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.