Kaua'i Reflections, Prologue: In Defense of Simply Tasty

Now tastier, it says.

Tastier than what?

This particular turn of advertising phrase has baffled me since its inception. The epithet itself was pioneered, I think, sometime during the New Coke phase of the post-Vietnam era, but had its roots in earlier efforts to push food upgrading, when the model of edible obsolescence needed to be sold to the American public as a legitimate way of thinking.

By the way: hi. I'm Charles Cox. I'm at the airport Wendy's, just off the security line, and they're telling me some biscuit sandwich is now tastier, and I'm going through mental anguish trying to figure out what that means. That's my current situation. My now. My gestalt. How's your Wednesday?

You know, they're putting advertisements at the bottom of those TSA search bins now...

I think being displeased with the ordinary food item was initially a postwar concept; rationing and scrap drives and air raid drills left on the last train out with Hitler, to be replaced with what must have been the first sigh of post-atomic disappointment at opening a tin and finally realizing that for all of the war-effort smokescreen literature, you were eating goo. Formless, vaguely pink and alimentary.

Food romanticism was born in those days, really, and I don't blame anyone for that; it's a natural response to Hormel. Epicurean equity theory poured into the void that used to hold warm, yeasty, brewing anti-German sentiment. What was tasty if it wasn't at least tastier than zero-state? The American palate calibrated itself on civilized C-rations, which drifted an appropriate distance toward being just like Our Boys Over There without ever actually touching hardtack. I think that's how we got creamed chipped beef, incidentally.

It's about 8:00 AM on an airport Wednesday. I'm waiting for a flight to Hawaii, and the October sun is just starting to peek out over the trees and gray slate flats of the tarmac, poked up in places by squat, pyramidal bunkers with flashing red lights.

Outside, visible through the three-paned armored Lexan bowing inward on steel cable trusses, a stout little truck is passing by a row of planes. Made by Volcanoes, the truck proclaims. It's bottled water, and while it's my understanding that we probably had water before we had volcanoes, I have to admit a little bit of awe at the concept.

Water. From Volcanoes. Goddamn.

You know, they cool submarine nuclear reactors with mercury, not water...

"What do you want for your side?"

I pull back from my daydream, and she's behind the register, looking at me looking at the menus; enthralling in green and yellow wake-up advertising plumage. I try to clear my head.

What do I want for my side? You know, they even tried to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor once...

I ordered french toast sticks, and now I get to choose a side. You know - to go with french toast sticks. I get to choose a cinnamon roll, a blueberry muffin, or hash browns. I sputter, perplexed. None of those make any sense. It's not that they are unworthy food items. I'm sure they're tasty. Hell, I'm sure they're tastier. But how can any of those go with french toast sticks? It's starch-on-starch. It's not sexy at all. I don't own a single starch-on-starch DVD in my entire mental food porn collection.

I'm having a Monty Hall moment.
I don't know what to do.
These are terrible choices, terrible days of indecision in which we live...
Stop speechwriting, just pick something...

"I'll have the hash browns," I hear myself say.

Hash browns.
Seriously. You picked hash browns to go with french toast sticks.
Way to go, Cox. Great start.