Cheez-its and Fine Dining

            There I was, sitting at one of the most expensive restaurants I’ve ever been to and chewing a piece of steak, nodding my head – when I realized that the steak probably tasted worse than the paper the restaurant menu was printed on.

            What differentiates eating at a normal restaurant or buying food from Acme from dining at an expensive restaurant? Is it the ethnicity of the food? Is it the deliciousness of the foods? Or is it the price?

            There is no need to fly to Italy to experience pizza, as there are twenty pizza shops just ten minutes away from my house. Similarly, there is no need to vacation to Japan just to experience sushi. Googling “sushi restaurant” brings up twenty sushi restaurants around Princeton.  The diversity of the United States negates the need to travel long distances to experience authentic dish from countries around the world. Walking into a local supermarket I see frozen Italian pizzas, ready to be eaten after microwaving, rice imported from Thailand, and chocolate imported from Switzerland.

            Society panders the notion that a dish of food only tastes good if it costs more than 100 dollars, it is served on a silver platter, and if it tastes like absolute garbage. In an expensive Chinese restaurant I recently went to, the menu charged $10 for “high quality and succulent” white rice. The only problem? Rice has no taste, and nobody can differentiate between this “high quality” rice and normal rice.

Expensive restaurants take advantage of this and raise prices for the same exact item, but instead of calling the dish “white rice” on the menue, they now put “High-quality rice, carefully cultivated handpicked from the finest rice grown. Our rice undergoes rigorous labatory testing to ensure that it is the best, most delicious rice in the world $15.00.” Of course, the public eats it up. The restaurant is rated 5 out of 5 stars, featured in Zagat, and praised in local newspapers. It’s a placebo effect, just as sugar pills can give the impression of recovering from a sickness, or an ordinary pair of shoes marketed by a famous sprinter can give the impression of running faster.

Potato chips were once considered a luxury dish. Created by a resort chef in 1853, potato chips soon became an expensive and popular part of the resort’s menu. The chef had to manually cut potatoes very thin, and then fry them with a pinch of salt. This process was time consuming and contributed to the potato chips’ high price. After the advent of the mechanical potato peeler, the price of potato chips fell and fell until they became a mass-produced snack eaten by millions of Americans. Nowadays, potato chips are deemed as unhealthy “junk” food. What changed? Only the price. The taste of the potato chip remained the same for almost two centuries, but potato chips changed from the popular luxury dish eaten in restaurants to cheap junk food eaten by the masses. After potato chips became less expensive to make, they lost their luxury appeal.

            To put things in perspective, if given a choice between a slice of France’s most expensive cheese and a bag of Cheez-its, I’ll probably need a pair of scissors to cut open the bag of snacks.

Abortion

            Abortion represents one of the most controversial and contentious issues in the 21st century. It is a popular subject for talk shows and news channels, and also radio stations, podcasts, and other media. The issue of abortion splits itself into two main groups: pro-life representatives, who are opposed to abortion, and pro-choice believers, who believe that women have a right to abortion.
            In 2008, about 1.21 million abortions took place in the United States. About 50% of these abortions were preformed on women under the age of 25 years old. In 2007, over 84% of these abortions were preformed on unmarried women.
            Pro-life groups argue that it is morally wrong to take a human life, and sometimes use sentences such as “life is scared” and religious references to back up their ideas. There’s a great deal of hypocrisy amongst pro-life groups, from extremists who burn down abortion clinics to justify “saving lives” to ordinary believers in pro-life who have momentously warped perceptions of what a life is. Pro-life believers claim that a microscopic ball of tissue is a “life” and destroying it is one of the most heinous crimes a person can commit. Take in mind, this ball of tissue has not breathed a single breath of air from the outside world and has not loved, hurt, nor felt anything. From a biological standpoint, the baby, at this stage, is no more sentient than a skin cell or a tissue cell. The baby is nothing other than a fertilized egg.  Life is scared? A bacteria cell is “alive,” but when was the last time you felt bad for washing your hands? A baby in the first trimester shows the cognitive ability of a bacteria cell.
            But maybe that’s a faulty analogy, comparing humans to bacteria. Let’s compare humans to humans. Millions of people are dying in genocides in Darfur, bombings in Iraq, to mass murders in Rwanda. It boggles the mind how ignorant pro-life believers think that an unborn mass of tissue being removed is more serious than these mass genocides of cognitive, living people. Sentient people who have experienced love, hurt, happiness, and sadness. Instead, pro-life supporters are determined to force a sixteen-year old pregnant girl to keep her unborn child while ignoring the deaths of living people worldwide. I rarely see pro-life supporters donate to help cancer victims from death or children suffering from leukemia. When I usually hear about pro-life supporters, they’re usually on the news for bombing another abortion clinic and killing doctors, to augment their psychotic and prodigiously flawed ideals about abortion. Shootings, murders, bombings, assaults, kidnappings, and even anthrax threats have been carried out by pro-life extremists in the name of life.
            Anti-abortionists try to impose their ideals on other people, usually violently. They believe that a pregnant adolescent who was raped at eight years old, should ignore her mental trauma and suicidal thoughts to raise her child without any preparation – a child she didn’t even want. Maybe the eight year old girl should “suck it up” and “do what she’s gotta’ do.” Despite the fact that she still wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming and crying for her mother. Despite the fact that she has no idea how to take care of a child, no idea what to do, and no love for her child. No child should be raised without love. And for the girl, the child is a malicious byproduct of the most violent and frightening night of her life. ■