How Hipsters and Trendazoids Fuck with my Favorite Foods

Nobody needs to tell me that the best food, art, and music were spawned in the ghettos. Every little sweet piece of enjoyment in this world has come from a reaction to oppression of some kind. What really pisses me off though is how some simple delights have become trendy—even bourgeois, as the horrendously rich, sample—then accept these random delights created by the disenfranchised, and ultimately they become overpriced delicacies. Take the Thai Papaya Salad for instance. Under ripe fruit, brine shrimp, fish sauce, chilies, lemon, peanuts and palm sugar; not exactly truffles and caviar. Green papayas are cheap—dirt cheap—why...because they are kinda “inedible” according to the natural order of things. Brine shrimp are the poor man’s consolation prize, having rowed back to his corrugated tin hovel empty handed. Fish sauce is probably a botched experiment in food preservation gone terribly wrong. Need I continue with the chili, lemon, and palm sugar…?

A Thai restaurant opened up in my neighborhood about a year ago. At this point, I should tell you that I do live in South East Asia—and not too far from the home of these “exotic” ingredients. In fact, I have two papaya trees in my yard. Ha. So, the fact that I’m being a whinging bitch about prices should tell you something. I am not in Toronto paying ten bucks for a papaya salad. However, let me continue. The main appeal of this new little shack of a restaurant was that the prices were almost “Thai” in price, and the portions American in size. Hence, it became a local favorite among foreigners and Taiwanese alike. And being familiar with the comings and goings of restaurants—we all knew that their initially generous portions would thin out a little. However, we were disgustingly shocked by the degree.

In the beginning, their papaya salad was a dish to be shared with two or three people. My guess is that it was about 2-3 Cups worth. Price: about 3 bucks American, I think. However, with this particular item, I never felt that this new restaurant was trying to lure in customers with outrageously cheap prices. I simply felt, it being a Thai owned restaurant—that they were using prices reflective of the actual ingredients used—i.e. cheap stuff. My friends and I went there for lunch recently, ordered the salad and were presented with a sad little saucer of crunchy papaya strips, a few peanuts, in a soup of liquid. The flavor was still great—that refreshing Asian marriage of sour and spicy, but after a small bite or two each there was nothing left to do except awkwardly chase a fragment or two of peanut around with your chopsticks. All in all, the portion had been cut down to around 30 percent of the original. The question is why.

There are a few other food examples that have become outrageously overpriced as a result of either their popularity or “exoticness”. One could even argue that pizza also suffered a great inflation at some time. A few good examples are bagels, milk tea (outside Asia), and the Caesar Salad. These are again cheap dishes that have frogger-ed their way up a few income brackets—and are now generally accepted as luxurious items. A good Caesar will run you anywhere from 10-20 bucks—the worst part is that we’ve been so brainwashed that we accept it.  And it has nothing to do—like the papaya salad—with the ingredients. Anchovies?? You effing kidding me? They’re the piss-ants of the sea…more commonly known as “chum”—that is, cheap fish bait.

I guess this article is just a rant. I offer no solution, folks. Well maybe one or two; if you find a good deal out there in some restaurant, keep it on the low-down, and don’t be too frequent a diner if you want to slow down their process of skimming. Try not to popularize anything. Keep the bastards guessing—the minute you become a regular, and they know your order, say “eff this, now give me the cheese toast." And never at any point compliment the chef—while they, like teachers, may be the unsung heroes of our franked little world, we must keep them producing a quality item, a decent portion, at a reasonable price. Compliments lead to complacency. Heehaw!