ever wanted to know; and you will learn a fair amount about how music and stage-plays were performed during the Restoration, but you won’t learn a gosh-damned thing about what went into the making of a first-rate Restoration venison pasty, and indeed, if you aren’t up on your Cornish cuisine you may conclude that a venison patsy is some sort of kinky edible nipple-covering. Of course Pepys’s diary is a very old example that I ideally should at least concatenate with the correspondence of some World War II general or Golden-Age movie star, but it is still on the whole a very good example in showing that one’s degree of enjoyment of food need bear no proportion to one’s degree of expertise therein. People have always enjoyed food and in fact enjoyed it more than pretty much anything else (yes, including “sex”). But at least in the Anglosphere, it is only very recently that they have prided themselves on having a Michelin-starred chef’s-cum-industrial chemist’s-eye view of it. David Riesman documents the very beginnings of the trend in the 1940s in The Lonely Crowd. It was back then that Americans started finding—or affecting to find--the Boston Cookbook-type “comfort food” (turkey, roast beef, baked and mashed potatoes, etc.) a trifle bland and ethnically lackluster and started going out of their way to spice up their dinner menus with such exotic fare as veal Parmesan and tossed salads. Then in the 1960s Julia Child came along and put French cookery on the map—i.e., made it bad form among would-be civilized Americans to be ignorant of the difference between a quiche and a soufflé and so forth. A further turn of the rack-wheel of enforced meta-culinary snobbery took place in the 1980s with the coinage of the awful neologism “foodie,” which authorized the out-seeking of hithero unexplored cuisines as a full-fledged pastime. This was when “going out for sushi” became a thing even for relatively ill-heeled people aspiring to be yuppies and Szechuan started being regarded as the only authentic kind of Chinese food (presumably because Hong Kong, the birthplace of the previously hegemonic Cantonese style, was still a British colony whereas Szechuan [or as we are now obliged to spell it, “Sichuan”] was sited within the borders of Red China)—so it was out with salutarily insipid Anglo palate-friendly dishes like chicken chow mein and moo goo gai pan and in with lashings of five-alarm-fiery Kung Pao Chicken and spicy pork bellies, not to mention that horrible soup consisting of nothing but tofu (tofu! Ugh! Doesn’t the very sound of its English translation, bean curd, put you off your lunch?) steeped in hot sauce. And about fifteen years ago we reached a kind of heat-death of absurdity in meta-culinary absurdity, wherein the most prosaic of “traditional” Anglo-American foodstuffs are fetishized but only in “funky, offbeat” (i.e., unsightly and inedible) “takes” thereon that cost a fortune, and on the other hand only the most arcane and at the same time most barbarously prepared and unappetizing “ethnic” cuisine counts as “authentic.” One is now expected to shell out a Jackson or two for a single cupcake, a confection that in my infancy was regarded as but the shabbiest of pis allers for a piece of proper birthday cake. In my late-1970s tykedom, if you found yourself eating a cupcake at one of your “little friends’” fetes, you could take for granted that you weren’t part of his inner circle of schoolmates. And now you are permitted to have a hamburger only if the patty has been “smashed” into a preparation effectively indistinguishable from beefsteak tartare (because no civilized person eats beef that has been cooked past rare, right?) or wrapped in a leaf of lettuce in lieu of a bun (because one mustn’t consume a single calorie of “carbs”!). Nowadays, to establish one’s bona fides as a connoisseur of Latin-American cuisines it no longer suffices to frequent those dreary waiterless Mexican restaurants where they brazenly squeeze the refried beans out of a plastic envelope; no, one must dine on carryout Colombian cookery from a food truck or repurposed check-cashing site, cookery that seems to be centered on the very dregs of American junk food like hot dogs (not chorizo sausages: dishonest-to-badness perros calientes) and crinkle-cut French fries. I find all of this extremely tiresome because my own gustatory preferences are essentially identical to what they were thirty years ago. Mind you, I’m not about to say that these preferences have “frozen” or are “in a state of arrested development” or that I am meta-culinarily speaking “stuck in the 1990s” or that I am “a meta-culinary dinosaur,” because the very notion that one’s taste in something like food should “evolve” is ridiculous and because I think these preferences of mine are entirely estimable. And in saying that I think they are entirely estimable I mean that they are informed by as much discrimination as an organ or faculty such as the human tongue or palate is capable of exercising and that they encompass the full range of the very best flavors, textures, and so forth that the pseudo-art of cookery has hitherto presented to that organ or faculty. I happen, for example, to be especially fond of sandwich-cut top-round roast beef, and I reckon there is no finer cut or preparation of animal flesh to be found on earth. To be sure, I know that top round makes for a rather tough steak, but to my mind, the steak is a grossly overrated genre of butchery. I daresay indeed that when it has been properly roasted and judiciously seasoned and cut to just the right thickness to supply a layer of sandwich filling, top-round deli roast beef makes for a more richly flavored and textured culinary experience than does the most expensive New York Strip steak or filet mignon from the kitchen of the most Michelin-star studded restaurant in New York or Paris. And yet my enthusiasm for top-round sandwich-sliced roast beef must yield pride of place to my enthusiasm for nachos, for a well-prepared plate or bowl or basket of nachos caresses each and every taste-bud sector of the tongue at once. And the preparation of a good serving of nachos requires at least as much skill as that of a soufflé or a crepe, and it is at least as easy to bungle. How many nearly inedible nacho-servings have I encountered that would have been perfect had it not been for the chef’s failure to master only a single element of the hundreds that go into the composition of such a dish. On one occasion, the chips are exquisitely crisp and fresh, the meat (always either chicken or steak, never ground beef, let alone shrimp [although crab nachos are worth having once in a blue moon, perchance alongside a bottle of Blue Moon]) appropriately shredded and apportioned, the cheese applied in adequately copious amounts and baked to just the right temperature and consistency—and yet the bungler has somehow thought to top the whole thing off with iceberg lettuce! (If nachos must include lettuce [and I could always do without it, and the same a fortiori goes for the much-overrated topping of guacamole], let that lettuce always be of a type resilient enough not to wilt into flavorless slurry under the heat of a forty-watt light bulb.) On another all the ingredients are perfectly satisfactory eo ipso and satisfactorily distributed, but the foul-up has prepared one of them in some way that is completely inimical to the spirit of the dish: he has used cubes of steak instead of slices thereof, or hockey-puck-thick discs of jalapeno pepper instead of tiny fragments thereof. On yet another, he has spoiled a perfect serving by baking it alongside another customer’s god-awful seafood dish and thereby imbued every bite with the nauseating tang of crayfish or calamari. Again I advert to the counterfactual example of the three-star Michelin restaurant: I defy the chef of such a restaurant to produce an even-edible serving of nachos.
Anyway, to revert to the general level: for the gratification of these estimable culinary preferences of mine I need look no further than the culinary offerings of a late-twentieth century-type American supermarket delicatessen or a late-twentieth century-type American sports bar. For my daily home-prepared fare I repair to the nearest late twentieth-century-type supermarket deli (along with the circumambient shelves of the containing supermarket for a smattering of supplementary boxed, canned, and frozen goods), and for holiday fare—for birthdays and reunions with rarely seen friends—I repair directly to the nearest late twentieth-century-type American sports bar. And I daresay that if my budget and living-situation permitted it, I would repair to that there sports bar for lunch or dinner on my lonesome every single day. The late-twentieth century-type American sports bar is for me what the mid-twentieth century-type Viennese coffeehouse was for Thomas Bernhard. Not that I am by any stretch of the imagination “a huge sports fan”; to the contrary, since my earliest bairnhood I have been a huge sports foe (or as huge a one as my never imposingly large corporeal dimensions have allowed me to be [and, to be fair, now that the god-awful time-killer known as “gaming” seems to have overtaken sports-spectation as male America’s favorite pastime, I am almost nostalgic for the days when my father’s monopolization of the television compelled me to sit through entire afternoons of The Wide World of Sports and double-overtime nocturnal NFL games]), but as it happens, no other genre of Lokal can be counted to feature a menu that suits me to the ground (although the above-much discussed family restaurant of the Cracker Barrel or Chili’s type often comes serviceably close enough), and so I am willing to put up with the fifteen fifty-inch screens of televised ball-bandying for the sake of the food. I should also mention that the potational offerings of the sports bar are entirely adequate to my dipsophilic needs—a handful of pale ales and stouts from the bigger regional former microwbrews like Sierra Nevada and Cigar City plus a smattering of lagers from the “legacy” national macrobrews like Budweiser and Miller is all that I require (and all that anyone should require beer-wise, for truth be told in the unfiltered hops-stained teeth of today’s beer connoisseurs, any locally or foreignly sourced eldritch deviation from the four or five basic beer-types is statistically bound to verge on undrinkable). “Well, it sounds like you’re all set, as they say. So then what’s the problem or hitch?” The problem or hitch is that that in the present meta-culinary dispensation of snootiness and perversity the late-twentieth century-type American supermarket delicatessen and late-twentieth century-type American sports bar are the very antipodes or antitheses of hipness—nay, of even borderline meta-culinary respectability. And while the late-twentieth century-type American supermarket delicatessen seems to be in no immediate danger of disappearing (if only because the average American supermarket is still obliged to cater to the unhip as well as the hip [but note well: the average American supermarket is gradually being edged out by such un-American chains as Whole Foods and Aldi’s that either lack delis altogether or have delis centered on un-American foodstuffs]), the late-twentieth century-type American sports bar seems to be on the verge of becoming a culinary dinosaur or dodo. Back in the mid 1990s, when I started eating and boozing on my own in earnest, the sports bar was essentially the default genre of kitchen-equipped bar throughout the United States—not that almost every American kitchen-equipped bar back then styled itself a sports bar (although I suppose a good two-fifths of them did) but that almost every American kitchen-equipped bar not styling itself a sports bar offered a selection of food and drink that was indistinguishable from that of a self-proclaimed sports bar barring (apologies for the awkward but seemingly unavoidable repetition of “bar”) a very few alternative style-justifying variations; thus, an Irish bar was a sports bar that included Guinness stout plus at least one other Irish beer (most often Harp) in its beer list and at least one Irish dish like corned beef and cabbage in its menu (and occasionally substituted potatoes for tortilla chips in its nachos [generally to sufficiently pleasing effect, although I don’t consider potato nachos to be proper nachos at all]); a brewpub was a sports bar that happened to be owned by a local or regional brewery and to serve a half-dozen of that brewery’s beers in lieu of, or alongside, the “legacy” macrobrews’ mainstays, etc. But beginning in the late twenty-oughties at the latest, one started to have to go out of one’s way to dine or sup at a sports bar: in the course of planning a supper or dinner out with friends, one found them initially proposing some newly opened ethnic joint or purveyor of the abovementioned funky, offbeat take on “comfort food” rather than the stone’s-throw-distanced sports bar of yore, and on eagerly turning up at the doorstep of one of one’s own favorite sports bars for a spontaneous happy-hour solitary supper, one found that it had been converted into one of the two just-mentioned types of establishments since one’s previous visit a scant half-year earlier. For the first decade of this epoch, I could count on fairly easy sports-bar access at least during my return visits to Florida thanks to the ubiquity of outlets of the regional chain Beef O’ Brady’s (whose name of course betrays its participation in the Irish pseudo-subgenre), but since about 2020 (when I moved back to Florida from Maryland) Beef O’Bradyses have been dropping like potato-famine victims, and in 2024 the nearest one to me, sited about eight miles down the road on the Keystone-Citrus Park border, closed its doors, leaving me without a single sports bar to aspire to call my local. The former “Beefs”-space stood vacant for nearly a year; then, about three months ago, a Korean barbecue restaurant commenced operations in it. As it happens, I quite like Korean barbecue eo ipso, and indeed for many years in succession I would cheerfully celebrate certain of my Baltimore friends’ birthdays at one of the two or three Korean barbecues nestled cheek by jowl in a rather blightsome four-square-block area of the 21218 ZIP occasionally known as Koreatown (“Koreatown” being a typical example of a Baltimore neighborhood-designation that never manages to take firm hold owing to the circumambient urban disorder), but I have always found that, as with most ethnic food-genres, the circumstances in which it typically must be consumed ultimately make for a very poor culinary bargain. At about thirty dollars a serving it is rather expensive, and while the sauce is certainly distinctively and agreeably spicy, the meat base seems to be at best a half-cut above cheesesteak filling; and the restaurants are not particularly appealing dining-settings on account of their chipped and rickety furniture, squalid unisex bathrooms, and appetite-killing dim fluorescent lighting. So when I first saw the sign of the new Korean barbecue atop the former “Beef’s,’” my reaction was not “Hip, hip, hooray!” but “Oh well, I suppose it could have been worse.” Nevertheless, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the online menu, where I found that this new place offered most of the usual dishes at even higher prices than usual, that it made a proud point of only offering non-alcoholic beverages, and that there was a two-hour time limit at its weekend lunch buffet. Whereupon I peremptorily crossed it off my list of to-be-given-a-try local restaurants. For as far as I’m concerned, no Korean barbecue-meal is complete minus a few bottles of South Korea’s answer to Bud or Miller Lite, OB, and I’ll be darned if I am going to shell out sixty dollars (for there is doubtless a twenty percent minimum gratuity added to the bill despite the minimum table service intrinsic to the buffet format) to submit to a temporal imposition straight out of a Baltimore-ghetto McDonald’s (or, alas, by now, the McDonald’s sited a mere hundred feet due east of the new K-’cue-joint itself [see my follow-up to “Proprietary Names: the Name” for details ]). Still, I don’t doubt that the place will be a massive hit with the Citrus-Parkers and Keystoners, and indeed, within days of my just mentioned menu-gander, while I was awaiting the slicing and packaging of my roast beef and turkey cold cuts at the Shoppes of Citrus Park’s Publix’s Deli, the customer just behind me in line, a bearded quinquagenarian gent, asked me completely out of the blue and semi-breathlessly if I had been to the new Korean restaurant. Whereupon I replied exactly as I thought I was duty-bound to reply: I told him that I had not been to the restaurant but that I had checked out its menu and found that it was expensive. Fortunately I have at long last found a more than perfectly serviceable nearish sports bar: although unhappily sited nearly twice as far away as my old Beef’s, at Gunn and Henderson, culinarily speaking it is happily virtually indistinguishable from it (and distinguishable only in good ways—e.g., in offering wings à la carte and differentiable into drums and flats [a boon to me, an ardent drumophile-cum-flatophobe]), which is hardly surprising, as its owner is a former manager of a Beef O’Brady’s. And happily the place, unlike most restaurants of any sort these days, seems to be doing brisk late-night business to judge by my three visits thereto, although I dare not infer therefrom that we are in the midst of a sports-bar revival, for who is to say that this Beef’s-in-all-but-name is not a sort of life raft for the entire Tampa Bay area’s moribund smattering of sports-bar aficionados?
All of this might be still be easy enough to put up with if people were still discriminating about something other than food, and in particular something worthier of being discriminating about than food. Nowadays (in the words of a friend of mine about whom I am not—or at least not yet--at liberty to disclose any particulars), all tourism is food tourism: Americans travel to Europe, for example, not to take in the art in the museums but to take in the food in the restaurants, which tends to mean perversely paying through the nose for something that they could find a cheap exact replica of back in the States. (A year ago another friend of mine while on vacation in Salzburg sent me a picture of a pork schnitzel he was about to consume at some Lokal there; just yesterday, I saw both beef and pork schnitzel on display at my neighborhood Aldi—on display in a hefty cooler dedicated to foodstuffs of Austrian and German origin.) And they fritter away the rest of their leisure time on the gourmandization of even trashier and more infantile cultural goods (which I would of course term “bads” if good English permitted it)—video games, so-called comic book movies, and, among the tiny minority of them who read at all, The Lord of the Rings and its umpteen-thousand knock-offs, and unabashedly pornographic so-called chick lit. Again the reader will protest that this is or should be no skin off my Alpine-altituded nose, that their gourmandization of this cultural trash need not detract an iota from my own enjoyment of cultural treasure, and to the reader’s prospective pleasant surprise, I shall be happy to own that at the most fundamental level and in the most important sense he is absolutely right. I am quite happy to pore over my Shakespeare or Proust while tucking into my roast-beef sandwich or nachos to a soundtrack of Bach or Schoenberg all on my lonesome; my intrinsic enjoyment of my cultural (and culinary) treasure is utterly independent of other people’s approval or disapproval thereof. The problem is that my wherewithal to continue enjoying my cultural and culinary treasure is terrifyingly contingent on certain pecuniary realities and that (and here comes the kicker or clincher) these realities are in turn frightfully contingent on other people’s approval or disapproval of my culinary tastes. And in explaining how and why this is the case, I can concurrently and finally provide an explanation for the title of this essay, or at any rate , for its inclusion of the proper name Bourdieu. You see, the Bourdieu in question is—or was--Pierre Bourdieu, a late twentieth-century French sociologist who specialized in the sociology of taste. His 1988 magnum opus, Distinction (conveniently titled so both in the original French and in English translation), consisted in a great heap of interviews with people hailing from all walks of French life and a breakdown of their taste in culture according to the three main semi-official French designations of social class—the haute bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and the prolétariat. So with respect to music, for example, he showed that to a man and a woman the haute bourgeoisie favored the likes of Beethoven’s string quartets, the petite bourgeoisie classical “pops” fare like Rhapsody in Blue and the Blue Danube, and the proles popular chansons of the Piaff-Aznevoir type. The book presented itself as an objective study, but I found it hard not to read it (as I did during my mid-1990s stint as a graduate student in the humanities) as a combination of ruthless satire of the haute and petite bourgeoisie and a maudlin paean to the prolétariat, and consequently not to fall in love with it—for after all, being a Yank of semi-proletarian origins I stood well without the target range of its satiric shafts (although I could not forebear from feeling a passing shudder of embarrassment on recalling that Rhapsody in Blue was one of my father’s favorite pieces of “classical” music). I recall deriving an especially great deal of mirth from its interview with a certain “grand bourgeois in his element” who claimed that his stereo system was “more precious to him even than food.” The upshot-cum-thesis of the book was that the two bourgeoisie’s taste was nothing but a way of showing that they were superior to the class or classes below them in the hierarchy. During that same mid-90s period I found myself smitten with or by another book, Cultural Capital by the academic literary critic John Guillory, which openly applied Bourdieu’s method to an American phenomenon—the development and promulgation of the so-called Western Literary Canon. Like Bourdieu, Guillory argued that his focal phenomenon was an epiphenomenon of socioeconomic forces—in this case, the production and reproduction of the so-called professional managerial class. In his view, over the course of the twentieth century the list of books taught to American university students had been more or less standardized so that when those students went on to become bureaucrats, middle-managers, doctors, lawyers and so forth they would have a common stock of reference points via which to recognize each other and distinguish themselves from the plebs they were charged with manhandling. But unlike Bourdieu, Guillory did not think of aesthetic artifacts that served the function of socioeconomic discrimination as wholly arbitrary vis-à-vis their intrinsic content. To the contrary, he argued that the specific works that had come to comprise the Western Literary Canon—Hamlet, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, etc.--never would have been included in that canon had they not possessed certainly qualities that transcended their utility as caste-markers (this presumably because effective technocracy depends on thinking that is not narrowly technocratic, although I don’t recall if Guillory ever explicitly asserts as much). Perhaps not quite needless to say, because by the mid-90s I had already spent a great deal of time (specifically a couple of hours a day over the course of about ten years) reading works in the Western Literary Canon, not to mention listening to works in that canon’s approximate aural counterpart, the repertoire of so-called classical music, and derived all sorts of socially otiose enjoyment from that experience (if also a fair amount of equally socially otiose vexation therefrom), I found Guillory’s qualification of his sociological thesis quite appealing and reassuring. At the same time, I reckoned that there was a good deal of truth even to Bourdieu’s most cynical “takes” on so-called high art. (Although perhaps these “takes” should rather be called “philistine” than cynical, for in a video-interview clip I first saw a few months ago, Bourdieu responds to a dithyrambic tribute to Distinction penned by the great Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard by bemusedly shaking his head and remarking “I’m no poet,” thereby splitting the difference in classic philistine fashion between intimating that he is not sophisticated enough to “get” high art and intimating that there is nothing substantive about it to “get.”) It seemed obvious to me that people’s choices in the books they read, the music they listened to, and so forth, were always guided in part and sometimes even entirely by a desire to number, and to be seen as numbering, among the better sort of people, the richer and higher-status sort, and a dread of numbering, or being seen as numbering, among the worse sort, the poorer and lower-status sort; and indeed I could not affirm in good faith that my original “pivots” to classical music and serious literature had been entirely unguided by such desires, even if in my case these desires had been “mediated” (as a sociologist or academic literary critic would have said) by certain aesthetic preferences that had not “mapped on” to the American socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s, inasmuch as I had “pivoted” from rock-type pop to classical music partly out of a palpably impractical yearning to live among polite-dictioned nineteenth-century ladies and gentlemen in full evening dress rather than among profanity-slinging twentieth-century louts in T-shirts and blue jeans, and I had “pivoted” from science-fiction and “fantasy” novels to serious literature partly out of a desire to dissociate myself from the nerds and affiliate myself with some sort of coterie of personable and smartly dressed bohemians (not that any sort of such a coterie existed at my junior-high school). And per Guillory, I could not deny that my then-present pursuit of professional accreditation in the academic study of the humanities was partly actuated by a social-climbing impulse, that I was aspiring to become a university professor partly with the aim of hoisting myself out of my de facto “blue-collar” station in life and up into the ranks of the professional managerial class. And so vis-à-vis my personal relation to the study of the humanities, I arrived at a synthesis of the Bourdiuean and Guilloryian positions. With any luck, I reflected, I will get my PhD and be hired as a professor at an academic department, where I will be surrounded by slightly older versions of the personable and smartly dressed bohemians of my middle-school dreams who for all their outward bohemianism will, like me, be solidly fixed members of the professional managerial class and who will also be seriously interested in talking about literature. And if I don’t get my PhD, and consequently don’t manage to make it into the professional-managerial class, well then, I’ll still have Hamlet and Paradise Lost and the rest ready to hand as worthy objects of contemplation and conversation; and with any luck, I will alight on the company of people outside the academy who want to talk about them. As it turned out, my academic study of literature did not result in my ascent to the professional managerial class via my hiring by an academic department because I dropped out of graduate school at the end of my fourth year—which is to say, after acquiring my master’s degree but before acquiring a PhD. While my decision to drop out was partly motivated by a sense (both mine and that of the faculty) that I was by temperament and ability not suited to certain core duties of academic life–notably, teaching; at least to the seemingly near-infinite extent to which teaching consisted in responding off the cuff to unintelligible or wrongheaded questions from imperturbably smug undergraduates—I believe I could have summoned the will and the skill to surmount this obstacle had my prospective colleagues even roughly tallied with my notions of what a would-be professional scholar and critic of literature should be like. “Don’t get me wrong”: on the whole, they were personable enough, but neither their relation to their subject of study nor to their professional-managerial aspirations seemed to be “organic.” Almost to a man and a woman they seemed to be the future black sheep of wealthy and ancient families from the Middle Atlantic, and New England, and Deep South, younger brothers and sisters of top-flight lawyers, doctors, and investment bankers who had placed themselves on the academic track not out of any enthusiasm for the humanities but out of a sloth-actuated aversion to the workload imposed by the study and practice of the higher-paying professions. In their broader cultural tastes they were virtually indistinguishable from the “yuppies”—and to some extent even the Middle Americans (in 2020s parlance, “Red-Staters”)--of the day: they dutifully took in the latest Spike Lee “joint” or Spielberg action or “issues” flick, eagerly kept up with the prime-time offerings of “Must-See TV,” and closely followed the fixtures of the major-league sports, especially baseball; and they listened either to the “alternative” pop music they had grown up with or the discography of the most illustrious vocal exponents of the so-called Great American Songbook such as Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme. Complementarily (and in hindsight quite refreshingly), they were completely unpretentious on the metaculinary front, wolfing down cheeseburgers and guzzling “legacy” macrobrews no less cheerfully than me. Not that I inferred—or have since inferred--therefrom that their enthusiasm for mainstream bar food arose from ignorance or lack of enthusiasm for more upmarket forms of cuisine, for I assumed (and still assume) that during parental visits they dined at Baltimore’s then-leading sites of traditional haute cuisine such as the Prime Rib and the restaurant at the Harbor Court Hotel, then (and possibly still now) the city’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, and I assumed (and still assume) that during their not-infrequent weekend excursions to Manhattan they did not omit to take in meals at the Big Apple’s derniers restaurateurial cris (for Baltimore did not really start keeping up with the latest culinary trends until, I would guess, the opening of celebrity chef Cindy Wolf’s Charleston, a purveyor of very expensive versions of traditional Deep-Southern food, in, I believe, the very late 1990s); on the other hand, I would not have then said (nor would I say now) that in partaking of mainstream bar food alongside me they were “slumming,” for they seemed to consume that food with genuine gusto and a complete absence of condescension. From this relaxed meta-culinary comportment of my former colleagues, along with certain indicators in the contemporaneous popular culture—for example, the WASP protagonist of Whit Stilman’s 1994 film Bareclona’s paean to a well-cooked hamburger—one may gather that the American “elites” of those days felt far less antagonistic towards their socioeconomically inferior compatriots than those of today, who resile from mainstream bar food like first-generation Central-European vampires from tinned McCormick garlic in their dread of being mistaken for “chuds” from “flyover country.” But not to dwell too intently on the “positives” of those former colleagues of mine: as I have just hinted in the preceding quasi-digression, their one shared sincere and ardent ambition seemed to be to live in New York City, and what they seemed to detest most about an academic career was its tendency to force one to live hundreds or even thousands of miles from that metropolis for years or even decades at a stretch. As far as they were concerned, Baltimore, where our university and academic department were sited, might as well have been Omaha in point of its lifestylistic distance from New York: they would get away to the Big Apple as often as the academic schedule permitted, and in looking ahead to the official starts of their academic careers, they seemed to covet an adjunct position at a third-tier department in New York City, or even elsewhere in the so-called Tristate Area, more ardently than a tenure-track one at a first-tier university in the Midwest. I, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to be living in Baltimore (yes, despite its “quality of life” issues, which at least did not seem to be terribly serious back then), a city that I considered a major upgrade from my native one of Tampa simply because it was a largish city in the Middle Atlantic rather than a smallish one in the New South. And in looking ahead to the start of my own academic career, I coveted even a tenure-track position at even a second-tier university in the Midwest or even the Deep South more ardently than a tenure-track position at a third-tier university on the Upper-West Side or in Greenwich Village, or, rather I started coveting it more, when I thought such a position at such an institution bade fairer to have me “rubbing tweeded elbows” (to quote the director of graduate studies of one of my “safety schools,” with whom I had briefly chatted over the phone after learning that I had been accepted by my top non-safety school) with colleagues with a serious interest in literature and a serious indifference to or scorn for “Must-See TV” and the like; but the longer I rubbed shirt-sleeved or even bare (i.e., because southward of the short sleeves of T-shirts) elbows with those unregenerately desperate would-be New Yorkers, the fouler such a position bade to have me engaging in such tweed-mediated frottage, until at length I concluded that I might as well give over the academic study of literature altogether. At the same time I still felt a vocational dedication to the study of literature tout court. So as far as I was concerned, Guillory had been proved right about those intrinsic qualities of the canonical classics. But as I was at least as far concerned, I needed to keep supporting myself financially. So while continuing to live in Baltimore, which I had grown to feel quite at home in after a certain fashion (yes, despite the “quality of life” issues, although by then these were beginning to seem at least middlingly serious), I temped my way into a menial permanent clerical position (in the old days it would have been call a pink-collar job [i.e., a job of comparably low status to a low-skilled blue-collar one but traditionally performed by women in office settings]) at an agency of Maryland’s state government headquartered in the city. The job was depressing because it placed me in the company and at the beck and call of people far less cultivated even than my former grad school colleagues. But at least the work entailed by it was undemanding enough to allow me to devote plenty of time and thought to my studies, and I flatter myself that over the course of my first decade of employment in that low-status position, I learned more than in the entirety of my educational career from first grade to twentieth (my first year of college being Grade 13, and my last of grad school being Grade 20). I read all of Shakespeare several times over, for example, along with most of Plato and a good bit of Aristotle in English translation, and I became fluent at reading French and German. I also did quite a bit of writing both in the form of essays and vignettes and in translations from the German, and through the magic of the internet I made this writing at least theoretically available to the entire world. As the 20-ouhgties rolled on into the 2010s, this writing of mine, especially the translational portion of it, began attracting a modest amount of notice, and by 2019, I had even secured a publishing contract for one of my translations long enough to fill an entire book. Needless to say, by then I had given over every hope of becoming a full-fledged member of the professional-managerial class. My sole worldly ambition was to upgrade from the rented studio apartment I had been living in since 2003 to a rented one-bedroom apartment. (And the stinking so-called Zoomers have the temerity to grouse about not being able to buy a house immediately on graduating from college, if not high school!) A recent promotion to a slightly less menial position at work, with its attendant modest elevation of my wage schedule, gave me reason to hope, however faintly, that I would be able to effect that upgrade within the following, say, five years. And who knew? (i.e., “Who knows?” adjusted for the pastness of the posing of the question and not, as “Who knew?” seems inescapably to intimate, “How could anybody have known?” [Note to self: remember to place the tense-dependent character of certain idioms on my list of sad commentaries on the English language—perhaps immediately below the absence of a subjunctive of indirect speech and immediately above the lack of any etymological or semantic connection between “lumbago” and “plumbago” in descending rank of sadness.]) Perhaps I would come to earn enough from my published writings to avoid having to downgrade back down to a studio apartment when I retired some ten or fifteen years thence (and consequently took the usual massive pay cut attending the transition from wage-income to pension income). Then 2020 hit, and we all know what happened in 2020. My “story” is a typical one of that year: effectively unusable ancient internet service in my apartment plus the prospective exacerbation of Baltimore’s “quality of life” issues past the threshold of even minimal tolerability (I trust I needn’t explain why the events of that year bade fair to exacerbate them past that point, at least for a Baltimorean in my statistically near-nonexistent situation [a situation vis-à-vis which the reader can presumably “connect the dots” that I have already supplied]) virtually compelled me to move in with my mother back in Florida and work remotely, which I was allowed to continue doing until December of 2022, when even the least “essential” government workers were finally expected to work in person at least a day or two each week. Whereupon I resigned my position, and ever since then I have been effectively incomeless. To be sure, my success as a professional translator has exceeded if not my wildest dreams then at least some of my less tame ones: I have published five book-length translations, three of them “sourced” in the work of a writer who has been named as a “major influence” by three out of the past five Nobel Prize for Literature winners, and one of them in that of “arguably” the most influential Continental-European “intellectual” of the second third of the twentieth century. But my total earnings from these Englishings would not suffice to allow me to live on my own for more than three or four months in succession. Why? Because, as already mentioned, nobody reads proper books anymore, not even books by the latest Nobel Laureates’ idols or the top-shelf twentieth-century intellectuals (even if milliards of people continue to drop the names of such figures [because, after all, it takes neither time nor effort to drop something]); consequently, no financially well-heeled publishing company is interested in commissioning literary translations. Concurrently, my submission of hundreds of applications for pink-collar or “laptop-class” employment has yielded nothing but “crickets” because the Millennial-dominated HR-iate is apparently unwilling to hire a person over the age of fifty, no matter how richly credentialed or experienced he may be, to do anything. Hence my only hope for remunerative work would appear to lie in my insinuating myself into some sort of patronage network. But into exactly whose network am I to insinuate myself, and how? As my political views, such as they are, have come largely by sheer inertia to overlap more extensively with those of the contemporary right than with the contemporary left, at least superficially (for at a deep level they do not overlap at all with those of any extant faction [Is there any such thing as, for example, a movement to de-decimilize the entire Anglosphere’s currency system, to have us all reckoning in pounds, shillings, pence, and guineas as though it were still 1699?, or to reorganize the entire science of medicine along the lines of Galenic principles from the top down?]), and the right-wing “influencers” are constantly banging on about the lack of competent people on “their side,” for a time I cherished some hope of attaining some sort of position at a right-wing think tank. But getting into the good graces of these right- wingers would perforce entail “bonding” with them over shared tastes and interests both positive and negative—that is to say, over both predilections and aversions. On the positive side I have little or nothing to offer, for I have not played a video game of more recent date than the 1994 versions of Alone in the Dark and Sim City (known with even-then “cringy” “retro”-ness as Sim City 2000) or seen a comic-book superhero movie more recent than the second Batman flick (to a screening of which I was dragged entirely against my will). Vis-à-vis the negative side until recently I thought I might enjoy a fair amount of good luck, for the flipside of the right’s notorious (and genuinely contemptible) philistinism vis-à-vis the domain of “paleoculture” has been its equally notorious (but at bottom genuinely admirable) “ugly-American” unpretentiousness in all the non-paleo subdomains of culture—notably, in the subdomain of cuisine. But alas! The Bud Light and Cracker Barrel kerfuffles have conclusively shewn that at least in its highest-brow ranks, the ranks of people with the clout to place other people in think-tanks, the right has become at least as snooty about cuisine as the left ever was.
And as for the left’s current nasal altitude vis-à-vis culinary matters, I realize that, given that the academic Humanities enjoy a reputation as the inner sanctum of leftism and that I have lately praised my former academic colleagues’ refreshing metaculinary unpretentiousness, the reader may be under the impression that at least I am under the impression that the left is in fact less metaculinarily snooty than the right—but the reader must recall that those people were my colleagues well over a quarter of a century ago, and I have since kept sufficiently abreast of the academic humanities to fail to fall prey to any illusion that they have not participated in the general snootification of the metaculinary sphere, and indeed to succeed at forming the impression that they predictably served as ground zero of that snootification, for at a humanities grad-student party I attended in 2012 at the latest (for it is the most recent such party that I can recall attending, and it was in 2012 that I lost my last personal link to Baltimore grad-student life when a then-33-year old male alumnus of my alma mater’s engineering department, thitherto a sedulous attender of such parties [for my alma mater was no exception to the rule about the respective “gender balances” of the “hard sciences” and the humanities], got married and moved to the suburbs), on being strenuously adjured to take a trip to Europe by a young buck, the then-Wunderkind of my former department, and protesting in reply that in order to save up enough money for the journey I would have to substitute lentils and water for my diurnal diet of beer and Subway sandwiches, I was essentially greeted by the same reaction that greeted (or greets) the younker aspiring to join some select social club in Paul Fussell’s Class (basically the U.S.’s avant-la-lettre answer to Bourdieu’s Distinction [which it antedates by four years], although because its author claimed that it had been written tongue-in-cheek it has never been more than joshingly recognized as such a counterpart-cum-prefigurer) when he tells (or told) the club’s “gatekeeper” that his city of birth is Truth or Consequences, New Mexico—viz., a muttered “I see” accompanied by a disconcerted lowering of the eyes. You see, in those days I gratified my jones for delicatessen-sourced fare almost entirely via a 24-hour Subway sandwich shop sited a mere two blocks from my above-mentioned studio apartment. Indeed, back then my sole meal of the day (or, rather, night, or, perhaps, rather, morning, for I took full advantage of the restaurant’s schedule by repairing thither no earlier than the larger of the small hours) consisted of two footlong Subway sandwiches—generally, a cold-cut roast beef or turkey sub and one of the transient specialties like the Applewood barbecue pork sub—washed down with liberal lashings of beer (generally a “bomber”—i.e., 24-ounce bottle—or two of Sierra Nevada Torpedo Pale Ale purchased from the liquor store sited a further two blocks down the street from the Subway); and, indeed, my dietary regimen would doubtless have continued to center on Subway fare for the duration of my residence in Baltimore, had not in ca. 2017 the city’s “quality of life issues,” by then verging on dire, intolerably begun to seep into the premises of that particular Subway franchise—which means, of course, that absent that seepage I might very well have still been subsisting entirely on Subway sandwiches to this very day (for absent the direness and pervasiveness of the “quality of life” issues I might very well have continued residing in Baltimore to this very day; although I own that even in that absence, pecuniary considerations might have since driven me to seek alternatives to Subway for my nutriment, for the chain’s supposed “deal” of “six inches for six dollars” [as against yesteryear’s “two six-inch subs for six dollars”] would better be termed a “steal” [i.e., for the fat cats at Subway HQ, not for us poor punters]). But woe betide me if any right-wing intelligent whose patronage I am seeking should get wind my metaculinary satisfaction with Subway, for in the eyes and bellies of today’s right-wing intelligentsia Subway is immeasurably downmarket even of Cracker Barrel. Why, Matt Walsh recently devoted a segment of his show to tendering a ranked list of the nationwide submarine style-sandwich purveyors, a list on which Subway figured at the very bottom. Subway’s bread, he said, was not even real bread but rather a sort of sugary paste heated into a vaguely bread-like consistency, and its sandwich fillings but of bits of discarded offal and gristle. Of course the formula “Food-type A purveyed by Corporation B isn’t real Food-type A” has always been a topos of the metaculinary discourse of the left, specifically of the valetudinarian domain of that discourse, the domain that concerns itself with panicking about the supposed disastrous health-effects of the most accessible, enjoyable, and affordable ingestibles, and as Walsh’s couching of his denunciation of Subway in that topos intimates, the right have lately become at least as hysterical and finicky as the left ever have been in the valetudinarian metaculinary discursive domain. (In all fairness to Walsh, I must acknowledge that to his credit he has also recently asserted that even the best upmarket ethnic restaurant is not nearly sufficiently superior in point of culinary quality to a “two-star” “family” restaurant like Chili’s to justify the much higher price tags of its menu-items.) Sure, in salutary contrast to the left, they don’t expect you to go vegan and eat soybeans and tofu instead of beef; in fact, they fairly idolize beef as a golden calf (only one made of real calf’s meat, not gold), but it’s got to be a special kind of beef: U.S. bred-and-raised, hormone-free, organically grown grass-fed, and ideally of some modish recherché cut known as Waygu (how a cut of beef with a manifestly foreign [Japanese?] name came to be so highly prized by the MAGA set is quite beyond me); otherwise, it will give you turbo-colon cancer and turn you and your descendants to the ninth generation into non-elective transsexuals. They are forever whinging about the evils of “processed foods,” a term that is pure, organic, hormone-free bullshit, for as everyone knows or should know, any sort of food that does not take the form of a hunk of meat freshly hewn from the animal or a vegetable freshly torn from the earth is perforce a processed food. Baking, boiling, seasoning, mixing, fermenting, and pickling are all processes, whether effectuated according to the methods of the latest “deep state”-funded research labs or those of third-millenium-B.C. Mesopotamia. Above all this new valetudinarian right cannot abide seed oils, a term that apparently superscribes all frying media apart from beef tallow and lard, including the legendarily beneficent olive oil. Their chief bogeyman among the seed oils is canola oil, otherwise and originally known as rapeseed oil (a linguistic fact-tidbit that they are forever citing for rhetorical effect while either artlessly or disingenuously omitting to mention that there is no etymological connection between rape in the sexual-assaultive sense and the rape of rapeseed, which is derived from the Latin word rapus, meaning “turnip”). In mingled horror and outrage, they decry canola oil’s use in cookery since the early twentieth century on the grounds that it was initially employed solely as a lubricant of industrial agricultural machines like tractors, which may for aught I know be true (the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary [1990], in which I found the just-parenthetically cited etymology defines rape-oil as “an oil made from rape-seed and used as a lubricant and in foodstuffs”), but even if it is true, it is entirely beside the point of the question of the safeness or harmfulness of frying one’s Waygu beefsteak in rapeseed oil in 2025, for it is not as if a chemical’s efficacy in a non-human setting automatically precludes its salutary absorption by the human organism, as the “online right” should be the very first to know, they having rightly decried the impertinence of the “mainstream media’s” derisive rejection of a certain pharmaceutical preparation as a treatment for the “Wuhan flu” on the grounds that the drug had been invented for use as a “horse medicine.” But even if the right are absolutely right about seed-oils and all the processes attending the preparation of modern foodstuffs, they will find no champion of their valetudinarianism in the present writer, for as I have already hinted, I am a believer in the old-fangled Galenic theories of medicine—not a narrow-minded “paleo” believer therein, mind you, for I am disinclined to reckon à la a medieval physician that the human organism’s chemistry is reducible to the interaction of the so-called four humors, but a broad-church believer therein, inasmuch as I am inclined to reckon that human illnesses generally result from a repletion of certain substances (including many that in modest amounts are essential to so-called homeostasis) and that good health largely consists in purging one’s body of the excess thereof, a believer therein of the type that most Occidentals were until well into the twentieth century, as is attested by the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s choice of the Feydeau farce On purge bébé as the subject of his first sound film and by the viability of enema jokes in a sitcom as recently produced as Seinfeld. Hence, I am inclined to reckon that however rife with toxic preservatives the mainstream of the American food supply may be, these preservatives’ toxicity can be preempted by simply allowing them to work themselves out of the body through “the usual channels” (if need be with the aid of some anodyne laxative like magnesium citrate) along with the foodstuffs in which they are embedded. Accordingly, during my weekly trips to the supermarket I base my purchasing-choices entirely on a combination of taste and cost and never glance at a product’s list of ingredients before selecting it. The result is invariably a shopping-cart receipt guaranteed to appall the bejeezus out of any potential right-wing pal or patron. I have no idea where my deli roast beef is “sourced,” but I assume it is some some hormone-happy farm sited in a foreign country because it is of the Boar’s Head brand, and Boar’s Head is the nation’s most popular retailer of deli meats, and I assume my frozen Skyline chili is heavily processed and chock-full of preservatives because it tends to have an expiration date more than two years in the future. Why, as if by way of hoisting dayglo-yellow colors by way of making myself a maximally visible target to every freebooter and privateer in the valetudinarian ocean, I even regularly purchase boxes of that most notorious of all “icons” of preservative-ridden phoniness (save perhaps Wonder Bread, which I might very well try out as a sandwich-jacket if I ever happened to espy a loaf of it, but the Wonder Bread brand seems to have gone the way of the dodo, or, rather, the Twinkie [i.e., to have been extirpated from the supermarket shelves entirely under pressure from the valetudinarian lobby, only to make a brief comeback after nominal health-minded revisions by the manufacturer, only to vanish yet again under pressure of neglect by the original consumer base, who understandably found the reformed version about as appealing as flat, room-temperature New Coke]), namely, Velveeta Shells and Cheese! And why not? For it seems to me that were Ben Franklin alive today, he would find himself at least entertaining the notion of opting for Velveeta shells and cheese instead of beer in phrasing his famous proof that “God loves us and wants us to be happy.” And for all my already-much-discussed love of beer, I am not sure that it is a better illustration of Providential benevolence than Velveeta shells and cheese. (Here, for self-interest’s sake [i.e., for the sake of propagating any fact about VS&C whose wider circulation lessens the likelihood of its falling under the barbarian valetudinarian axe] it behooves me to point out, although the ostension in question cuts against the grain of my argument, that VS&C actually has a rather modest shelf lifespan of three or four months, such that I am obliged with more than figuratively gritted teeth to forgo many a two-for-one deal on VS&C lest I end up with a cabinet-load of expired boxes of the stuff [for owing to my already-much-discussed living situation, I cannot treat myself to a meal of VS&C more than twice a month {i.e., because its preparation requires the stovetop-boiling of a quart-and-a-half of water and hence a massive expenditure of my jealously rationed kitchen time}].) If the valetudinarian subdomain of right-wing metaculinary discourse gave any sign of being sincerely motivated by concern about personal health one could at least respect it after a certain fashion, inasmuch as I am something of a valetudinarian myself in my own Galenic way; and indeed, in that case I might even contrive to work out some sort of modus vivendi with it (although in the light of the costliness of domestically raised Waygu beef etc. that is a very big—or little?--might), for it is not as if I have a positive passion for seed oils and preservatives, such that I would crave their absence from my diet; but the date of the domain’s genesis alone makes it eyeburstingly plain that its valetudinarianism is but a stalking-horse for a host of political axes to grind (and no, I am not mixing metaphors here, for my second metaphor’s master-vehicle is not axes to grind but host, and a host is a kind of army—i.e., a group of hunters of men—although I own that it would take a mighty big horse [perchance a Trojan-sized one {such that might I as well recast my stalking horse as a Trojan one? (Naah! For once one starts to picture those axes climbing out of the horse, the whole conceit looks very silly)}]—to conceal an entire army). For it (the domain) came into being out of the blue (or, rather, per our current bizzaro political color schema, red) in the spring or summer of 2022, when the national controversy over the vaccine for the “Wu-flu” was at its hottest and fiercest, when the Biden administration was trying to impose a nationwide so-called vaccine mandate that would have required every American who worked, or was looking to work, at an organization bigger than a [your favorite genre of small business-shop here] to get the jab. The right, especially the Evangelical-Protestant faction thereof, creditably opposed the mandate for all sorts of commonsensical and legally well-founded reasons. The left, on the other hand, went for it like gangbusters; they had no choice but to because they were after all the pro-science faction, and the vaccine was presented to everyone as the greatest scientific breakthrough ever. Even those among them who were privately skeptical about the vaccine’s hesitancy or safety fanatically championed the mandate for fear of being lumped in with the science-hating, Bible-thumping “chuds,” the would-be banners of the theory of evolution from school textbooks, the believers in “young-earth creationism” (even if they ultimately despised and dreaded this sub-faction of the right less for its anti-scientism than for is opposition to abortion and so-called gay marriage). In reaction, the right felt obliged to signal the vitality of their opposition to the left by dissociating themselves from the consumption of any drugs or foodstuffs tainted by the most recent designer-chemicals of the pharmaceutical industry, and from there it was “an easy transition” to the abjural of all foodstuffs containing substances in use only since the early twentieth century. And caeteris paribus, being no fan of anything modern, I would be at least imperfectly happy to go along with them, but the caetera, particularly the caeterum of cost, are decidedly not para, and I am not about to bankrupt myself merely for the sake of “owning the libs.” And yet, of course, I am precluded from casting my meta-culinary fortunes with the left, because they retain their classic horror of meat and dairy products (even if they are perfectly capable of quelling that horror long enough to consume an authentic serving of Colombian beanie-weenies) and because, as mentioned far above (and allusively re-mentioned), they are now snootier than ever towards “middlebrow” American cuisine. In any case, I don’t want to have anything to do with the left qua prospective commensalists, as I no longer have anything to chat with them about over dinner. I have no interest in railing against “Cheeto Hitler’s” latest incursions on “our democracy,” and I am not competent to descant on Hollywood’s or Netflix’s latest turgid iterations of the god-awful televisual and cinematic hits of the “boxed set” micro-epoch (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, The Office, etc. [all of which I detested even when they were new, and all of which, incidentally, are likewise lauded with tears of nostalgia by today’s right {who correctly decry the “wokeness” of more recent productions but fail to see that even if these films’ and series’ “agendas” were “based as f**k” they would still be fatally vitiated by their participation in the post-late-1990s aesthetic of fatuous gigantism. For pace my strictures on digital film in an earlier essay, most of the depravations of the digital era were foretokened by an aesthetic cataclysm that suddenly and unaccountably befell the entire realm of movie-making in the late 1990s Virtually every film and TV show made after this cataclysm, notwithstanding even the thinnest shoestring-budgeted “art house” offering, exudes an air of bombast and agoraphobia. That the cataclysm was powerful enough to override even such nominally style-defining determinants as identity of production team may be seen via a comparison of Merchant and Ivory’s 1984 warmly lyrical adaptation of Henry James’s Bostonians with their coldly prosaic 2000 adaptation of the same author’s Golden Bowl. It is really quite extraordinary how natural and gemütlich the facture of even the most notorious “turkeys” antedating the catastrophe by only a few years (e.g., Cop and a Half and The Jerky Boys) is by comparison with that of any movie or series postdating it}]). And the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for any prospective commensalist on the right: I have no common conversational ground with them because I gave over reading J.R.R. Tolkien shortly after “transitioning” from shorts to trousers nearly fifty years ago and I have played no video game of more recent invention than Sim City 2000 (which, despite its millennium-straddling name, dates from 1994). And if I were to mention Beethoven or Shakespeare, let alone Proust or Samuel Johnson, to a member of either faction, I would be bound to be met with a nonplussed and utterly incurious rhetorical query of “Who he?”
And now that I have fully limned the confines of my present meta-cultural impasse, I can at last fully expatiate on the “trap” portion of the title of this essay. For you see, I cannot but think of my present and to all appearances permanent predicament as a trap engineered and set by Pierre Bourdieu inasmuch as, while Bourdieu may have been at best half-right about the cultural artifacts of thirty to fifty years ago, in the long run he has been proved right about cultural artifacts “across the board.” Such cultural artifacts as now enjoy any presence in the Occidental Kulturschaft are manifestly deficient in intrinsically arresting or absorbing properties, and this deficiency is no bar to their enjoyment of such a presence, because their sole function consists in the demarcation of politically mediated socioeconomic distinctions. The current Occidental Kulturschaft can get away with centering itself on an organ as undiscriminating as the tongue because nobody any longer has any interest (in either of the two principal senses of the word) in lingering over anything any longer than it takes for a mouthful of food to pass from the lips to the gullet. A single glance at a person’s Google restaurant-review list or Instagram food-tourism gallery suffices to inform today’s Americans where he stands in the socioeconomic pecking order; upon taking that glance they are ready to cry, “Check please!” What is to become of me qua paleo-cultural-snob in consequence of this terminal coarsening of the Kulturschaft I know not. Via my retardataire culinary habitus, I have rendered myself permanently unemployable by the “laptop class” (or whatever they call themselves now that most of them do almost all their keyboard work on their phones), and at fifty-three I am already too corporeally decrepit to take up any “blue-collar” occupation. And as for the option of “joining ’em because I can’t beat ’em,”—i.e., the option of more than figuratively swallowing Waygu beef or Colombian beanie-weenies and the like with the aim of convincing today’s “foodies” that I am one of them—my slenderness of financial means precludes my availing myself of that option for more than a year or two; hardly enough time to allow myself to establish monetarily rewarding connections with any of those sub-sybaritc louts. And so I suppose that if it please God to preserve my life until I have spent my last three dollars on that last box of Velveeta shells and cheese, I shall round out my days as a “rough-sleeping” vagrant or a ward of the state (though God alone knows which state). In the meantime I continue to while away the non-gustatory portion of my existence reading Samuel Johnson, David Hume, the King James Bible, Thomas Aquinas, et al. and listening to Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Schoenberg, et al. (and writing about all of them) in total solitude. But with each passing day, I pursue these pursuits with an ever-increasing sense of futility. For after all, when I say that these artifacts are possessed of intrinsic qualities, I am mainly thinking of relatively intrinsic qualities. For after all, every cultural artifact is inalienably embedded in the historical moment of its origination and therefore cannot help pointing backwards and forwards to the state of the Weltgeist at preceding and succeeding historical moments, and it also cannot help pointing backwards and forwards towards the past and future history of its reception by readers, listeners, et al. What is the point in my thinking and writing about the cultural artifacts of the past if I must resign myself to a future in which they are sought out and appreciated not merely by hardly anyone but by absolutely no one, not merely mostly but completely abandoned in favor of a culinary canon that occupies every square inch of the cultural landscape? But even more significantly, what is the point of thinking and writing about them if they are ultimately but so many pieces of a breadcrumb trail leading to the present cuisine-besotted historical moment and its even more cuisine-besotted successor moments? In every diplomatic reception and artist’s soiree in Henry James (a man whose corporeal girth surely betrays that he was at least as passionate about food as about art), in every minuet by Haydn and Mozart (for Dick Wagner, although himself no mean contributor to the culinarization of culture [recall, for example, Hagen’s call to “slay the biggest ox” for a wedding feast in Götterdämmerung, and the entire meta-convivial atmosphere of Die Meistersinger], was clearly onto something when he said one could hear the “rattling of crockery” in Mozart’s music); nay, in every occurrence of the word “breakfast” in Shakespeare, I now aurally and olfactorily discern the primeval grumblings of the collective human tummy aching for the moment when humankind need never do anything but eat and drink. It would seem that for centuries history has been preparing for Good Ranchers and GrubHub; that in nosably destroying they nauseatingly fulfill.
THE END
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