[Pizza, burgers, and tacos are not only delicious, they are
essential to how capital shapes our lives. ]
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THE DOMINANCE OF PLATFORM FOODS  
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Arun Gupta
November 30, 2023
Dissent
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_ Pizza, burgers, and tacos are not only delicious, they are
essential to how capital shapes our lives. _

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927 , Edward Hopper

 

What did you eat today? Perhaps it was an egg-and-cheese sandwich,
followed by pizza, then ramen for dinner. Or maybe you had a breakfast
burrito, grabbed to-go sushi for lunch, and noshed on a burger and
fries to end the day.

I term these dishes “platform foods.” Though a sliver of culinary
heritage, they make up most of our meals. Americans devour 200
sandwiches
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burgers
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and forty-six slices of pizza
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year on average—deriving a third of meals from these three foods.
Add in packaged sushi and instant ramen, tacos, burritos, and nachos,
fries and chips, and pasta and mac ’n’ cheese, and it is evident
that a dozen or so platform foods account for most of our diet.

I borrow the concept of “platform” from the Pentagon. The
innumerable weapons in its trillion-dollar budget
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into just three categories: ships, planes, and vehicles. The military
calls them platforms
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they can be hollowed out into shells and upgraded with the latest
weapons, electronics, armor, and power systems. Similarly, most
platform foods have an elemental quality based on the three grains
that nourished the first civilizations: wheat, maize, and rice. As
vital as ever, they provide 50 percent of all of humanity’s caloric
intake
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Platform foods can easily swap components to create the illusion of
variety. Fatburger [[link removed]], for example, has
thousands of variations based on all possible combinations of
garnishes, sauces, cheeses, proteins, and buns.

The illusion of variety extends across platform foods as well.
Consider pepperoni pizza, carne asada burritos, cheesesteaks, pasta
bolognese, and cheeseburgers. They are but variations of wheat, beef,
and cheese. Other than the cheesesteak, they all have tomatoes. (While
barbarians will add ketchup or marinara
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a cheesesteak, purists know fried peppers and onions suffice for
tomato-like sweetness.)

For restaurateurs, platform foods are low cost, high volume, and high
profit. For consumers, they are cheap, filling, and tasty. Familiar
and made from common farm goods, platform foods are easily adaptable.
Pizza is said to have become popular in New York during the Great
Depression because it cost the customer only a quarter, while “the
owner racked up 90 percent profit
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Platform foods developed alongside steam-powered transport and
industry to feed a rapidly growing and mobile workforce. For example,
in Yokohama, Japan’s gateway to the world, mobile ramen stands
(_yatai_) near the port fed sailors, factory workers, and
longshoreman, who would gulp bowls of factory-made noodles in minutes
while standing. In late-nineteenth-century New England, lunch wagons
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pies and sandwiches were a fixture outside of factories day and night.

Nearly all platform foods bubbled up during the Second Industrial
Revolution
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The hamburger appeared in the 1890s
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in the United States (although who served it first is up for debate).
The first known American pizzeria was already open in 1894 on
Mulberry Street
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Mi originated in Vietnam during the First World War. By 1910, some
25,000 chippies
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and chips blanketed Britain, and a decade later curry houses
established a foothold there. In _Planet Taco: A Global History of
Mexican Food_, Jeffrey Pilcher writes, “Tacos gained widespread
attention only in 1891, with the publication of Manuel Payno’s
masterpiece, _Los bandidos de Río Frío_.”

In the United States, trains, refrigeration, and trucking built a
national market for standardized inputs like bread and beef. This
sparked a Cambrian explosion of beef sandwiches. Baltimore developed
pit beef; Boston has roast beef; Philadelphia the cheesesteak. _The
Bear_ has brought a new generation’s attention to Chicago’s
Italian beef. New York City can claim pastrami
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the French dip
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from Los Angeles, and credit for the Reuben
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Omaha. (Buffalo’s beef on weck is an outlier, dating to 1837
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The name refers to _kummelweck_
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a roll crusted with salt and caraway seeds.)

As commercial districts boomed, platform foods were sold in
mom-and-pop restaurants, soda fountains, and automats. A futuristic
cafeteria, Horn & Hardart
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automats fed as many as 800,000 people a day who self-purchased dishes
like pies and sandwiches displayed in hundreds of windowed slots. By
standardizing platform foods, hiding the labor process, and
normalizing eating alone, quickly, and around the clock, automats
paved the way for fast food. (_Automat_
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Hopper painting from 1927, captures the gloomy alienation of the new
food technology.)

After the Second World War, fast-food chains serving platform foods
took shape alongside cars and television advertising. Outlets
quadrupled in the 1970s as women went to work in greater numbers and
the right gutted social welfare and ground down unions. Advertisers
encouraged workers stressed by dwindling money and time to see fast
food as a treat to relieve family and work pressures. (McDonald’s
classic jingle, “You deserve a break today,” was segregated into
a soothing Barry Manilow version
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white families and an upbeat R&B take by Jimmy Radcliffe
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The pleasure platform foods provide makes them hard to resist. They
synthesize the two sides of capitalism: the material with imagination.
Marketing, branding, and psychology bridge the two sides. Not any
burger, pizza, or soda will do; it has to be McDonald’s, Domino’s,
or Coca-Cola. We believe that exchanging money for a Happy Meal
provides magical qualities—pleasure, joy, camaraderie,
satisfaction—otherwise absent from our lives. The desire for a
specific commodity like Popeye’s spicy chicken sandwich
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can compel people to drive hundreds of miles, stand in line for hours,
and even commit murder. But whatever the fast food, our dependence on
and lust for it obscures its real costs.

Platform foods create a virtuous cycle for capital. Every step of the
production process involves low-wage workers, from growing and
harvesting grains, meats, and oils to high-tech factory processing to
assembling meals in fast-food outlets. Completing the cycle, these
workers often live on platform foods. Capitalists want as few inputs
as possible to produce as many goods as possible. Fewer raw materials
mean economies of scale, lower costs, and higher profits. Fewer inputs
also align with capital’s tendency toward monopoly.

In its quest for efficiency and profit, capital has reduced the number
of plants humans regularly eat from 6,000 species to just nine
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Quantity has replaced diversity, shearing the human diet to a few
goods produced at mind-boggling scale. About 5.5 trillion pounds
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maize are produced globally every year (much of it for animal feed and
biofuels). That’s on top of 1.4 trillion pounds of meat
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910 billion pounds of seed oils
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and sweeteners
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and 230 billion gallons of milk
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Food scientists transform these few elements into thousands of
processed inputs and chemicals. Then they are assembled into patented
brands—intellectual property. To engender cultish loyalty, the food
industry spends nearly $14 billion on advertising
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twice that sum
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on indirect marketing. Consumer loyalty and dirt-cheap ingredients
equal outlandish profits. McDonald’s earns
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percent profit from its soda sales and 72 percent from its French
fries. Fast food is relatively cheap, but it’s not a bargain. A Big
Mac meal near me in Manhattan costs more than $14, whereas there are a
hundred places a stone’s throw away that serve food that is tastier,
more nutritious, and cheaper.

It’s easy to deride a Big Mac, and I think it tastes awful. But to
be fair, everyone has a favorite junk food,
including Michelin-starred chefs
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Julia Child [[link removed]] and Paul
Bocuse
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the renowned inventor of nouvelle cuisine, both praised McDonald’s
old-style fries cooked in beef tallow. In my case, I love Doritos,
Oreos, Cheetos, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Still, I think that the
best-selling book _The End of Overeating _is wrong when it says
processed foods are as addictive as cocaine. If that’s correct, what
does Doritos withdrawal look like?

Many writers reduce the appeal of platform foods to science, erasing
social history. Political machinations enabled their rise after the
Second World War. As the (probably apocryphal
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story goes, Washington told farmers to “get big or get out
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taxpayer-subsidized megafarms, and it weaponized international food
aid to make countries dependent on surplus U.S. farm goods, as Raj
Patel describes in _Stuffed and Starved_. Platform foods have an iron
grip on our diet because food manufacturers have engineered the social
landscape to ensure their products are everywhere, while ruthlessly
crushing alternatives. I have found Doritos for sale from the Canadian
Arctic town of Inuvik to a shack in the Guatemalan jungles of Lake
Atitlán.

Platform foods embody modern science and capitalism. The foods are
energy dense both as a product of fossil fuels and as fuel for
workers. They also reflect the era’s defining scientific
breakthrough in which Einstein showed space and time were not flat or
featureless as previously thought. Instead, Einstein proved space-time
is the unified fabric of our universe in which time flows at different
speeds and space is uneven terrain.

In our universe, platform foods compress and expand space-time. A
McDonald’s burger can range over the planet, with meat from more
than 100 different cattle
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reared in Brazil, Poland, Canada, and Australia
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compressed into a single patty. Supply chains of beef, wheat, corn
syrup, and dairy that encircle the globe are compressed into massive
warehouses, refrigerators, and granaries. Time expands as raw
ingredients are produced year-round, freed from seasons, and processed
foods are stored for months or years.

Quick to make, quick to order, and quick to eat, platform foods expand
workers’ spatial mobility and compress the time they need to refuel.
Junk food companies shape our space-time by being everywhere
twenty-four hours a day so we can eat anywhere, any time. Think of how
John Travolta struts down a Brooklyn sidewalk in _Saturday Night
Fever_ eating pizza in what might be the first recorded instance
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signature “fold, eat, walk” method.

The reshaping of gastronomic space-time is most evident outside the
home. We eat 70 percent of all meals
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from our dinner table, including 20 percent in cars. Never before on
earth have millions of humans been able to stuff their faces while
hurtling down highways at seventy-five miles per hour.

With the explosion of delivery services, we’re approaching peak
_Star Trek_ by obliterating space-time itself. You speak your
computer’s name to order any kind of food, or at least a fast-food
replica of it, brought to wherever you are, whenever you want it.
It’s not as instantaneous as _The Next Generation_’s replicators,
but be assured capitalism is working on it.

ARUN GUPTA is an investigative reporter who has written for
the _Guardian_, the _Daily Beast_, the _Intercept_, _The
Washington Post_, and other publications. He is a graduate of the
French Culinary Institute, cooked professionally in New York City, and
is author of the forthcoming, _Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food Loving
Chef Explains How America Created the Most Revolutionary Food System
in History_ (The New Press). Read all of Arun’s writings
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at [email protected] with question, comments, or to join a
food tour.

* Fast Food
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* capitalism
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