Wednesday, December 02, 2009

there he goes again

Also, another commercial I hate is not a specific commercial so much as every single one that suggests that a home microwave and a bag of something from your grocery store's freezer aisle is comparable to something cooked by professionals in a restaurant.

They usually show a series of clips of chefs, and you know they are chefs because of the coats and the toques (the stupid ass hat that sits three feet off the top of your head and gets knocked off constantly) which suggests a certain quality one must assume. I can do the same job in jeans and a tshirt and busted old boots from Sears, but that isn't the point here.

We are slowly lead through a segment of that professional kitchen till we somehow end with a mother/wife/woman removing some sort of packaged product from her microwave. On some level we tend to imagine the corporate kitchen where all these chefs work tirelessly, creating each of these packages of foodstuff individually, putting great care and precision into each one. You open the freezer door and touch a piece of their soul in the process.

Or maybe we are merely led to believe that, without any real effort on our part at all, we too can attain a level of craft that a real chef works years to perfect, an unattainable goal that drives one to insanity at times.

I can't necessarily argue with buying food for convenience if you feel you need to. I get that some days the bag of pasta dinner just-like-in-the-restaurants-but-in-seven-minutes is the best way to go.

Just don't lie to yourself. And accept that the commercials are lying to you. It may not seem like a lie, and perhaps they don't come right out and say it as such, but you know for a fact that their food is not anything like what you could make or what you could order in a decent restaurant. And if your local favorite is serving shit that tastes equal to what you can purchase and nuke then for fuck sake find a new favorite.