How do they know what Tasty Wheat really tasted like?

"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction . . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal." 
—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations


It's easy to think of fast food, and its pre-packaged home variety brethren, as "postmodern food." But the fact is, we know all that stuff is just "food." That is, maybe I can eat at McDonald's tonight, and it will actually fill my stomach. It's even fun to pretend that I'm actually eating food. But in order for it to be truly postmodern, it has to transcend "food" and become Food -- something I take seriously as a meal. 


Take the "college student" archetype. Movies about college students teach us that, when we are in college, we are to abandon all the food traditions taught to us by our parents and live off a steady died of ramen noodles and microwaved KD. But we don't take those eating habits seriously. We know it's a joke. We do it because it's funny, not because we think those foods will somehow magically provide us with all our required nutrients just because we're in college. "Look, everyone, I'm eating 'food.'"


Maybe in the 50's, you could have lived off a diet of charcoal-barbecued red meat and thought it was good for you. But now with all the nutrition-mongers constantly barraging us with their doctrine of food stoicism, is it even possible to eat postmodern food? That is, can "food" ever Truly become Food?


Yes it can. Sort of. Even here, it's not really the food that's postmodern. Just the flavour.


Sometimes it seems we live with postmodern flavour all the time. Like, who decided what purple candy would taste like? Still, we all know there's "grape" and there's Grape. 


But what about purple? 


Because of grape-flavoured candy, I'm pretty sure I know what Purple Really tastes like.


And what about history? Does an orange now taste like what an orange tasted like in 1810, or has the history of hybridization made it something totally different? There's no way of knowing. The only option is to accept an orange as an orange. What may have been real at one time doesn't matter, because this is what I have available to me now. It's a Real Orange, because that's all there is. 


We know that all the fast food and packaged snack food in our society is unhealthy, and is no replacement for real food. At least, I hope we all know that. Because of this, it's not really postmodern food. "New" foods are only really postmodern when they take on the same definition their precursors carried. 


If you ever overhear a kid refer to a Big Mac as a "carrot," give me a call.