Meditations on Chain Dining

An essay by Dr. Moriarty Cornelius Livingstone IV

Come my children, gather around, sit with me at the table of consumer capitalism. The literal table that is, for today we shall explore the fantabulous world of the mundane through the lens of corporate “casual dining” chains.

Any of us who have resided in our great (of late, ailing) republic has, inevitably, at some point dined, eaten, feasted, supped, consumed, chowed down, devoured, ingested, broken bread with, or engorged themselves at one of the nation’s several focus-group-designed eateries. You, dear reader, know their names, which I shall spare you from. If a hint is needed, I refer to establishments such as the one that names itself for the day prior to Saturday, the one that alludes to a vegetable of South American origin, the one that refers to a land mammal with keratin protrusions emanating from its head, the one that pretends to be Australian, the one that pretends to be Italian, the one that refers to the fruit that keeps the doctor away, the other one that pretends to be Italian, the sea cockroach joint, the one that pretends to be Texan, the one that pretends to be country, and the one about boobs.

These temples to mass-produced shareholder value are ubiquitous on the wide landscape of our nation’s sidewalk-less communities. There are dozens of such chains (owned, however, by a much smaller number of corporations) who compete ruthlessly to present to middle-class America their contending visions of prepackaged conformity.

Let us take a moment here to think, in other words, to ponder, to consider, to mull over, to contemplate, to reflect, or to cogitate about the experience at one of these sanctuaries of market research. If we are to understand the forms in which the mundane is utilized by these corporations, we must start from the beginning.

The structure is a start. These restaurants occupy buildings of roughly the same shape, optimized carefully by architects and interior designers who long ago surrendered their dreams in exchange for a stable upper-middle-class income. These buildings appear as islands in a sea of parking lots large enough to fit a rental car fleet, signaled to road-weary drivers passing on the interstate by signs tall enough to rival the great monuments of Europe.

This design is fundamental to the very nature of these establishments. As the consumer drowns in a sea of pavement and exterior suburban hostility, they grow desperate to be released from the hellscape of their life. Some form of respite is necessary, yet none is in sight. There is nothing to see. They know that the prefabricated box they search for will not save them from their all-but-assured fate, but it will provide them with some form of sustenance, even if they are aware of the forms in which it poisons their mind, body, and, alas, soul.

So, one, succumbing (likely unaware) to a form of existential fear, pulls into the parking lot and leaves their vehicle between an F-250 and a GMC Yukon, and walks across the intolerably hot asphalt to the intentionally heavy doors. This walk is again part of the design. It is not a long distance in an empirical sense, yet it appears to drain the soul just enough to exhaust the consumer. The purpose of this is so that when invariably the arriving party is asked to wait twenty minutes for a table, they are now too weak to come to their senses and choose a more suitable establishment[1].

Once finally seated, the individuals in question are greeted with ferociously coached friendliness. This is not your natural American friendliness, the treat-people-right bubbliness that oozes from that incredible optimism found almost exclusively on this continent, home to a world of promised opportunities. The natural form of this friendliness is the backbone of American mundanity, especially in regions like the South or the Midwest. Without it, other aspects of the mundane are left exposed to great risk, threatened by the traumatic darkness of our colonial past, which seeks every opportunity to manifest itself.

Unfortunately, as established prior, this is something else entirely. This is an artificial joviality, one defined by specific regulations in an employee handbook and instructed by videos narrated by artificial intelligence. A façade designed to disguise the fact that fentanyl and dubious relationships of a sexual nature exist among the staff. Bondage for the employee, a trap for the consumer, and a threat to American democracy. (We will return to this point of artificiality and its risks later on; keep it in the back of your mind for now.)

Past the greetings, one is then presented with the menu. This is, of course, an integral part of any dining experience. Menus are an artifact of the mundane, designed to transmit crucial information that allows us to decide how we should nourish ourselves. This is where the greatest efforts of the third-party and internal consultants are in play. Tremendous, in other words, enormous, huge, massive, immense, colossal, or gigantic amounts of money have been spent devising every single aspect of the menu, from the offerings of food, to the names for these products, to the colors of the menu, the material it is made from, its layout, the marketing synergies with associated brands held by the same private equity overlords, and, of course, the pricing strategy.

Such research-focused marketing leads to all brands, despite theoretically being rivals, reaching the same basic conclusions, generating a numbing sameness across the board. The food is almost entirely comprised of highly recognizable, palatable, mediocrity. There is always some sort of sauce advertised as being derived from a well-known alcohol brand, whisky or beer. Trademarked logos are generously splashed across the menu wherever they are mentioned. This sauce is seemingly available on every food item, yet amounts to little difference, given that the entire menu tastes the same, at any rate.

There is also, invariably, an item that has some variant of the word “sizzle” in its name. This sizzle is a most insidious option. It exists for one purpose alone: to fool the Default Mode Network into believing that the menu is not somehow excruciatingly boring. Sizzle suggests excitement, when in reality it is quite possibly the most bland item on the menu. The presentation of this foodstuff on a dangerously hot piece of metal creates the sizzle sound. This is theater of the lowest degree. A lie for the controlled. This item is so generic that I suspect that none of you, my dear readers, could confidently remember which establishment sells the “San Antonio Sizzlin’ Angus Platter.”[2]

Once one has consumed the factory-prepackaged foodstuffs, from appetizers to entrées to dessert (all of which contain a shocking amount of high-fructose corn syrup), the cheque has been paid, the tip left, and bathroom facilities utilized, there begins the long trek home (inevitably thirty or more minutes). The drive is filled with silence; nothing is left to be said, as nothing worth discussing was experienced. An element of shame hangs in the air, colored by suburban existential dread. You know this feeling, dear reader; I need not need describe it.

Now that we have established the basics of the chain dining experience, let us move on to the meat of the matter. If we are to explore the world of the mundane in this context we must start with some fundamental questions. Is the mundane present here? What form has it taken? Is it authentic? What is authenticity? Is authenticity a prerequisite for legitimacy? Is legitimacy a prerequisite for authenticity? Does the human heart crave the authentic? Why does our heart bleed when we recognize that the one we love does not consider us fully authentic and therefore does not requite the feelings which we have developed toward them, ironically or perhaps unironically due to their own authenticity that we so admire? Why did Lottie choose Jeff over me? Why have I never been able to rekindle the embers of my heart? Lottie, I failed you and thus failed myself.

Authenticity. That word has grown increasingly popular in our world that is increasingly inauthentic. When we say authentic, unless we are using it in a performative sense for social media (and thus, ironically, inauthentically), what we mean deep down is organic. This is fundamental to the mundane.

The mundane is a beautiful thing. It is the force that binds human society together; it is what creates the circumstance by which we can grow, feel, love, and be filled with joy. But it is critical to understand that it can only be formed through organic processes. Mundanity is not pre-decided, it is not intentional, it is not a product of intentional social engineering; it is the natural end result of the confluence of an enormity of factors rooted in the human experience and sourced directly from our souls.

These casual chain restaurants operate with a very dangerous core concept: that mundanity can be created in a boardroom. Every aspect of the experience in one of these restaurants has been carefully crafted so as to appear to be a mundane, generic American experience. However, there is no authenticity, no originality; nothing decided by a team of third-party consultants with a scheduled “roll out phase” is organic, and thus not authentically mundane.

Synthetic mundanity. These enterprises are desperate to create “mass appeal,”[3] which inevitably leads to a concerted project to manipulate mundanity, to forcibly mold it, to make it profitable. Mundanity, in the eyes of these corporate vultures, is not the collective glue of human society, but an instrument which can be rewired to engorge themselves with ill-gotten funds. It is a foolish and dangerous gambit, but one in which they find many willing allies, some of whom, I am sorry to say, come from the field of mundane studies.

The field of mundane studies is, I believe (as I must), a noble science at its core. That does not mean that all of its potential uses advance the human condition positively, however. We experts of the mundane seek to understand its fundamental elements in order to understand the human condition and the relationships that bind our species together. In this effort, we collect vast amounts of research: observations which detail every aspect of the mundane visible to our eyes.

The potential misuse of this body of work is, of course, evident. Armed with this information, corporations attempt to synthesize the mundane, to warp our work, and to gain profit. There are, alas, snakes, traitors, backstabbers, turncoats, rats, weasels, two-faced scum, deceivers, manipulators, phonies, scoundrels, and punk-ass buttholes that violate the ethical code of our profession to aid these soulless corporations in their criminal enterprise.

This may seem harsh, but I have cause to react in this fashion. The core danger of the synthetic mundane is that it forges the pestilent heart of modern fascism. The arrogant belief, born perhaps of despair, that our lives can be formed and molded in a laboratory of blandness as a weapon to entrench mediocrity—and its terrifying cousin, conformity—at the pinnacle of power, is a venom that threatens to annihilate our entire human project.

What does fascism need to propagate and sustain itself? Conformity. The death of individual freedom and originality.

To understand why this is so, we must recognize that, at its core, fascism is a weapon wielded by mediocre individuals—people who, under conditions of truly equal opportunity, would amount to nothing of value—to rid the world of authentic achievement and of true, earned greatness, so that their own pathetic nature is no longer a liability, but an advantage.

Fascists reject an equal world and push a narrative of superiority, but what they truly want is not a world where the best dominate because they are the best, but a world in which losers are sustained by artificial means in the key positions of power. They do this because, at a fundamental level, they understand that an imposed structure, not an organic one, is the only way they (the mediocre) will hold these positions of power for a sustained period.

Conformity in the mundane aspects of life suddenly becomes a necessity to maintain this framework. Originality, authenticity, are a serious risk, as they threaten to reveal the insufficiency, the mediocrity, of those empowered by fascism. We, as human beings, are naturally connected to true creation, to the real, and draw inspiration from it. An inspired world, a world interested in being its authentic self, in empowering that in others, is a world that rejects fascism inherently.

Now, I am not some kind of conspiracy theorist, nor a deranged radical. I am not arguing that the corporations that create and profit from these restaurants are necessarily intentionally looking to establish fascism among us[4]. What I argue is that their use of synthetic mundanity, their push to prepackage every aspect of our mundane daily lives into an artificial, unoriginal, and generic form in a search for endless and unnecessary profit puts us all at risk.

Mundanity surrounds us constantly. We derive much of our sense of human inspiration from the beautiful, authentic, and fundamentally human mundane things we see every day. Restaurants are part of this. At a genuine restaurant, one created by a human being because they love to feed people, we can be inspired in deeply profound ways. We eat food that someone put their heart and soul into preparing, that put themselves out there artistically, gastronomically, and, in a deep sense, personally. We sit in a space that reflects the personality, the goals, and dreams of those who have invited us in. And of course, we share this experience with people we love, or maybe don’t love, but nonetheless have chosen to sit down with. All of this is inspiring.

These corporate-designed chains lack all of these things. The food is designed to ensure either addiction or low costs for the owners. The space is designed to get you to spend the most money possible. And the experience isn’t the same. I think we all know this deep down. When your burger has a sauce that has a name like “Signature Alamo Spicy Mayo Bacon Burger™” and was shown on a Super Bowl ad featuring two comedians and a retired basketball player, you are deeply unlikely to find human connection with those around you[5].

The economic power of these chains means that they have the capacity to push restaurants created by real people, by members of the community, out of business. Their propaganda machines (called marketing) ensure you only hear their names, and their sales tactics, including prices that genuine restaurants cannot compete with, mean that we are increasingly left with a world of identical mediocre eateries.

Originality is dying, conformity is growing. As authentic spaces die, we lose our sense of the authentic mundane, and the synthetic mundane increasingly takes over. When we don’t see authenticity anymore, when our landscape is filled with identical mediocrity, we forget what being human really means. We let our guard down and the fascists absorb everything of value around us. Control the mundane, control the people.

We naturally glide through the mundane, shaping it through our human experiences, our emotions, and our collective individuality. It is created by us, from the ground up, and empowers us with the ability to define our daily life—the little things that are not so little when we really think about how much they mean to us.

Synthetic mundanity is a perversion of our social norms and thus a grave threat to our collective future. It seeks to shape our human experiences, define our emotions, and crush our collective individuality. It is imposed on us from above and strips us of the ability to define our daily life, repurposing the little things that are not so little when we really think about how much they mean to us to serve the greedy hearts of shareholders who have shed any notion of wishing to form part of human society.

This is why I am writing to you today; this is why I approach this topic with such passion. To surrender to the onslaught of conformist garbage thrown at us daily by moneyed interests would be a tragedy. It may not be in our power to stop the creation of synthetic mundanity, but we can at the very least try to fight for what is right, help originality flourish, and defend the truth at the core of mundanity.

Go out to dinner tonight. Don’t go to the place with its own app. Try the neighborhood joint owned by the immigrant couple that drives a 2014 Honda Odyssey. Get the house special. Leave a nice tip.

Embrace the mundane.

Yours truly,

Dr. Moriarty Cornelius Livingstone IV

Pre-eminent expert on Mundane Studies

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[1] It is important to note that a sound individual (of body as well as mind) ought not to have become physically weakened by the transit from automobile to waiting room; thus, it is crucial to understand that this comes in the context of an all-encompassing system that gradually degrades the health of its victims.

[2] The answer is, in fact, none.

[3] Mass “appeal”=mass profitability.

[4]Though, I suspect a number of them would not be displeased by such an outcome as long as their profit margins are adequately protected.

[5] I have also found, through intense experimentation, that dining in these kinds of restaurants greatly reduces the probability of post-meal sexual intercourse with one’s invited companion.

About the Author

Dr. Moriarty Cornelius Livingstone IV is the planet’s preeminent expert on the mundane. He is a prolific essayist, covering a stunning range of topics and genres with a specific emphasis on the ways in which the mundane mold the world in which we live.

Dr. Livingstone also serves as head editor of our Lurking Llamas Press Classics Anthology series. He brings his nearly infinite wisdom and stunning observations to these affordable volumes of great literature.

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