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The idea of food as a source of amusement has been parallel to the experience of eating since gastronomy began. Turning the eating of food into entertainment has encouraged further developments in the culture industries. At the same time, making food a form of amusement means that it can also become a source of boredom. Consumers experience food fatigue just as they experience other forms of sensory and intellectual overload. This article explores the idea that the cultural reworking of food as entertainment also generates new experiences of detachment, boredom, and ennui.
Keywords: food; entertainment; culture industries; popular culture
Much of culinary history has been about a sense of playfulness associated with food. The development of exotic dishes, the manner of food presentation, the theatricality of the restaurant, and the display of taste are all aspects of eating rituals that express our continuous amusement and engagement with food. With the industrialization of food, however, and the advent of the fast-food outlet, the social repertoires around cooking and eating have changed and the social functions of food have been radically altered. An examination of the social consequences of some of the changes provides insights into the character of contemporary pleasure as well as the insinuating spread of global regulation and mass boredom it can generate.
In recent years, largely through the work of George Ritzer (1993, 1998), the effects of increased regulation and rationalization have been returned to the center of sociological debate. Ritzer has examined the application of a rational or "scientific management" paradigm to the analysis of social life and found that it produces a welter of irrational consequences. He has lifted the metaphor of McDonaldization from the globally recognized chain restaurant McDonald's and used it to dissect some of the ironies of modernity and mass democracy. His main point is that as services become "McDonaldized," they produce "consequences that are the exact opposite of what is intended" (Ritzer, 2001, p. 2).
Many of these consequences are unanticipated and this in turn creates situations that can have long-term deleterious effects. Ritzer (2001) states that
McDonaldized systems wrap themselves in a variety of illusions; they tend to disenchant the world; they have a wide range of dehumanizing effects on people as workers and consumers...