Steve Macone
When the economy sours, dining out becomes a low-hanging fruit, one of the first things people forgo to save money. Frankly, I’m thrilled. This might be the best excuse not to have to go out to eat to come along in years—the greatest thing since sliced bread, which, coincidentally, is great for making sandwiches at home.
Americans spend about 49 percent of their food budget on dining out. The Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service expects that number to pass 50 percent sometime around 2012. But I've felt for a long time that dining out has occupied the position of inflated priority, that a luxury has been advertised into a norm and swallowed without question by a public that feels entitled to this vaguely Manhattan-esque lifestyle, that in reality this lifestyle more often results in the ambiguous half-dining out experiences of drive-thrus, "grabbing a burger on the way," or bringing home Chinese food, which include the costs but none of the abstract aesthetic benefits associated with eating out. Then there's the spending beyond our means, the disintegration of the domestic sphere, and the criticism of it being good old fashion laziness. If you look at how enmeshed the practice of eating out is, with the expense and typically large portions, it's clear: when it comes to our national eating habits, gratuity is included.
Whew! Pretty convincing, huh? All that is just what I've been telling people.
I actually just don’t like eating out.
I finally realized how much I don't like it when my girlfriend and I recently had a great time eating out. We went to Sushi Café in Harvard Square. Then we got ice cream at Coldstone, sharing a "Cookie-Doughn't You Want Some" in that playfully selfish way where you protect your portion. Hey quit hogging all the whipped cream! It was all very nice. Too nice.
Something was missing.
It was that subtle twinge that sometimes accompanies a dining out experience: when something goes wrong and eating out with another person reveals itself as a ridiculous three-legged race of an affair, neither person actually eating when or where or what they'd like, an expensive subcontracting of a simple bodily need in which I actually pay to submit to the tyranny of cooperation. And why does "cooperation" always mean we go to the place she wants?
But on this evening, none of that. Just a great dinner and dessert.
And then, on Waffle Cone Wednesday, it was revealed to me: the equation of dining out happily. That night, I was in "specific mode." Kate was in "I don't care mode." Two people in "specific mode," who know exactly what they want, becomes an obvious problem. I want Thai food, and I'm not even sure if anything other than Thai food is even capable of making me feel full. The idea that she doesn't want Thai food is absurd, because Thai food sounds so delicious right now and...Italian? On a Thursday? Then come veiled accusations of veiled racism.
But two people in "I don't care" mode can be just as bad. That's when you have the "Where do you feel like eating?...Oh, I don't care" conversation, which usually lasts an annoying 18 minutes and eventually becomes about convincing the other that you care the least, thus making them responsible for the decision. I really don't care. I am completely apathetic. Really. I just decided not to vote in the next election. You start throwing out suggestions, not to help, but to prove you shouldn't be in charge. "Let's go there." "That's a bus."
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I've always wondered about the mixture of anger and hunger needed to trigger cannibalism. I think the first cannibals were trying to figure out where to eat when one got frustrated and bit the other. Then he realized that, given the options, eating his companion was logically the best course of action.
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Now, the specific/don't care modes must also interact in a matrix of who wants comfort food versus who's feeling adventurous. One end of the spectrum is "Sure, I'll drink cow's blood because it's your favorite." The other end is when you just want to know exactly what you're going to eat and how long it will take. You want to have eaten five minutes ago, actually, while wearing sweat pants.
So the night of the beautiful sushi eclipse: Kate was at her most adventurous and I was in "specific mode," and so we ate sushi. And it was awesome. Then ice cream because, well, we were both in "human being mode."
I know the merits of dining out, how it has long been intimate and communal, that it revolves around something at once necessary and indulgent, laying bare both a corporal dependence and that so-very-human striving to enjoy and add garnish to everyday experience. The problem, though, is that sometimes we eat out to celebrate a special occasion and sometimes we do it so that our bodies can perform the necessary chemical reactions to keep us alive. And it's not always clear to me which one we're doing. So if two people go out to eat with different expectations one will be walking around reading posted menus and saying "this place looks cute" while the other eats berries off of bushes and makes mental notes to Google the symptoms of hypoglycemia.
This is not even to speak of the effects of snippiness.
For early courtship, dining out makes sense. It’s efficient for the number of factors it exposes: etiquette, diet, price range, tastes. But it’s all still slightly arbitrary:
Listen, Angela, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to get together Friday and wash our cars?
What? That’s so weird. Why don’t we do what everyone else does: wait until we are weakest, when our bodies are most deprived of nutrients and we’re focusing on food, then dress in our nicest clothes, purchase meals that are potentially messy and put things in our mouths so we can’t talk.
Sounds good. Then let’s get ice cream!
But for anyone else, a "Let's go out to dinner" decision is more often a barometer of both how much you can splurge financially and how much expendable moral income—the sort of capital to celebrate life—you’ve got handy. So it follows that the economy is the perfect excuse for my aversion to extravagance. Thank you, factors I don't understand. Now I can just say, Dinner? Not with the subprime housing crunch affecting micro-credit Pell grants for Fannie Mae…
Here, I brought along some low-hanging fruit to snack on.
posted on Wednesday, October 22, 2008
at 7:29 AM