The rich eat differnetly from you and me, Y12 for a soy caf? sure Options

[Snow_Fox]

I was reading Bourdain’s new book Medium Raw and it brought up something very interesting in food culture. In the dystopian world of SR how often do we hear that the ultra wealthy eat ‘real’ food while we get by on soy caf and krill burgers(do you really want to eat something from those toxic waters?) but Bourdain raises a very interesting point, that all too often the very rich are not eating any better than we mortals do, in fact they often eat worse but don’t know any better. At the very least they pay a heck of a lot more for the exact same thing we eat.

I won’t quote directly from Bourdain because I respect him but he hits this theme a couple of times. In the chapter meat he talks about the ubiquitous hamburger and the problems that it has gone through. What is a stable of cook out and greasy spoons became yuppified with such brand names as the Kobe-burger, probably made from meat that never went near Japan which would be an absolute waste of real Kobe beef, and now after many chefs have had their way the new concept brought out by the Minetta Tavern- the classic burger of just grilled beef on a bun with lettuce and a slice of tomato, for only $26. He says it is a very good burger (Just add lots of swear words for how good and you’ll know how Bourdain feels about it) but what burger is truly worth $26? It isn’t but the rich will pay for it.

Pushing the mark a little more in his chapter “The Rich eat differently than you and me” he writes about a place in the Caribbean where the rich and shameless get together to make catty comments, be seen and tell each other they are wonderful and the surgery makes them look days younger. Bourdain goes into detail about the crowd and no I didn’t steal any of his descriptions but I couldn’t help but think of SR fat cats .The top dog club got away with serving a poor quality lentil soup for $38. A peasant dish that cost the chef pennies to make but they’re told it’s wonderful. It’s in the place of the moment and they’re told it’s authentic and they don’t question. And like the emperor’s new clothes no one dares to think about questioning it. A fool and his money is soon parted. Probably with a nice tip added on.

So this raises the question in SR do the wealthy really eat better or is that a sign of people who really know what they’re doing as opposed to the posers and climbers and can runners actually have fun finding authentic food as a part of the role playing? Digging oysters in Puget sound yup saw those boats come in? A road side BBQ place in Tennessee-all the riggers stop here, A greasy spoon in Manhattan, I sear this Ed is better than the luxury burger I had in MSG last night and so on. Personally I’ve had gastronomic delights in one of Boston’s finest places and eaten well at a road side clam place in Plymouth and actually remember having more fun in Plymouth, even if they did have John Alden Burgers and Pilgrim fries on the menu.

[Daylen]

I expect like now there is a mixed lot. Some who want to feel they are having something lesser mortals can only dream of will pay 30 bucks for a badly cooked burger and oversalted fries. Some mega wealthy will drive their 20 year old beat up pickup truck to the local BBQ joint wearing work cloths that came from the same place mechanics use and eat there because its the best BBQ around. And plenty inbetween.

[tagz]

Sounds about right from what I've seen. My work takes me from various restaurant to restaurant, not to eat but to work in their kitchens. I've seen the entire gambit run, and from my experience the places that are considered gourmet and upscale tend to have more issues with cleanliness and sanitation then chain restaurants and such. Chain "family" restaurants tend to be real bad though.

But sanitation aside, yes, I've seen them serve extremely cheap food at country clubs and restaurants the President of the United States might dine, and then charge $20-$30 what it might cost elsewhere. $34 Ruben? Yep, seen it. The meat came in the same kind of box as a mom & pop's I was in earlier that day.

I think what it comes down to is nobody really knows what they're eating when they don't prepare it themselves. I've stopped eating out so much, that's for certain.

[Traul]

Don't forget cyber. The rich who actually enjoy eating will get a taste booster and you won't fool them with low quality stuff.

[Snow_Fox]

there's no reason to think the guys Boudain is writing about in 2010 have naythnig wrong with them but they're told it's gormet and like the emeror's new clothes, no one of the silicon geeks wants to call it for fear of standing out from the crowd. They've all said it's good, if ou say it's crap, you're saying they don't know what they are talking about, and no one wants to open that can of worms.

[Snow_Fox]

I mean you ever buy a $5 cup of coffee at Starbucks? You can get a poerfectly good cup at diners for what? $1-1.50 Is the Starbucks coffee really that much better? but you pay for it.

[Voran]

I think its kinda a sliding scale. There's the 'rich' and 'powerful' that eat what they think is real food and pay out the nose for it. Then there are the godawfuluberrich and uberpowerful that have the resources and inclination to do a 'quality control' check to see they're really getting their money's worth.

In regards to the excellent Mr Bourdain, if I were really rich and really interested in the quality of my food, rather than being catty and snobbish about it, you'd hire someone like Bourdain to check out the quality of the crap you're actually eating to see if its high quality.

I'm a middle class dude, I know what kinda food I like, but I don't know if its the best quality, I am unsure I'd be able to tell the difference between a steak I normally eat, and a "Um yeah, this steak cost me 300 bucks". Make me a millionaire suddenly, but that doesn't mean my ability to discern quality has magically gotten any better.

Basically, I'm concerned with the crap vs ok/good checkmark on my food, rather than the ok/good vs omgorgasm.

[Traul]

I think you are trying to mix two very loosely related topics. The examples you give are about restaurants. SR describes what people eat everyday.

[DuckEggBlue Omeg...]

In SR it's not a matter of the rich getting the same thing at a premium price, they are actually getting a different product all together.

[CanRay]

I joked about the difference in cost of artificial flavouring in one of my stories... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

What the rich have is more ACCESS and CHOICE than the poor. At the bottom, you have the bums on the street eating unflavoured NutraSoy. At the top, you can have NutraSoy with however much flavouring you want if you're in a hurry, or nuke up some pizza if you're less so.

In the end, the folks that are higher up are usually too busy to eat better, as they have to fight hard to keep their position, but that's a different discussion.

[Yerameyahu]

Since when does respecting someone mean you don't quote them? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[MikeKozar]

This actually came up with my last character creation. My guy was a professional game hunter out of the Salish-Sidhe Council, a member of the Cascade Ork tribe. It seems entirely reasonable to me to assume that with the SSC forcing the lands back into a natural state, that they get things like fresh vegetables and farmed meat. They might not be running the kind of factory farms that are profitable today, but I don't see any reason that a First Nations kid wouldn't grow up on bacon and eggs.

When he came to the sprawl, that was his biggest bit of culture shock - how awful the food is, and how much people will price-gauge for real stuff. He took it for granted that you could crack open a jar of peppers to throw on your eggs in the morning. Hell, eggs aren't a luxury, they're a by-product of doing your chores! Eat 'em before they go funny, gotta stay ahead of the chickens!

But with all of the agricultural land ceded back to the NAN, and the NAN being unwilling to use the semi-toxic farming techniques developed in the 20th century...yeah, I can definitely see how real food might get scarce in the sprawl.



As to Snowy's original question, I suspect that the reason the rich don't eat better then the poor in 21st century America is that we all have it so good, food-wise. As soon as we start to see scarcity, or meat shoots to $50 a pound, I think the class divide is going to start producing some very tangible differences in how the other half lives.

[hobgoblin]

I think what it comes down to is nobody really knows what they're eating when they don't prepare it themselves. I've stopped eating out so much, that's for certain.

makes me think about the number of city kids that turn vegetarian after visiting a butchers place.

[Badmoodguy88]

Heston: Listen to me chummer, you gotta tell em. Soylent green is people! We gotta stop them, some how!
Ghoul: People you say? Waiter, one soylent green please.

[LivingOxymoron]

You know... you bring up an interesting point, though.

See, I can totally see the rich being the ones eating "real" food as a status symbol, and just to be able to say "I can eat real beef whenever I want". I mean, the dystopian world that is SR has said that soy and krill are the standard foodstuff because everything else is so expensive. But it seems to me that its expensive because the agrocorps make sure its expensive, because they know that people buy the hype and status just as much as they buy what supposedly tastes better.

I remember a while back that Gourmet magazine did a blind taste-testing of several types of Vodkas at a posh, very hip and expensive bar in NYC. Most of the people, who SWORE that they would only drink Grey Goose or some other "Super Premium" brand ended up picking plain old Smirnoff as the best. Same with wine. A noted wine magazine got several wine critics together and poured several types of unlabeled bottles for them, only telling them the varietal (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, etc.), where it was from, and the price. The deception, though, was that they were giving them a glass of "$150 a bottle Pinot Noir from Napa County", and later a "$12 bottle of Pinot Noir from the Central Valley". Except it was the same wine. The critics raved over what they thought were the expensive bottles, and assigned all of the negatives to the "cheaper" ones in almost every single case.

So, here's what I think:

"Real" Food, at least in the Metroplexes, is expensive because of ultra-inflated prices, but JUST AFFORDABLE ENOUGH that an average wage-slave family could splurge on a "low quality" steak dinner every now and then. Meanwhile, the local posh steakhouse buys the exact same steak, prepared in the exact same way, and charges the rich and beautiful 6x or more. Why? Because its the place they're going to, with the beautiful aloof Maitre'D and the reservations you need to have a month in advance to get.

On the other hand... there are probably "Gourmet" Soy and Krill restaurants. Soy is probably hyped like wine to the rich, with subtle "flavor profiles" based on who grew it and where, paired with "Celebrity Chefs trained on the cutting edge of molecular gastronomy" to coax all the very best flavors out of it, mixed with rare herbs and spices from exotic places in the world. I'm sure most of it is total bullshit, but the rich and beautiful will lap it up.

The irony is that the masses eat soy and krill, altered by additives and techniques to resemble other foods. And this is the food of the masses. Yet today, chefs like Homaro Cantu in Chicago and Feran Adria in Spain (who's restaurant El Bulli is called the greatest restaurant in the world) use those exact same techniques and command praise and high prices. Amazing how today's gourmet is tomorrow's peasant food, and vice-versa.

[hobgoblin]

reminds me of this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Car_Warriors

[Daddy's Litt...]

A couple of years ago, Snow Fox hosted a small New Year's Eve party that had taste testing different brands of champgne and 'sparkling wine.' The most popular of the night was a french Moet but the #2 far an away was Korbel that goes for about $12-14 a bottle.

I think her point is that the rich might not really be getting stuff that is too much better, but think that they are because there is a high price tag attached to it.

[Daddy's Litt...]

Since when does respecting someone mean you don't quote them? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I asked her about that too. She said "It's a new book, I don't want to give people the good stuff and detract from sales."

[Fauxknight]

I think its kinda a sliding scale. There's the 'rich' and 'powerful' that eat what they think is real food and pay out the nose for it. Then there are the godawfuluberrich and uberpowerful that have the resources and inclination to do a 'quality control' check to see they're really getting their money's worth.

Which is primarily a difference between old money and new money. The ones who work thier way up to that level might eat the $30 burger with friends every once in awhile, but they're day to day burger is still going to be the $5 one that is just as good or better.

[nezumi]

I actually just ate dessert at Brennan's last night, so I can appreciate this (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) (Only went there specifically for the red room. I'm definitely a cheapscate.)

Was the champagne good? Yes. I could have identified it compared to a $12 bottle of champagne, but I doubt I would have identified it from a $40 bottle. (Yes, I know it's not actually 'champagne'.) So I certainly realized I was paying a 50% markup on atmosphere, namebrand and having a delightful waiter in a suit. It's the same with shoes. Do you think a $200 pair of nikes makes me run faster than a $20 pair of k-mart specials?

Now certainly, in Shadowrun the big difference is 90% of the western population is now right around or below the poverty line, and I don't think Snow Fox is arguing against that. However, if you contrast the food between the middle class and the upper class, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that, in many ways, the only difference will be the price. Even accepting that the upper class will have access to 'real' food more often, I question how often they would take advantage of it. Much of our best food is food of poor people. Lobster, oysters and caviar, for instance, or anything cajun. I expect the same thing with soy. The thing about soy is that it has little or no inherent flavor - it is flavored precisely to the tastes of the customer. In theory, you can make a hamburger from it that tastes mnore like hamburger than hamburger. Just like right now Brennan's has a specialty salad made up mostly of iceberg, and sells water which, chemically, is in every way identical to the 'house water', so I would also expect them to sell soy-based food with house flavorings.

[Yerameyahu]

You mean that lots of cuisine *used* to be poor food. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It goes in cycles, and the price changes mean that poor people can't afford it anymore. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[DuckEggBlue Omeg...]

"Real" Food, at least in the Metroplexes, is expensive because of ultra-inflated prices, but JUST AFFORDABLE ENOUGH that an average wage-slave family could splurge on a "low quality" steak dinner every now and then.

See I go with 'real' food being not affordable at all. Your average wage slave buys "premium" soy products, now with advanced texture treatments and colouring so real you'd swear you were crunching on a real carrot, but real food simply isn't an option, and the futher you go down the economic curve the more bland and less flavour the soy gets.

Today we see a lot of false premium stuff going on, but it requires a lot of marketing to get people to pay a lot more for marginal improvements in quality and create these artificial price gaps. My take is that in the future that is SR however, the ubiquitousness of soy products and the experience Corps have producing and working with it, make it easier for a corporation to ACTUALLY alter the quality of your fake food, than it is to try and convince you through marketing. The con is that it doesn't cost any more to produce premium soy products than the regular stuff in the first place.

'Real' food is solely for the rich. It usually isn't 'better' than premium soy products, and at the lower end is the kind of stuff we simply wouldn't accept by modern standards, but it's a status thing - "See this piece of gristle, it's HUGE, won't find that in some fake soy steak, no sir, that's how you know it's a REAL steak, you could chew on this thing for hours, I tell you those poor bastards don't know what they're missing."

High quality real food is the domain of the MEGA rich. That's how I treat it anyway, it a simple thing that helps to illustrate the difference between the distopian future and now when a character says "I'm going to splurge and buy some real bacon and eggs for breakfast" and you reply with "Sorry, I don't think there are any 5 star restaurants open at 6am". Not to mention the joy of a simple description of genuine high quality food they're eating sending the players into ultra paranoid mode, trying to figure out if Mr. J is a Big 10 CEO, or if they're just stuck inside a UV host.

[Doc Chase]

I seem to recall SR4 fluff saying soy and krill were being phased out due to widespread soy allergies cropping up in metahumanity after the blitz of the 50's and 60's. Companies such as Natural Vat, whoever took over Monsanto(lol) and the Azzies have genegineered foods to increase output and make things tasty.

[Bira]

The whole soy thing is a bit silly, especially if you go with the vastly reduced population figures Shadowrun gave us in editions past (I don't know if they've changed that in SR4). If you can feed 6 billion people with "real" food today, you can feed 3 billion just as well in the Sixth World. "Soy everything" also gets a little old after a while. It seems to be a joke that got out of control and became a "setting fact".

[CanRay]

Which is when you get really cheap, and serve up the "I Can't Believe It's Not NutraSoy"!