ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

This column originally was published on July 10, 2014. Until only recently the prospects for creative redevelopment at Colonial Manor seemed permanently belly-up, but now residents living nearby have rallied to the idea of participating in the Redevelopment Commission's closed-door, fix-is-in process. Predictably this has raised the hackles of the spider-web-encrusted monastics seated there, but anything to mobilize the grassroots is good, whether or not Irving Joshua agrees (and rest assured, he doesn't). 

Hint: "Corridor study." Mayor Jeff Gahan is on record as dismissive of the idea, which is the single best reason to pursue it. 

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ON THE AVENUES: You want some fries with your redevelopment?

“Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.”
-- Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

Once upon a time someone asked me where I live.

I said, “Well, have you heard the old adage about the clinical definition of insanity?”

“Sure,” he replied. “The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results.”

“Exactly. So, to answer your question, I live in the place where the definition of insanity is precisely the same wording as the mission statement for our city’s economic and redevelopment commissions.”

“I don’t understand at all. Can you repeat that?”

“But of course. Our elected officials repeat it twice a month.”

---

A boy can dream of subversion, revolution and the unexplored, virginal territory lying just outside the box, but in reality, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Tahiti that the moribund stretch of Charlestown Road by the McDonald’s and Colonial Manor would ever be “redeveloped” in any substantially different way today than it first was developed in the early 1970s.

After all, these latest cookie-cutter chain components are interchangeable. Once a Wendy’s and KFC; now a Hardee’s and Domino’s Pizza. Once an impossibly ugly suburban-style strip center with a Kroger, now just as unattractive and sparsely occupied by a Cash Saver grocery (it’s a member of One Southern Indiana, dog), this latter occupancy hailed by England Doug and Maalox the Conqueror as one of the supreme achievements of Hizzoner’s somnolent third mayoral term.

It is left to Irving Joshua, who surely has more unmonitored power than any non-elected official in town, and consequently wields the redevelopment commission as a veritable rolled-up newspaper of outmoded notions, to step forward and connect the dots with another usual platitude, fortuitously captured by the newspaper at a meeting scheduled during the afternoon, when most working people can’t attend:

Joshua, president of the redevelopment commission, said (Hardee’s and Domino’s) are “improving the likelihood we can keep the grocery store there.”

That’s a deeply depressing measure of how far the bar has descended here in Truck Through City, where pallet-nailing is considered a high-tech job, and Chick-fil-A is the preferred place for 50th anniversary dinners, just so long as they’re procured via the handy automotive window.

At the same time, it shows just how crazily out of touch I’ve become with respect to what passes for modernity these days – thankfully, gratefully and happily so.

I try to imagine what it must be like to hear of a new burger joint coming to the neighborhood -- to immediately fall to my knees, and to break into tears of joy, fulfillment and release: “I never, ever thought I’d live to see the day when we’d have a Zaxby’s down the street. I just might eat there every single night.”

Whatever. Let’s hope you have Obamacare when your heart explodes.

---

Consequently, it is with an overwhelmingly vast chasm of a psychological disconnectedness that I attempt to fathom the desperation and bleakness of lives spent contemplating the advent of a new fast-food sandwich, as seen on television, all the better for the Archer Daniels Midland Triple Fatburger to be greeted by social media with millions of “likes,” retweets and varied regurgitations of “hosanna.”

How on earth these people can root for extractive, exploitative corporations is beyond me. Maybe I’m getting old. Then again, maybe uneducated self-delusion is the new national pastime.

And yet … the recurring problem amid my rampant cynicism is that yes, I actually can see both sides of it – and I’m fully implicated in one of them.

In my own chosen world, there are regular explosions of pulse-quickening geekery, exclusionary narcissism and pure avarice when it comes to the impending release of a rare, highly-rated beer, and to be perfectly fair, I’m forced to concede that as the peculiarly American stains of materialism and consumerism go, the differences between Taco Bell envy and Westvleteren hoarding are of degree only. They’re both representative of materialism and consumerism run amok.

It makes me want to refrain from both food and drink, and retreat to the confines of my library to select real, tactile books, and begin to reacquaint myself with the world of ideas.

That’s because I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, this country is a dismally stupid place. It also is mercilessly tacky. Perpetual tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed define the American experience, and what’s worse, we’re not content to populate our own continent as 24-7 shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles.

No, we must infect the remainder of the planet, too. The evangelistic impulse is the same, whether capitalistic or religious. To me, David Novak’s rah-rah cheer for the shareholders of Yum Brands plays a bit too much like “Heil, Hitler” – and as a non-book-reading, insultingly wealthy white man, his cadence is even less symmetrical when translated into Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese or Klingon.

We can’t even have useful innovations like universal health care, for fear that dollars invested in human happiness might detract from expenditures on the very same food rendering us in need of hospitalization in the first place, not to mention whatever is left to purchase vital plastic trinkets from overseas manufacturers.

There it is, in a nutshell, and something to ponder while you’re sinking your cavity-ridden teeth into some Papa John’s:

We celebrate rope-a-dope notions like the "American Dream," aiming to marginalize an excluded majority, while perpetually bedazzling constituents with hopes of a consumer paradise here on Earth, buttressed by religious and patriotic superstition, even as the overall playing field is kept firmly tilted toward wealth where it already reposes.

Come to think of it, that’s the Republican Party's platform.

To paraphrase the late Warren Zevon, America … New Albany … your shit’s fucked up.

---

Recent columns:

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: "Pints&union, where the classic beer hits keep right on pouring."

Death (and bizarre zombie afterlife) to chains.

I have a dim memory of seeing that Chi Chi's in Luxembourg, probably in 2002. Kenny Rogers Roasters food never passed my lips. Rax? Maybe in the 1970s.

Death to chains, people.

The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains, by Ernie Smith (Atlas Obscura)

Losing can be an opportunity to do something different.

... So it wasn’t a surprise then, when (Kenny Rogers Roasters) eventually faltered, and, by 1998, Rogers himself was trying to disassociate himself. The company was sold in 1999 to Nathan’s, the hot dog chain, and after years of declines, the chain—which once had over 300 locations—closed its last location in North America in 2011.

The real story, though, is what happened just before that. Because while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008. Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S.

And, last year, the chain opened up its first Indian location, with the goal of reaching $10 million in sales and 40 to 50 locations in India alone by 2021.

Now, there are more than 400 locations worldwide—topping its ‘90s peak and, in the process becoming one of a number of chains that have faltered domestically but gone on to have strange, often lucrative second lives, whether they exist, like Kenny Rogers Roasters, as successful American exports or whether they persist, like the last remaining Chi Chi’s restaurants in Belgium and Luxembourg, as a wildly diminished if improbably stubborn reminders of a chain’s former greatness.

In which the Tragic Ketchup Calamity is recounted.

Every time an incident like the Tragic Ketchup Calamity occurs, the 1% smiles, because it means that all the rest of us are screaming at each other, and not sharpening knives.

Maybe You Get Bad Customer Service Because You're a Bad Customer, by Matt Walsh (Huffington Post)

 ... Now, I replay this back to you because I realize you probably scream profanities at minimum wage customer service representatives every time you run an errand or grab a bite to eat, so you might not recall the specifics of this one incident. And that brings us to the possible answer to that query you posed in the midst of your ketchup rant. You asked: "Why can't I ever f*cking get good customer service?" Well, ma'am, that might have something to do with you being a vulgar, miserable, malicious person. Maybe you get bad customer service because you're a bad customer. Did you ever consider that possibility?

I get it. "You're the customer so you're always right." They work here so they have to bend over backwards for you "because that's their job." Well, you're partially correct about that. Yes, you are a customer and, yes, they do work here. But it's actually not their job to deal with psychopaths. They aren't hostage negotiators, they're fast food workers. And even if the powers that be at these corporate chains push this "customer is always right" crap because they've decided it's good business to placate horrible jerks, in the real world, outside the land of plastic chairs and soda fountains, adults who throw temper tantrums in public are never right about anything.

ON THE AVENUES: You want some fries with your redevelopment?

ON THE AVENUES: You want some fries with your redevelopment?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

“Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.”
-- Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

Someone once asked me where I live.

I said, “Well, have you heard the old adage about the definition of insanity?”

“Sure,” he replied. “The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results.”

“Exactly. So, to answer your question, I live in the place where the definition of insanity is precisely the same wording as the mission statement for our city’s economic development department.”

“I don’t understand at all. Can you repeat that?”

“But of course.”

---

A boy can dream of subversion, revolution and the unexplored, virginal territory lying just outside the box, but in reality, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Tahiti that the moribund stretch of Charlestown Road by the McDonald’s and Colonial Manor would ever be “redeveloped” in any substantially different way today than it first was developed in the early 1970s.

After all, these latest cookie-cutter chain components are interchangeable. Once a Wendy’s and KFC; now a Hardee’s and Domino’s Pizza. Once an impossible ugly suburban-style strip center with a Kroger, now just as unattractive and sparsely occupied by a Cash Saver grocery (it’s a member of One Southern Indiana, dog), this latter occupancy hailed by England Doug and Maalox the Conqueror as one of the supreme achievements of Hizzoner’s somnolent third mayoral term.

It is left to Irving Joshua, who surely has more unmonitored power than any non-elected official in town, and consequently wields the redevelopment commission as a veritable rolled-up newspaper of outmoded notions, to step forward and connect the dots with another usual platitude, fortuitously captured by the newspaper at a meeting scheduled during the afternoon, when most working people can’t attend:

Joshua, president of the redevelopment commission, said (Hardee’s and Domino’s) are “improving the likelihood we can keep the grocery store there.”

That’s a deeply depressing but accurate measure of how far the bar has descended here in Truck Through City, where pallet-nailing is considered a high-tech job, and Chick-fil-A is the preferred place for 50th anniversary dinners, just so long as they’re procured via the handy automotive window.

At the same time, it shows just how crazily out of touch I’ve become with respect to what passes for modernity these days – thankfully, gratefully and happily so.

I try to imagine what it must be like to hear of a new burger joint coming to the neighborhood -- to immediately fall to my knees, and to break into tears of joy, fulfillment and release: “I never, ever thought I’d live to see the day when we’d have a Zaxby’s down the street. I just might eat there every single night.”

Whatever. Let’s hope you have Obamacare when your heart explodes.

---

Consequently, it is with an overwhelmingly vast chasm of a psychological disconnectedness that I attempt to fathom the desperation and bleakness of lives spent contemplating the advent of a new fast-food sandwich, as seen on television, all the better for the Archer Daniels Midland Triple Fatburger to be greeted by social media with millions of “likes,” retweets and varied regurgitations of “hosanna.”

How on earth these people can root for extractive, exploitative corporations is beyond me. Maybe I’m getting old. Then again, maybe uneducated self-delusion is the new national pastime.

And yet … the recurring problem amid my rampant cynicism is that yes, I actually can see both sides of it – and I’m fully implicated in one of them.

In my own chosen world, there are regular explosions of pulse-quickening geekery, exclusionary narcissism and pure avarice when it comes to the impending release of a rare, highly-rated beer, and to be perfectly fair, I’m forced to concede that as the peculiarly American stains of materialism and consumerism go, the differences between Taco Bell envy and Westvleteren hoarding are of degree only. They’re both representative of materialism and consumerism run amok.

It makes me want to refrain from both food and drink, and retreat to the confines of my library to select real, tactile books, and begin to reacquaint myself with the world of ideas.

That’s because I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, this country is a dismally stupid place. It also is mercilessly tacky. Perpetual tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed define the American experience, and what’s worse, we’re not content to populate our own continent as 24-7 shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles.

No, we must infect the remainder of the planet, too. The evangelistic impulse is the same, whether capitalistic or religious. To me, David Novak’s rah-rah cheer for the shareholders of Yum Brands plays a bit too much like “Heil, Hitler” – and as a non-book-reading, insultingly wealthy white man, his cadence is even less symmetrical when translated into Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese or Klingon.

We can’t even have useful innovations like universal health care, for fear that dollars invested in human happiness might detract from expenditures on the very same food rendering us in need of hospitalization in the first place, not to mention whatever is left to purchase vital plastic trinkets from overseas manufacturers.

There it is, in a nutshell, and something to ponder while you’re sinking your cavity-ridden teeth into some Papa John’s:

We celebrate rope-a-dope notions like the "American Dream," aiming to marginalize an excluded majority, while perpetually bedazzling constituents with hopes of a consumer paradise here on Earth, buttressed by religious and patriotic superstition, even as the overall playing field is kept firmly tilted toward wealth where it already reposes.

Come to think of it, that’s the Republican Party's platform.

To paraphrase the late Warren Zevon, America … New Albany … your shit’s fucked up.

A fetishization of wealth vs. capitalism's honorable foot soldiers.

Has it really been 13 years since the release of Fast Food Nation, the book by Eric Schlosser that examined "the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry"?

On the general theme of widening inequality, two recent articles in the Guardian considered food and eating. First, the moralism of fast food critics.

Don't look down on those who eat fast food, by Kathryn Hughes

Moralists sneer at people who choose McDonald's or KFC. But not all of us have time to cook a Jamie Oliver recipe.

Then, the glorification of wealth through dining.

London's restaurants: a grotesque display of opulence, by Tanya Gold

In the naked fetishisation of wealth that dominates the capital's most fashionable eating places there are no critics.

Learn about the forthcoming Mai oh Mai food truck.

Back on July 28, the absence of street food in New Albany on a Friday night prompted a rumination.

Needed is döner kebab, or perhaps falafel, maybe Cornish pasties.

 ... The gospel of the free market suggests that this situation eventually will solve itself. The solution might come more quickly if the city completes downtown streets, and the number of walkers and bikers escalates. At some point there will be a food truck, or existing establishments will do what we’re trying to do with the grilling program, at least in fair weather.

Unbeknownst to me, a partial solution may be in the offing.

Mai oh Mai Truck (at Facebook)

... Mai oh Mai will be a French- Vietnamese food truck that serves New Albany, IN and the surrounding area. While offering authentic cultural foods, it will also serve as the catalyst for educational programs that will benefit the community directly.

Jimmy Mai and Joe Phillips offer a partnership that has contributed 15 years in the restaurant industry, six years in the non- profit sector, and over 4,000 community service hours dedicated to regional and national non- profit organizations. Their combined knowledge of educational programs and the restaurant industry has enabled the opportunity to start a social establishment based on service learning and culinary artistry.

Hmm, looks like Joe has been holding out on me. As they get further along, I'll try to keep readers posted, but as for the intrigue factor, I'm already hooked.

Another factor to bear in mind is our Floyd County Health Department. Once I was chatting with a food truck operator in an adjoining county and asked if he ever came into Floyd. He grimaced.

"Floyd County? And deal with them?"

Let's hope that Mai oh Mai doesn't begin its career on Double Secret Probation.

Needed is döner kebab, or perhaps falafel, maybe Cornish pasties.

It was quarter to 8 on Friday night. I was with Blake at Party Time Liquor in Greenville, wrapping a beer tasting, and neither of us had eaten since lunch.

Was there any way we could grab a quick bite in downtown New Albany without eating chain fast food, and still make the beer stand in the alley at Bicentennial Park in time to have Houndmouth or two?

My first thought was DP UpDogs.

I searched the web on my i-Phone and couldn’t find the hours of operation; the phone kept ringing, so apparently our best bet wasn’t open. The problem is that downtown’s sit-down indie restaurants are packed on Friday (that’s a very good problem to have, by the way), and it would be unlikely to score a carry-out sandwich quickly at any of them.

Granted, we were grilling out in the beer garden at Bank Street Brewhouse, but I dislike getting in the way of paying customers, of whom there were a few queued up as we arrived. In the end, we each drank two hygienic plastic cups of dinner amid the music, and resolved to snack at home. That’s okay. We’re trained professionals. I can’t speak for Blake, though I had cheese and crackers.

The gospel of the free market suggests that this situation eventually will solve itself. The solution might come more quickly if the city completes downtown streets, and the number of walkers and bikers escalates. At some point there will be a food truck, or existing establishments will do what we’re trying to do with the grilling program, at least in fair weather.

But what I really, really wish we had here was döner kebab, just like in good ol’ Germany … with a streetside window.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432704577350194262835880.html">There's Nothing More German Than a Big, Fat Juicy Döner Kebab, by James Angelos (WSJ)

In fast food, Germany is better known for wurst. But few German street snacks are more appreciated than the Turkish döner kebab.

Brought to Germany four decades ago, the döner is to Berlin what pizza is to New York: a transplanted food that has taken on a new life in its adopted land. Today, there are more döner stands in Berlin than in Istanbul. And about 720 million servings are sold nationally each year according to an industry association.

German-style döners are seasoned meat processed into a large cylindrical loaf, roasted on a vertical spit, then thinly sliced with a long knife and wrapped in flat bread with vegetable toppings and, sometimes, a spicy sauce.

"Sometimes, marketing enables a pickpocket to steal a wallet--and be thanked for it."

Ground control to Doctor Tom: Do you have a dog in this fight?

The perfect crime, by Seth Godin

Sometimes, marketing enables a pickpocket to steal a wallet--and be thanked for it.

Marketers are responsible for what we do, it's not an activity without effects.

Last year, just one of the big fast food companies made more than $1,300,000,000 in profit (billion with a 'b'). They've also paid their CEO nearly $200 million in salary in the last five years. Sometimes, a big profit is the sign that you're doing something right, creating real value for people able to pay. Sometimes, though, it means you're exploiting a weakness in the system.

The big food companies are brilliant, relentless, focused marketers. Marketing works. It gets people to take action, to change their minds, and most of all, to do more of what they might have had an inkling to do in the first place. Sometimes a lot more. When the ideas of marketing (and the products are part of the marketing, optimized for high consumption) are weaponized like this, they are extraordinarily effective at achieving their goals.

The side effects of this marketing are obvious: both short-term satiation and long-term health degradation.

Alzheimer's, and more obviously, recurring litter in my yard.

As if we needed yet another instance of the high cost of low price ...

Alzheimer's could be the most catastrophic impact of junk food, by George Monbiot (Guardian)

... Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling ...

... Plenty of research still needs to be done. But, if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer's disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, seem to be incapable of responding.