Again, just musing on the point to socialize:

There was some guy Joshua Weissman was talking to who went around to all these diners and studied the food science for what makes a good burger and published a book on it. That's an interesting enough thing. If Amerikkka has a culture that's positive then surely that knowledge is part of it.

And to your last point about people eating flavorless slop I remember asking about what rich people eat that makes them make such weird faces when eating corn dogs or whatever and someone explained to me how it's probably not that they're eating at all these high end restaurants but rather that it's probably more like flavorless gruel - the plain corn soups of the world. So for many of them it's not that they siphon everything so that they covet the nice things in life, but rather they paint the world into gray nightmare fuel in their own image