What's the saying
"Americans think the real lemons in their cleaning sprays excuse the fake lemons in their food"
That said, this is what happens when your culture doesn't have a culinary tradition and is supplanted by fast food, hyperprocessed shit, and a thousand versions of the same sugar water
It makes me sad to think of all the cooking culture and knowledge that's been systematically replaced by corporate food. Everything my grandmother knew how to make (and grow and preserve), I have to relearn from youtube in my limited spare time. I mean, it's very good that women have been somewhat liberated from the kitchen, but I wish the solution had been "everyone learns to cook and shares the duties" instead of "Kraft and McDonald's cook for us"
My maternal grandmother was one of the best cooks I know. She wouldn't have called herself a feminist, but she was. She was rough and tumble as a kid, regularly beating up the neighborhood bullies (and her older brothers). Ironically she didn't learn how to cook growing up, she learned from my grandfather. They frequently shared the cooking duties. He slapped her once, just once, she smack him over the head with a rolling pin. He died in 2003 from a stroke, she died the same year from a broken heart.
This is Zizek's point about objects never being simply objects, but always-already inscribed with meaning by the viewer. A food is never simply a food, it is a food and organic, or it is a food and fair trade, or it is a food and in this case, literally nothing else. Cigarettes help you relax but you also look cool, Starbucks will sell you coffee but also donate 10% to kids in wheelchairs. The phenomenon has become so saturated with its this excess that marking the absence of a something else, of a little object A, is significant. This is a dialectical process - food, like anything, exists in a substantive nothingness ("everything makes love to silence"). This nothingness is filled by a somethingness - organic, fair trade, cookie dough, 10% to charity. This somethingness becomes so ingrained into the object itself that its presence is so expected that we mark its absence. This now exists as a trait of the object, and the gap between the object and its excess informs us of what is real
As I commented elsewhere, Zizek expresses this point with the joke: "I'll take my coffee without cream." "I'm sorry but we are out of cream, can I bring you coffee without milk instead?"
when you live in a sea of spectacles - a glimpse of the real is like a glass of water in the desert
Easier to store a hydrated husk than actual fruit, and harder to tell when a husk has expired
just give me the apple and blueberries
ok but they have to be individually wrapped in plastic
-America
...and then-and then it said "Contains: Apples. Yep, that's it." Funniest shit I've ever seen.
