Stop Asking For The Cheap Stuff- and No Billionaire Earned All That Money.

Courtesy of Eater SF- We've got a scoop on some local pasta supply companies trying to spin pedestrian product as affordable rather than simply... uninspiring? I don't want to say their product is bad, because I've eaten it and it's not. A major part of what makes restaurants appealing is scale- the ability to make more flavor than a home kitchen because more time and resources are devoted. These pasta joints just aren't very interesting. The pasta they sell is solid, but the composed dishes are no trick to replicate in part or in full, even with standard grocery store items.

But that's not the issue, not to me. What upsets me most is the approach and the mindset behind the concept.

"...the hospitality industry needs to figure out how to provide an inexpensive restaurant experience for customers since there’s certainly an audience for it. 'With the approachable, priced-less restaurant experience, there’s just an opportunity there that’s unserved'..."

Utterly absurd. There's such blatant desperation from struggling industries to reestablish the mindset of pre-pandemic ‘normalcy’. They aim to distract the general public from the fact that everything was already terrible- and that 'affordability' was treated as a selling point instead of more rightly as a warning sign.

'An inexpensive restaurant experience' is, to my mind, a cultural hazard. People get the idea that X or Y should be cheap, and then have the temerity to act surprised when things become popular, prices go up, and quality goes down. 

In short: Prepared food is a luxury item. Behave accordingly.

However, the notion of prohibitive expense is also deliberately engineered. The inability to have sufficient free time for one’s own cooking (or to garner the funds to properly compensate hugely underappreciated food industry staff) is almost entirely the fault of universally inadequate, deliberately hamstrung wages, salaries, and other compensation.

Such overarching systemic flaws come from the efforts of those who possess gratuitous, superfluous wealth and entirely undue influence. Too much hoarded at the top, too much attention aimed at the bottom, and too little attention to the social and cultural obligation to provide a given quality of life.

Fixing all of this is easy. It just requires the willingness to actually commit. It means making some very wealthy people very unhappy and less wealthy, but that's worth doing any day that ends in 曜日.