Talking Out Of Turn

Imagine with me if you will that food is free, and what you get to eat depends on where you go. For example, there are a number of all-you-can-eat restaurants around; some serve mostly fast food, which is fine once in a while but when eaten too much makes you fat and sick. Some are all health food, which is good for a while but staying there makes you a little gaunt and weak (and feeling like you would kill for a cheeseburger). Some are little more than vending machines—but the point is, all the food is essentially free, you just have to go there to eat it. These restaurants, oddly enough, are called “churches.” Well, you can get little snack samples in the mail, but that would be the exception to the rule.

Now imagine that many people eat at a few large restaurants that have been around a long time (most of them are Italian, or at least have something to do with Rome), and word has gotten out that they are serving old food that will poison you, slowly but surely. Most people who like those big old restaurants don’t believe a word of it, but a few do believe it, and stop eating there.

The ones that left the big old restaurants mostly find other restaurants that adhere to the health guidelines more strictly, but some entirely stop eating in normal restaurants and hang out at trendier places where they eat food that is radically different in taste and texture but is still essentially the same ingredients as they were getting in the big old restaurants. These people claim not to be actually needing food anymore; they are beyond food now, or they doubt that food is really necessary or helpful. This post is not about them.

Most serious gourmands protest the poisonous content of the Roman restaurants, and are generally known as protestors (or even Protestants). They eat in smaller chains or independent restaurants. Some are truly excellent, and some are more like the nicer chains. For every four-star restaurant, there are quite a few Applebee’s and hundreds of McDonald’s. There are a few smaller chains that actually serve food with a higher poison content than the Roman restaurants, including prominent ones based in Salt Lake City and Brooklyn. One notes that many of the more poisonous little chains have very aggressive marketing campaigns. Some of them are not only serving poisonous food, but some have noticed that it seems to be highly addictive as well.

Every restaurant, whether they be chain or independent, claims to have the original recipe for the best food in the world. Some claim that they are the only place where you can eat this food; others really don’t care whether you eat there or not, and claim that all restaurants are equally good, as long as you think the food tastes good. Many are in the middle, most admitting that there are other restaurants where you can get food that is almost this good, but none admitting that there is a better restaurant anyplace else.

One man, who had his own problems with the food in a couple of different restaurants, assumed that all restaurants were like this, and decided to start his own restaurant. He did what all the others did, claiming to have found the original recipe. He also claimed that there was more or less poison in everybody else’s food. And to top it all off, he only prepared granola. He spiced it up every now and again, and sometimes painted it different colors with food coloring. He didn’t tell anybody, but he did go and get food from other restaurants, some large, some small, and garnish his granola with it, sometimes. He told everybody who came into his restaurant that he alone had food that was worth eating, and while he would tell people when asked that they could prepare this food just as well as he could, he tended to imply that it was unlikely that they would ever master it the way he had. He broadened his claims as the years went on; he accused all the other restaurants of being Italian restaurants, he repeated over and over that his food tasted better and nourished more than any other food available, and he vilified anybody who turned up their nose at granola or got sick of it eventually. He opened a second restaurant halfway across the country and moved there to maintain it.

While the second restaurant was open, a young man who was an extremely picky eater (not from having too good of taste, but because he only liked very bland or sweet food, nothing complicated) started eating at his restaurant. He thought the granola was very nourishing indeed, and he seemed to grow stronger from eating it. He didn’t have enough experience to know that the garnish was coming from other restaurants, and he excused the food coloring and other little tricks of the restaurant trade as being necessary to keeping people here, eating the good food, rather than going anyplace else and being poisoned. Eventually the young man started covering the lunch menu while the old man handled dinner, and after a few years, the old man decided to go back to his old restaurant and leave the new one in the young man’s care.

Unfortunately, the young man wasn’t prepared to handle all the objections to an all-granola diet. Some people recognized that there was more than just granola there, and complained about that. Some people thought the menu should be seriously expanded. Some people just hated his cooking and wanted the old man back. The new restaurant didn’t do so well, but the old man wasn’t concerned, because the first restaurant was thriving and taking all his time and energy. As time went on, the young man became more convinced of an all-granola diet, and kept cutting back on the food coloring and garnish. He didn’t know where to get the garnish anyway. He now only ate his own granola, and he started to get very sick indeed. He saw signs that the other patrons were getting sicker. He tried to ask the old man’s advice, but the old man told him to paint the granola again and use the garnish, and he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He thought the granola was the important thing.

Eventually he was convinced that he needed to get some training as a cook. The problem couldn’t be the granola, he reasoned; it must be the preparation. He took a class in basic food preparation. It taught him about food in general, and he was able now to read the original recipes better than he ever had before. And eventually, since he hadn’t listened to the old man in a long time, he began to realize that the original recipes called for far more than just granola. There was all sorts of nourishing food to be had, and as he realized this, and he saw the specific nutritional needs that weren’t being met with his regular patrons, he started, very carefully, to add things to the granola—a side salad here, a bit of cheese there, the occasional bouillon cube.

Suddenly things happened very quickly. A few of the patrons immediately stopped being sick and started showing signs of recovery. A few picked out all the additions and stuck to the granola. All the patrons had continued to have granola mailed to them from the original restaurant and its owner, but gradually, all but a very few stopped those deliveries.

Eventually the young man decided that he wasn’t even going to claim that this was a granola restaurant anymore. The old man had been loudly touting his granola gospel, and finally the young man and the patrons just decided that the old granola recipes were not going to be the main course anymore. In a few months granola was almost completely gone from the menu.

However, there was a problem; the young man himself wasn’t getting well. He was now preparing better food, but it still wasn’t great food, because he didn’t know what great food was; he was preparing straight from the recipe book but he couldn’t tell by taste if the food was right or not. He had never actually tasted great food himself. He asked if he could take some time off from the restaurant and sample some other restaurants. The patrons gave him leave. He read up quite a bit on what to expect from good restaurants, and he knew what the recipes should look like, as far as he could tell.

He went to the first restaurant, and liked it so much that he never got to try another one. The food was really, really good. He went back and announced that a place that started out as a granola restaurant, and never transitioned to being a full-service restaurant, wasn’t going to magically become one overnight, so everybody was going to have to start thinking of his restaurant as a vending machine and start looking for someplace to eat full-time. As for him, he never stopped eating at the place he found (two chefs and patrons who themselves were the waiters and busboys and hosts, and food that wasn’t too rich but was extremely satisfying).

He didn’t count on the reaction of his old patrons, though. Some admitted that they needed to find a better restaurant. He eventually stopped serving food at all and just brought those little packets of cheese and crackers whenever they opened, to try to convince the patrons that they needed to go someplace else.

One night it was very clear that anybody who stayed was going to starve to death. It was decided to shut down the restaurant. The young man was sad, but happy that he was able to point people to decent food, instead of killing them with granola their whole lives.

The really sad thing was, there were still people in the end who refused to go to another restaurant. They decided to go home and keep eating their granola deliveries from the old man at the first restaurant. They were very unhappy when the young man boarded up the windows, but he kept pointing around him, as did the other patrons: “Look around! There are thousands of restaurants! They’re not all Italian restaurants! You don’t have to eat at the one I’m patronizing! Go anywhere! Try some different ones!” But they had believed the lie, that all restaurants served poison except the granola-only restaurants. They never believed that the old man had gotten his garnish from other restaurants. And they never realized that essentially the granola they liked had many of the same ingredients as the Roman food.

And they are now unhappy and starving, surrounded by food that is perfectly good, because they have been taught an aversion to all real food.