Euphemisms and politically correct speech have also infiltrated the food and restaurant businesses. We may as well begin with the inflated job titles, since they seem to be showing up everywhere we visit.
In a truly absurd departure from reality, at some point waiters temporarily became waitpersons, as if waiters and waitresses were somehow sexist terms. For a while there, a few of them even became known as waitrons until everyone involved simply refused to call them that. Now they seem to have settled on servers. These servers are said to be on the waitstaff. Wait-staff seems forced, doesn t it? And it goes without saying, no restaurant today would dare allow a cook to cook the food; instead, the cuisine must be prepared by a chef.
An important factor to keep in mind with all of this restaurant and food talk is yuppie pretentiousness. I was in a Yuppie joint last year where the cover of the noontime menu, instead of saying menu, actually had the words lunch solutions. There I sat, unaware that I even had problems, and those nice folks were ready to provide solutions. Once again, I feel the need to emphasize that I actually saw this. Every example I offer you on these euphemism topics has been personally observed.
And before we get to the food itself, I just want to remind you that you can usually determine a restaurant’s price range by noticing how it advertises. If it uses the word cuisine, it will be expensive; if it mentions food, the prices will be moderate; however, if the word eats is employed, rest assured any savings you make on the food will be more than offset by high medical expenses.
Now, on the subject of food itself, I’m sure you know that certain foods have been altered. I don’t mean genetically, I mean euphemistically. They tried to do it to prunes. The California Prune Board wanted to change the word prunes to dried plums, because research told them that women in their thirties reacted more favorably to the phrase dried plums. California women in their thirtiesdoes that tell you enough?
And the poor prunes were not alone. A long time ago the same thing happened to garbanzo beans. Apparently, someone thought the word garbanzos sounded too much like a circus act, so they began using the older name, chickpeas. Also at about that timeagain, for marketing purposesChinese gooseberries became kiwifruit. And since it was obvious feminists would never use an oil derived from rapeseed, we were all introduced to canola oil. And just to round out our meal, the reason Chilean sea bass became so trendy a few years ago was because it was no longer being called Patagonian tooth fisb. That item needs no comment.
And let’s not even mention capellini, which became angel-hair pasta, Jesus! Angel hair. And by the way, who was it that took the perfectly nice word macaroni and started calling it pasta in the first place? That sounds like more of that marketing bullshit. Never underestimate the relentlessness of the marketing people. Because long before we had yuppies, consumer goods had been getting image upgrades from the marketers.
For example, seltzer water has variously been known as seltzer, carbonated water, soda water, club soda and, finallyenter the yuppiessparkling water. Sometimes these days, the label on the sparkling water says lightly carbonated. Of course, that means they had to find a name for water that wasn’t carbonated, and since noncarbonated sounded far too ordinary, the trendier restaurants decided on flat water. There are even a few places that refer to it as still water. It’s subtle, but it’s clearly a decision that when it comes to beverages, flat may possibly be seen as negative.
Never overlook pretentiousness. Pretentiousness is the reason we don’t drink water anymore; instead we hydrate ourselves. Hey, I’ll hydrate myself to that.