How Is Everything Tasting?

I’m not sure when it came into use, but a few years ago I started noticing that wait staff in restaurants would come to my table with a new question:  How is everything tasting?

It’s in near universal use now. In fact, it is quite noticeable to me whenever a waiter doesn't use this exact wording, because those times are extremely rare. In those cases, I figure it must be a trainee who is quickly taken out back and throttled after this faux pas.

This question disturbs me. It’s not just because it's a grammatical hack job: I certainly hope that my food is not tasting anything at all, because I prefer my food to be dead before I eat it. I am the one doing the tasting, not my food, thank you very much. If that’s not the case, I would certainly like to know, so I could make my exit and find another establishment where I could enjoy a meal of good, dead food. I’m okay with a few living microbes on my plate, but animals and plants should not be alive when the wait staff brings them to me. It sounds morbid to state this out loud--and it is, quite literally-- but it is the reality .

I'm not much of a grammatical snob. I enjoy regional variations in dialect. Language evolves, and what’s incorrect today may be in the rulebooks tomorrow. This particular phrase does stick in my craw, however, as it is particularly tasteless, if you pardon the puns. 

But that’s not what’s really bothering me.

No, what bothers me is that mealtime has been downgraded from a holistic experience of culture, memories, dreams and relationships to simply a matter of bodily pleasure.

I consider this a telltale sign of the downward trajectory of the health of our culture.

In the past, a waiter might have asked: How are you?  Or: How is everything?

Though very general, those are open-ended questions through which the staff would have been trying to gauge all aspects of their patrons' dining experience--food, ambiance, service. Within that, there would have been a deeper, implied question--how are you?

Mealtime is a cornerstone of human culture, so these questions are mightily important.

To now ask, how is everything tasting? reduces the meal experience to only an experience of pleasure sensations. Complex social interactions are being described as consumer transactions. You are purchasing a product, and the sly-but-ever-so-significant implication is that its taste is the only relevant factor in the dining experience. In fact, this question is not only a sign of the decline of civilization, but it actually helps to facilitate that decline.

How so?  It's an illusion of choice: You are not being told outright what opinion to have. No, that would never happen in freedom-loving America. Your opinion absolutely matters, as any marketer would tell you. It is, after all, all about you.

But it's not. What is going on is much more sinister. You are being told the category and range in which meaning itself is recognized or, dare we say, allowed.  You can like or not like the food all you want, and the wait staff and their employers really want to know. But it's taste is the sole criterion for your opinion.

Human flourishing, cultural meaning, the spirituality of mealtime--those are non-criteria. Those are not to be discussed. Those aspects are not being refuted or argued against--no, that would actually give them power. Even worse, they are completely ignored altogether. They simply don't exist. Those kittens have been drowned in the river. Human hope, where the sum is greater than the parts, that language is gone. No, we are merely cogs in the wheel of consumer transactions, moving from one sensation to another.

Please, pass the red pill. I hear it's really tasting good.