Social media as a prism for consumption

In L.A., the easiest place to get a rainbow grilled cheese is Chomp Eatery in Santa Monica, a juice bar and organic food restaurant. In late September, two friends and I went to Chomp Eatery to try the sandwich for ourselves. The Yelp photos don’t show this, but the restaurant is in a strip mall next to a 7–11, a metroPCS, and a donut place that proudly advertises its own Snapchat filter. I ordered a ‘unicorn melt’ and asked the cashier about this food phenomenon. The main demographic is tween and teenage girls. They are almost always in groups, with an adult in tow. There has been a steady stream of orders — about twenty per day — since they started selling the melt on April 27th. The sandwich itself contains a mixture of fontina, asiago, provolone and Parmesan, all dyed with vegetable-based food coloring on sourdough. Almost everyone who orders the sandwich takes a picture before eating it.

Once our unicorn melt arrived, we immediately started taking pictures. We had fallen under its spell, just like the teenage girls.

“Oh, it’s it tastes like a regular grilled cheese,” I muttered. I had expected something different. Something more vibrant? The artificial colors, milk fat, and familiarity created a dissonance, but I kept eating.

“It’s good though,” one friend said.

It was. We sat there nibbling our now congealed melts, scrolling through our recent photos with greasy fingers.

The rainbow grilled cheese isn’t famous because it’s delicious. It’s famous because it looks delicious. It’s that one photogenic friend. Even if she is boring in person, she’ll still get likes. The food-coloring trend is very much connected to our image-based lives. It’s real-life Photoshop, saturation heightened, brightness bumped up. Rainbow coloring is a fairy-dusted manic pixie dream girl Snapchat filter. It’s GOOP with the dial turned up to 11.

We are on the tail end of a rainbow-food renaissance. Bagels, grilled cheese, wontons, sushi and even coffee have all been layered and dyed into technicolored marvels. The trend peaked this spring and summer. A search of #RainbowFood on Instagram leads to healthy Gwyneth Paltrow-approved wraps, ROY G. BIV vegetable platters, or artificially colored junk food.

On Pinterest, there are pages and pages of different rainbow recipes. Rainbow fudge, rainbow waffles, rainbow pasta, rainbow hamantaschen, and (my personal favorite) rainbow pigs in a blanket. Black foods like IKEA Japan’s hot dog and have ice cream become popular too. These are playfully associated with goth and metal culture as well as self-deprecating “black-like-my-soul” jokes. Galaxy print is not only for your tights anymore. Galaxy apples and donuts are there to complete your glittery cosmic brand. It’s like rainbow, but a little nerdier and more refined. If there’s a lifestyle you want to pursue, there’s an artificially colored food to match your a e s t h e t i c.

Most of the food-coloring trends are Asian in origin. The earliest traces I could find of the rainbow grilled cheese are from Hong Kong in September 2015. The all-black Kuro burger from Burger King was in Japan a year before a version came to American Burger Kings Halloween 2015. In Los Angeles, you can buy fairy dust wontons at 626 Night Market, an Asian-American centered food venue.

Photoworthy food is aspirational but also clearly fake, or at least manufactured. It inhabits a fantasy space; associated with unicorns, fairies, and glitter. In the popular YouTube series, Man vs. Pin, a husband and wife both attempt to recreate Pinterest posts à la “Pinterest fails.” The series is comedic and decidedly campy, but the viewer can live vicariously through the couple with relatively low risk. Lately, their channel has posted a lot of food coloring tutorials. The couple demystifies the rainbow-unicorn-glitter aspect by actually making the food. A rainbow grilled cheese isn’t all that special when the only difference is five dollars’ worth of Betty Crocker food coloring. The video series show the cracks within the mask. Suddenly anyone can access the galaxy or goth lifestyle brand and do it badly. But people still subscribe and watch.

We know social media is a façade, but we still participate. Instagram doesn’t show our everyday lives; it’s a collection of the best parts of our lives. It’s cold brew without the annoying silt at the bottom. It’s a wonderful night out with friends without waiting for people to show up. The food-coloring trend may seem juvenile, but it’s no different than a filter or even choosing to take a photo in the first place. The only difference is that there is now active documentation in hopes of sparking envy. As long as flatlays are a thing, we will have this dynamic.

As humans we have to consume things. Food is essential! It’s basic biology. But since the rise of social media, we are now fixated on the idea of showing our consumption. “Look at the beautiful grain bowls I eat!” Our public image is tied to what we document, and it’s easiest thing to document is our consumption, but only the best parts. With this mind-set we are not only performing consumption, but viewing everyone’s lives through technicolor lenses.

Rainbow grilled cheese is an easy way to one-up that paleo friend of yours who can’t stop posting pictures of papayas, or the health goth posing in front of white-brick walls. The best thing about rainbow food is there’s very little sacrifice. The food tastes exactly the same but now it gets more likes. Just make sure the lighting is good.

Jacky Train is an art person, writer, and IKEA enthusiast in LA. He likes to eat things and quietly judge. Feel free to judge him quietly at www.jackytran.net

Human names have been changed to prevent rat-prisals.

Jan

Jan from New York who moved to L.A. sat in a bar in Brooklyn on Thanksgiving day. She told the bartender there are no rats in Los Angeles, and it’s always 70 degrees.

“I bet they live in the fucking palm trees,” some guy yelled down the bar. On the way back to her parents’ house, Jan rolled over a flat rat on her bicycle and it crackled like a soda can.

George

On the Lower East Side, George with fluff in his eyes walked into the kitchenette. He switched on the coffee pot and went to shower in the shared bathroom down the hall.

Back in the kitchenette, in a terry blue bathrobe, George poured hot black coffee into a heavy ceramic mug. In the bedroom, coffee on the dresser, George pulled his outside pants up, his dress shirt down, and tucked.

Then, George leaned in the doorway to the kitchenette while a foot-long rat crossed the slots of his two-slice toaster, sniffing the chrome.

Dev

For two weeks after 9/11, Dev walked with shuttered roll gates on downtown streets. He sat at dawn with the sobering drunks. In the all-night Chinatown restaurant, he choose a chair that faced the door. He ordered vegetable lo mein, moo shu vegetable and fried vegetarian dumplings, doughy and crisp, every night, and ate until it was done, wiping up the last purple of plum sauce with the last pancake shred. He ate the tiny corns like corn. After 9/11, he felt a person should not have to choose which Chinese food he wants most.

More rats ran in Lower Manhattan then, he thought. He thought the C.I.A. could turn on his cellphone like a backwards intercom. He was sure he had seen 200 soldiers in fatigues on Canal Street marching with automatic weapons just before sunrise. Two tender weeks where he walked all night every night. Reality was zoomed in so close to the foreground that the focus was soft.

Which is why in 2016, when Dev saw a thing much larger than a cat, really nearly raccoon-size but with lumps, running fast and so loud across Pearl Street, he thought of how the city smelled like gasoline before the first tower fell, and of the blocks-long line of people outside St. Vincent’s waiting all day to give blood.

He knew it was a nest of rats glued to each other with blood and semen, but he didn’t really know it, you know? Like he knew they didn’t need the blood at St. Vincent’s because everyone was dead, but he stood in line anyways.

Mattie

One hundred taquitos in the fridge for the benefit party for the newspaper, gone. Who would eat 100 taquitos? Three hours it took for Mattie to make them all.

Mattie’s aunt’s recipe for taquitos for 100: Simmer two big cans of Goya black beans with one small can of adobo chipotle peppers, any brand, and three tablespoons of granulated garlic. Spoon a small row of beans into a corn tortilla, roll tight, place in a pan with one inch of hot oil. Fry until brown. Cool on paper towels. Let sit in the refrigerator until one hour before 100 people arrive.

But there were zero of 100 taquitos left in the refrigerator. And if each of you swear on our friendship and this lease that you did not eat them, then who did?

George

On the Lower East Side, George bought a rat trap: 18 inches of plywood platform with red paint like runway markers and a bar that took two hands to pry back. George set the rat trap with peanut butter and sprinkle cheese and placed it with ginger hands next to the coffee pot.

In the morning, expecting blood, he stood in the kitchen doorway with eyes half cowered. Then he looked under the counter. In the oven. In the shower. Behind the radiator. Under the bed.

No blood. No rat. No peanut butter and sprinkle cheese. No trap for a foot-long rat.

Mattie

“Hey. There’s half a taquito under here.”

“I think this is a bean. Oh — ”

“No way.”

“Oh shit.”

“Really?”

“You guys, I think — ”

“Jesus. They can open the refrigerator.”

“One hundred taquitos, my God.”

Paul

Paul was just a man fresh off the bus. He put his navy canvas suitcase down on the tile floor of the N/R subway platform. Already, the rat was looking at the old man; already the old man stood closer than Paul thought a person should stand to a rat. But what did he know; this wasn’t Duluth.

Then the old man kneeled down and put out his hand. Then the rat walked over on four legs. Paul thinks the rat is thinking: Old man, hello, is that food you’ve got there?

Then, with a swiftness, the old man sprang up on one leg, booting the rat into the air. Then, with a cry, the old man struck down with one arm, bouncing the rat off the floor. The old man grinning looked at Paul.

In New York City, Paul looked with two eyes at his cellular phone; there was nothing to be done about that.

Jessie

At potluck dinner parties and book club gatherings in her second-floor walk-up, there were varying opinions about whether the rats liked to fuck in Jessie’s garbage bags because of the G train that ran below the three-story brick building or the neon Chinese restaurant that occupied the ground floor.

The rats fucked in winter and summer. She knew the rats were fucking because she had asked Google: Why do rats scream?

In cold, in sun-bake, in sheeting rain, the black trash bags writhed and rolled like boiling tar because they were having sex on the sidewalk outside Jessie’s apartment.

Then the garbage truck announced itself in air brakes, and one rat whispered to all the others: shh, someone’s coming.

George

George, in the doorway of the kitchenette on the Lower East Side with a pint of black coffee hot in a ceramic mug, yelled, “Hey!”

The rat looked up then looked away.

George balanced the mug on his palm. He threw it overhand. It cracked in two on the carapace of fur, hot black coffee flying everywhere. The rat looked up then looked away.

Jessie Singer is an editor in New York City. She’s on Twitter, waiting to hear your rat story.

It’s okay, there was a lot to keep track of.

The world is most assuredly becoming more awful. Oh, there are still people who will tell you that the world has never been better and it’s only because we are more aware of what’s happening that we believe things are bad now but a) think about how stupid that is as an actual argument and b) if you look closely at the people who are making these claims you will notice they are all tenured academics or people who make a lot of money as consultants or speechmakers to corporations or people who are generally better insulated from the sheer terror of what is happening all around us. Of course things look okay to them. For the rest of us, whose stake in the game is contains considerably less protective cushioning, the undeniable horror of existence has been clear for some time. Everything, some of us have insisted for many years, is terrible and only getting worse. The fact that it took 2016 to bring so many of you around to this viewpoint and not our repeated insistence is unfortunate, but now that we have you on board we hope you will be more receptive to our future arguments on what to do about it.

Meanwhile, it is that time of year when we look back at the horrors of the previous twelve months. Particularly if we are websites and hungry for traffic. A lot of what you will see out there is gross, because it was conceived for gross purposes and birthed into a world where grossness is celebrated, but here are three things that are as enjoyable as can be when you consider that they are reflections on a terrible time that will itself seem somehow marginally less terrible when compared with what came after.

The Financial Times’ Alphaville blog’s Person of Interest 2016 longlist would not merit inclusion here simply for its description of the horrible menace that is Twitter, but it wouldn’t have required that much else, which is a bar it cleared easily. [Registration required]

Leah Letter Worst of the Media 2016

Leah Finnegan’s Leah Letter is the best bit of opt-in dyspepsia available these days. Unless you are a journalist with a Jewish-sounding surname it is unlikely you are getting this level of vitriol sent your way on a regular basis. Subscribe, if you don’t already, and outsource your antipathies to Leah.

The Worst Tweets Of 2016

How bad is Twitter? [See above]. This barely scratches the surface. Everyone involved in this, including the people who assembled it, should be ashamed of themselves but shame is an emotion we are no longer capable of experiencing. Like common sense, it is something evolution has apparently decided we no longer need. I’m sure half the people on this list were excited about how it boosted their brand.

That should tide you over for now. Rest up, there’s a lot more where that came from on its way. If we are still around to make these lists in 2017 we will need a whole new format in which to present all the awfulness. Take a second to reflect on how fortunate you are that this time around it was only three. You’re welcome.

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I’m alone for the holidays, what can I do?” — Lonely Lou

Congratulations. You are living the dream. Christmas is pretty intense. Maybe it would be nice if we only did it every four years like the Olympics. Or, more realistically, just on even years. Doing this brutal Capitalism Festival every year makes it kind of a drag. But you can get through it!

You could pretend it isn’t the holidays at all. Get some food ahead of time and treat December 25th like an unexpected snow day. Get some books from the library. Maybe something engrossing and long like the Game of Thrones books. Or Harry Potter. Or all the Little House on the Prairie books. And just go to town reading alone in your place, completely ignoring the insanity of the outside world.

If you don’t think about Christmas, it doesn’t happen. Everyone else in the universe doesn’t exist when you aren’t around. We literally freeze in place, waiting for you to emerge from your apartment. Don’t worry about it. We love being frozen in place. But if you don’t go outside, you won’t have to think about Christmas and yearn for whatever ghosts of Christmas Past you think will satisfy your loneliness. Nothing will. We’ve been trained since we were young that people are the solution to loneliness. When the solution for not being lonely is being happier being alone.

Watch DVDs! And crap on Netflix. If you haven’t watched “The OA,” you could go for that. Ignore Twitter, Facebook, email, Instagram. It will just be people humblebragging through their holidays. People with families, presents, food, miseries, unfulfilled desires. People are all secretly miserable. Especially the happy-seeming ones.

You don’t need mistletoe and ho ho ho. Midnight mass is really late, you could be sleeping. You don’t need Christmas. There will always be another one. It will creep up on you before you know it. It starts in October, just before Halloween and ends in mid-January. It’s endless. It’s supposed to be magical. Like, you’re supposed to buy your spouse a car and put a big bow on it. That’s pretty magical. But you don’t need this. You don’t need cards or trees or lights or wreaths.

And you certainly don’t need other people. Hell is other people said that French guy in that play. You are good enough. And if you fill your life with good things, you’ll be happy, no matter who you’re with. Or in spite of it. Eat well, see great movies. Seeing a movie by yourself is great. You can just leave if it sucks! You don’t have to ask anyone else what they thought of it! You don’t have to listen to their deconstruction of the character of Chewbacca. Because it’s just you!

If you yearn for connections during the holidays, just literally start talking to anyone. On the subway, at the supermarket. Anyplace. About 5 minutes into any holiday conversation you will once again wish you were alone. Have you ever spoken to anyone on a plane? Don’t do it. You will become their plane buddy for the flight. You will have to help them get their bag down out of the overhead compartment. This is why they invented headphones.

Christmas is knocking, but you surely don’t have to let it in. All Christmas skeptics are plagued by visits from ghosts who are supposed to torment you into liking Christmas by beating you about the head and shoulders with awkward memories of Christmases in all directions. If I had one wish for you this holiday season, it would be for you to get the rest you need. To put up with all the nonsense.

I’d like the teach the world to be alone. In a place without holidays. Where the only sign that it’s “the most wonderful time of the year” is the mittens on your Dunkin Donuts cup. If someone could explain “The OA” to me that would be a Christmas miracle.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

A roundup, and a best estimate.

There are a couple of things the science community knows to be true:

1. Santa is real.
2. Certain reindeer can fly, and
3. On Christmas Eve, they travel around the world together without catching fire.

In order to exert an amount of energy that huge, Santa is obviously harnessing technologies the rest of us haven’t figured out yet, but what’s a little more surprising is that the physics community can’t seem to agree on how fast he’s traveling between each of his stops.

Here are just some of the answers out there…

New York Magazine:

More than 6 million miles per hour.

This physics blog:

650 miles per second. [ed: That’s 2.34 million miles per hour.]

The Telegraph:

1,800 miles per second. [ed: That’s 6.48 million miles per hour.]

The Fermi National Accelerator laboratory:

99.999999 percent of the speed of light. [ed: The speed of light is 670,616,629 mph, so close to that.]

Physics.org:

10,000 homes per second.

NASA:

Faster than starlight. [ed: The speed of light is 670,616,629 mph.]

Nerdist:

650 miles per second. [ed: That’s 2.34 million miles per hour.]

Wait… did you catch that? Nerdist’s answer agrees with the physics blog one. Promising! Let’s try some different search terms and see what comes up…

Snopes:

650 miles per second.

Okay three and it’s a pattern as far as I’m concerned. Unless one of you has a better idea, I say we go with 640 miles per second (or 2.43 million miles per hour) as Santa’s unofficially assumed pace until the great minds of the physics community are able to give us some better specifics.

Everything’s going to be haunting from now on.

It’s Tuesday and you’re still alive. Does that qualify as good news? It’s hard to tell these days. I can’t offer you much in the way of consolation — and also I am starting to worry that your need for consolation is going to be so far beyond my capacity to give any in the coming year that you will walk about this world unconsoled for however many days you have left — but I can say that at least, uh, there is still music and here’s some now. Look, I told you I didn’t have much to offer. You will just have to make do with this, which these people correctly characterize as “haunting.” You should probably get used to seeing that word a lot in the future. Anyway, enjoy.

★★ The remaining chunks of snow were incongruous to the point of being baffling in the warmth of morning: How had that only happened a day ago? The rain jacket, turned up after a ransacking of the coat closet, was barely needed for warmth and not at all for dryness in the late morning. But the clouds coming from the west grew heavier again, and the wind moaned over the building, and rain started ticking against the windows. A crack of light ran across the north, below the lumpy and undulating cloud bottoms, but nothing broke apart even as the light through the crack turned pink with sundown. After dinner, the snow at the foot of the wall in the forecourt had made it through the thaw, and people were already back to bundling up again.

Or at least Trump voters are.

We parents tell our children that when you know you’ve lost an argument or a race, the right thing to do is to be a good sport and to “get ’em next time.” But if there is no next time, or you know that every next time you are going to be in the loser’s lane again, what’s the use of being a good sport? It would make you look even more ignorant, and more like a loser, to pretend like you think you have a chance. The game has been rigged against you. Why not piss on the field before you storm off? Why not stick up your finger at the whole goddamned game?

If you are of the opinion that the prevailing emotion for Trump voters in this election was “I want you to hurt like I do,” you will find a lot in this piece to agree with. Hunter S. Thompson has a bad rap these days because of how the dudes who look to him as an influence are terrible in and of themselves but also as a malign force in whatever survives of “journalism” and, to a lesser extent, because of the self-parody he became in his later years, but Hell’s Angels, his chronicle of “left-behind people motivated only by ‘an ethic of total retaliation,’” came long before either of those things, and the argument advanced here — that it was an early warning sign of what we just saw happen— is worth entertaining.

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.

A definitive assessment.

Maybe next year.

It’s as annoying as everything else we do.

What’s happening in the fast-paced world of candy consumption?

In the past two years, Mr. Crean says consumers have asked more detailed questions about where Prestat’s cocoa beans originate and want to know the percentage of cocoa in its chocolate. “Young consumers are especially gravitating toward 70% and above,” he says.

One of Lindt’s fastest-selling chocolate bars contains 90% cocoa, says Ms. O’Neil, of Lindt USA. “As consumers try dark chocolate, they start to test themselves,” she says. “They might begin at a lower rate, but then go up to 70%, then 85%, and then a 90% chocolate bar.”

Offering portion control also helps chocolate eaters feel good, Ms. O’Neil says. Lindt’s Excellence bars, which are wrapped in foil and white cardboard, are designed for a “ritualistic” experience. “Consumers take care to rip the foil gently, then break a square off, then roll the foil back up,” she says. “It’s meant to withstand that type of consumption where you might eat one square or two squares a day.”

You know, it is exactly stuff like this that explains not only why Donald Trump won but why we shouldn’t be upset when his administration results in the end of our species. The sooner we shuffle our single-square chocolate-chewing asses off the stage the better it will be for the planet and whatever’s left on it. Remember a year ago when were so upset about those beardo Brooklyn brothers who got busted for their bean-to-bar bullshit? We should have known right then a real reckoning was coming for all of us. If I were you I wouldn’t bother limiting myself to a square a day anymore. Who knows how much longer you’re going to be around to enjoy it? (If “enjoy” is actually the right word for what you are doing when you eat something that is 90% cocoa.) Eat it all and let God sort it out.

When is it OK to Eat Chocolate?