Food Status Fallacy

A non-chowhoundish friend, marveling at the quality of my unambitious hole-in-the-wall lunch joints, expressed surprise that we were eating so well in such unlikely venues.

"Building design doesn't cook your food,” I noted. "Genre doesn't cook your food. Location doesn't cook your food. A human being cooks your food. So the only thing that matters is the care and talent applied by that person.”

She replied "Sure, but garish bus station lunch counters don't normally attract great chefs."

"That's a false distinction," I said, "based on fallacy."

Most food is bad, I explained.

By bad, I mean uninteresting, unexciting, mediocre or worse. That includes a lot of food others might call "okay" or "decent", but which would leave me disappointed. Anywhere you go—top of the status range to the bottom—you'll find it hard to escape the dictum.

High-status restaurants have a bag of tricks to distract you from the listlessness of their food, beginning with their status, itself. Spend $100 on dinner, you'll probably miss the shortfall. If you do notice, you'll be inclined to shrug it off. Maybe it was a bad night (the place has such a great reputation) or it wasn't to your particular taste (again, the place has such a great reputation!). But when a joint serves bad food—and remember, most food is bad—it confirms your assumptions about low-status eateries.

If you mull it over, you'll notice this applies far beyond food.


See also the Green M&M Fallacy