by Matt Siegel
But just as with harvest festivals (and Hansel and Gretel, and Adam and Eve), there was a rub: though these utopias existed year-round, their locations were cleverly hidden, and even if you did find them, you had to swim through an ocean of pig shit96 for seven years to reach them or eat your way through mountains of porridge three miles thick—essentially suggesting that there was no such thing as a free lunch.
Some tales reinforced this point using reverse psychology; for example, the same text that praised the loose women of Luilekkerland ends by reiterating that it’s a great place to live—as long as you’re a debauched vagabond and champion rogue who wants to waste his life away:
There is nothing more disgraceful in that country97 than behaving virtuously, reasonably, honorably, and respectably and wanting to earn a living with one’s hands. Anyone leading such a virtuous and upright life is hated by everyone and eventually banished from the country. . . . On the other hand, those who are gruff, coarse, and foolish—and, moreover, either cannot or will not learn—such people are held in high regard. Whoever is found to be the biggest good-for-nothing, the most untrustworthy, rudest, most dull-witted, and moreover the laziest, most debauched vagabond and champion rogue—such a person is proclaimed king. And whoever is merely coarse and stupid is made a prince. . . .
The biggest wine guzzlers or beer quaffers, who think of nothing but swigging and swilling and keeping their throats moist from dawn to dusk, will be elevated to the rank of count. And lazy daydreamers who like nothing better than to sleep the livelong day are treated in those parts as refined noblemen. If here in this country there are any prodigal children who intend to display such manners as those written of above—by abandoning all pretense to honor, virtue, honesty, and civility, not to mention wisdom and knowledge—then these uncouth louts should go to that land, where, upon their arrival, they will undoubtedly be esteemed and respected.
So, as with Carnival, the hero was eventually revealed to be not the person who sought adventure, riches, power, or personal freedom but the person who stayed at home and ate gruel—because someone had to be there to work the fields and plant the seeds for the next harvest, both literally and figuratively.
And this is really the only thing that’s changed in the last two thousand years. People still celebrate the solstice by exchanging gifts, lighting fires, closing schools, feeding the poor, and gathering to feast—only instead of the jolly fat man having to die at the end to signify moderation and a return to balance, we now sit on his lap and leave him cookies.
Chapter 8
The Choices of a New Generation
Pour avoir assez, il faut avoir trop.1 (To have enough, you must have too much.)
—French proverb
Pepsi. The choice of a new generation.
—1980s Pepsi-Cola slogan
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career.2 Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.
Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself.
—Trainspotting
Today, of course, Cockaigne is no longer a fantasy, as advances in agriculture and food production have allowed us to indulge gluttony and excess year-round. By the seventeenth century, the mass cultivation of potatoes for animal feed had made it possible to delay the annual slaughter and keep pigs as late as January3 or February, and the industry has since progressed to the point at which seasonality has essentially evaporated, so we can now fatten and kill animals all year long and buy fruits and vegetables out of season, including things like year-round apples and shelf-stable orange juice.
So we’re basically living in a modern-day Cockaigne, a utopian fantasyland where food has no limits and our choices defy natural order.
Instead of pies sliding from rooftops and roasted pigs running around with knives sticking out of them, we now have food delivery apps, grocery subscription services, drive-through windows, and disposable cutlery. We can indulge in all-day breakfast without leaving our cars; substitute hamburger buns with fried chicken breasts or glazed donuts; and buy pitted cherries, seedless watermelon, and presliced apple wedges in single-use plastic bags.
As Gregg Easterbrook writes:
Average Americans and Europeans not only live better4 than more than 99 percent of the human beings who have ever existed, they live better than most of the royalty of history. . . . As Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell University, has noted, gas-station minimarts now sell cabernets and chardonnays “far superior in quality to the wines once drunk by the kings of France.” Today supermarkets offer at low cost dozens of items almost everyone who has ever lived considered unattainable delicacies and died without tasting.
Granted, maybe fresh food hasn’t made it to the masses, as food deserts still continue to haunt many low-income neighborhoods, making it difficult to find or afford things like fresh fruits and vegetables, but freshly prepared food has. More than 36 percent of Americans consume fast food daily,5 increasing to 80 percent monthly and 96 percent annually.6
Writes Adam Chandler in The Atlantic, “No other institution, not libraries or gyms7 or the collective houses of worship, is that popular. Not even the internet comes close to garnering that much loyalty or participation as fast food. On a descending spectrum of American certainty, it goes something like death, premarital sex, fast food, and income taxes.”
And all of this is getting faster, smarter, and more convenient. In addition to taking orders through mobile apps and text messages, chains such as McDonald’s have started using artificial intelligence and machine learning to customize drive-through menus based on time of day,8 current weather conditions, and traffic patterns. And this is only the beginning; imagine drive-through sensors scanning your face and tailoring recommendations based on your estimated weight, pulse, and respiratory rate. Maybe you’d like extra fries to match your neck size? Maybe a chocolate shake if you’re having a shitty day? Other fast-food chains are testing the use of license plate readers9 to remember customers’ orders. (Who wants to bet that there’s a correlation between expired registration stickers and irresponsible food choices—or vanity license plates and vanity espresso drinks?)
We face an avalanche of customizable food choices every time we open our mouths, which is ironic because the fast-food industry was built on systemic specialization and the idea that less is more. The initial success of McDonald’s, for example, came from limiting their menu10 to focus primarily on making just three items—fifteen-cent hamburgers, twenty-cent shakes, and ten-cent fries11—with speed, consistency, and economy. In fact, early on, you weren’t allowed to customize your order at McDonald’s12 because it slowed everything down, and part of what allowed them to sell their food so cheaply is that they sold it so quickly (reducing the wait time to just twenty seconds per customer13) and they could sell more burgers, shakes, and fries per hour if they didn’t have to worry about customization, wait staff, or turning over tables. Everything was streamlined and homogenized.
Writes social anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy:
A McDonald’s outlet is not a “restaurant,”14 but a smoothly functioning assembly line manufacturing a uniform and reliable product. There are no chefs, not even short order ones, and no real cooking. It is what businessmen call “a food management system.” And this standardization is the key to McDonald’s success. Everything is rationalized: the product, the service, the cooking, the s
eating arrangements, the location of the outlets, and the technological hard- and software are all designed or planned according to the golden principle that there is only “one best way.” . . . Every detail has been carefully thought out: the size of the counters, the number of tills, the space between each one, the standing room round the tills, the distances between tills and tables, the size of the tables, and the number of chairs and their position. This ensures the maximum use of production space, sufficient room to queue, and the right standing-to-sitting ratio. So that people do not linger in fast-food outlets, the hard, immovable chairs are deliberately designed not to provide prolonged comfort. That way, the clientele get fast food and the management get a fast turnover.
In fact, McDonald’s cares so much about uniformity and efficiency that they add a silicon-based polymer to the fryer oil to reduce splatter,15 which cuts down on cleaning time; called dimethylpolysiloxane, the same chemical is also used in head lice treatments, condom lubricants,16 and breast implants.17 How neat is that?
Yet the industry has since shifted toward choice and customization. It’s no longer enough to be served right away; we now demand to be served our way. The real watershed moment in this movement was the debut of Burger King’s infamous “Have it your way” jingle in 1974,18 penned largely in response to 1960s and ’70s counterculture, the quest for individuality amid corporate and governmental mistrust, the oppressions of patriarchal society, and the post–World War II military-industrial complex:
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce19
Special orders don’t upset us
All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!
We can serve your broiled beef Whopper
Fresh with everything on topper
Any way you think is proper, have it your way!
So customizing your burger sort of became the fast-food equivalent of growing your hair long, symbolically burning your bra, or having sex in the back of a Volkswagen: a way to protest oppressive mainstream ideals, piss off your father, and show the world you weren’t a corporate sheep.
And ever since, food brands have been increasingly pandering to customers to make them feel empowered and free by expanding their choices, making the offerings of Cockaigne and Schlaraffenland pale in comparison. In fact, a lot of fast-food advertising tends to emulate these fantasylands, most notably Burger King’s 2005 “Fantasy Ranch” commercial20 featuring the vocals of Darius Rucker against a backdrop of scantily clad milkmaids, farmer’s daughters, and cheerleaders, taking the concept of “Have it your way” a few steps farther:
When my belly starts a rumblin’
And I’m jonesin’ for a treat,
I close my eyes for a big surprise,
The Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.
I love the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch,
The breasts, they grow on trees
And streams of bacon ranch dressing
Flow right up to your knees.
There’s tumbleweeds of bacon
And cheddar paves the streets.
Folks don’t front ya ’cause you’ve got the juice,
There’s a train of ladies comin’ with a nice caboose,
Never get in trouble, never need an excuse,
That’s the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.
I love the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch,
No one tells you to behave,
Your wildest fantasies come true,
Dallas cheerleaders give you shaves,
Red onions make you laugh instead,
And French fries grow like weeds.
You get to veg all day, all the lotto tickets pay,
There’s a king who wants you to have it your way,
That’s the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.
As Carrie Packwood Freeman and Debra Merskin remark in their essay “Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising,” many of these ads also seem to imply a lifestyle free from “nagging wives, girlfriends, and mothers,”21 either by not portraying such relationships at all or by portraying wives and girlfriends as barriers to male freedom. And let’s not even get into the category of “breastaurants” such as Hooters and Twin Peaks.
So food brands are basically doing the same thing medieval hosts were doing when they offered nobles the choice cuts of meat and the “upper crust” of bread during banquets, except these honors are now given to everyone. Not only can we choose to hold the pickles and hold the lettuce, we can even get limited-edition toys thrown in if we order an aptly named “Happy Meal” (a relic, of course, of Kellogg’s free cereal prizes).
Consider the language Burger King used in 2014 when, after forty years, they updated their slogan from “Have it your way” to “Be your way”:
It’s ok to not be perfect.22 Self-expression is most important and it’s our differences that make us individuals instead of robots.
BURGER KING® restaurants are, and always have been, a place where you come as you are, eat what you want, how you want, with whom you want, and step out of this world of standardization that tells you if you do something different, people might look at you. The BURGER KING® brand says, “bring on the eyeballs.”
So really, Burger King has pivoted from the burger business to the self-esteem business.
The same press release goes on to explain that you can order a Whopper customized “221,184 different ways, with grill marks,23 which is why no two are ever the same,” which is interesting coming from a chain that also brags about the uniformity of cooking their burgers on conveyor belts—24though at least the marks aren’t painted on, a common industry ruse to make frozen, precooked burgers seem fresh and artisan.
And it’s not just Burger King and McDonald’s. This is the same motivation behind made-to-order, fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle. (It’s also not a coincidence that McDonald’s once owned 90 percent of Chipotle.)25 As consumers, we essentially get to play king (or ancient harvest god) by telling servers to do things “our way” and reveling in our wealth of disparate food choices.
Writes Australian essayist Elizabeth Farrelly:
It’s as though our childhood yearnings to play kings and queens,26 to wear ermine and live forever in vast palaces, still haunt us; as though personal opulence is still the biggest and brightest outpost of our imagining. . . . We presume—call it the castle-premise—that democracy has made the rights of kings available to us all, and that some kind of fairy dust has costlessly converted the undreamable dream into sustainable reality.
Starbucks, for example, offers more than eighty-seven thousand possible drink combinations,*27 many with ingredients that seem straight out of Cockaigne. There’s whipped cream, “vanilla” syrup (which, by the way, is made of sugar, water, natural flavors, potassium sorbate28, and citric acid), toasted white chocolate mocha sauce, skinny mocha sauce, dark chocolate curls, sea salt topping29 (which actually means sugar, sea salt, and silicon dioxide), smoked butterscotch, steamed apple juice, vanilla crème, holiday sugar sparkles, caramel drizzle, chocolate cookie crumble, cold foam, honey, “cloud powder,” matcha powder, freeze-dried dragon fruit, something called “pink drink,” Equal, Splenda, stevia with monk fruit—and, oh, let’s not forget, coffee. In fact, Starbucks’ drink menu reads a lot like an Egyptian medicine book; all that’s missing is the cat hair and penis water.
Instead of seasonality, we now have seasonal lattes, cycling among pumpkin spice, gingerbread, eggnog, and iced mocha. And each of these drinks comes in its own special cup size—tall, grande, or venti—with our name written on it because selling small and medium drinks would be way too corporate and normalizing. And if you order enough of them, you can collect virtual stars and badges.
In an age of industrial consumerism and mass manufacturing, this freedom and personalization make us feel less like a cog in a machine or a corporate drone. It’s our way of manifesting destiny in a world that’s long been conquered and homogenized.
Reflect Stanford University
researchers Heejung Kim and Hazel Rose Markus, “If a person orders a decaffeinated cappuccino with nonfat milk30 in a café in San Francisco, he or she can feel good about having a preference that is not exactly regular.”
This also explains the popularity of craft beer as an individualistic response to “big beer” and the $100 billion per year we spend on bottled water globally31 despite the obvious environmental impacts (more than 4 billion pounds of plastic in 2016 alone32) and the ubiquity of public tap water—which is a fraction of the cost of bottled water;33 on average, no less safe or clean;*3435 and in many cases bottled from the very same source.36
Writes Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, bottled water “is an example of what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen37 called ‘conspicuous consumption,’ a way to advertise how much money you have or, more generally, to show off your positive traits as a person,” such as taste, supposed purity, or athleticism. “If the water were free or had obvious health benefits,” says Bloom, “it would be useless as such a signal, and . . . fewer people would drink it.”
This hunger for personalization and conspicuous consumption is also reflected in modern grocery stores. Before the first self-service grocery store opened in 1916,38 customers had to wait at a counter and ask a clerk to get their groceries, much as we still have to do with razors and certain cold medications to keep us from shoplifting or using them to manufacture crystal meth. And they probably had to go to several stores: the bakery for bread, the butcher for meat, the pharmacy for soda or drugs. Then clerks disappeared* and shopping carts came along—and bar code scanners and express lanes and self-checkout. By the 1940s, the average supermarket was stocking about three thousand products,39 whereas today a lot of stores carry closer to ninety thousand.