Time for Timbits? Fast Food, Slow Food, Class and Culinary Communication

Tara Brabazon
2013 Fast Capitalism  
The only problem with choice is that citizens have to choose. Time is precious and how resources are utilized and expended, particularly in a recession, matters. Often the issue is not only the choices that are made, but the distribution of resources on the basis of these decisions. While some eat too much, others eat too little. Similarly, governments make a decision about priorities in public services. In 2011, the City of Toronto brought in KPMG to audit 'expendable' services. This
more » ... list of expenses in the budget included cuts to public libraries. While there was a public outcry in response to such a decision,[1] Councillor Doug Ford, brother of Toronto's then Mayor Rob Ford and representing Ward 2 in Toronto, deployed an odd metaphor to justify such a decision. On the radio station Newstalk 1010, he stated that, "we have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I've got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Hortons."[2] The idea that a politician would compare the value of fast food and libraries is inappropriate, bizarre and foolish. The reality that he was factually wrong in his comparison makes his statement even more bizarre. Not only were there more Tim Hortons in his district than libraries (39 to 13),[3] but Toronto did not even hold the record for the most libraries per person in Canada, let alone the world. There is a significant lesson to be learned when a politician appears to validate fast food restaurants over libraries. Such a statement provides an entrée (appropriately) to think about food as a mode of communication with political resonance and bite, particularly after the global recession and the continuing financial instability. The aim of this article is clear: to explore the function of speed -as a trope and variable -in thinking about food as a platform to communicate information. I investigate fast food and its context, slow food and its context, and finally probe how a consciousness of food in/justice is often blocked through the automation of decision making and the deskilling of cooking. Speed and Accelerated Culture Two examples provide a resonant introduction to this study of food and speed, platform management and information literacy. Consider the differing speeds of our online communication. The average email is read within 24 hours and responded to within 48 hours. The average text message is read within a minute and responded to within five. Email is being used less for personal correspondence and more for business and educational communication. [4] Text messaging and social networking are becoming the dominant ways in which personal lives are negotiated. But this changing function in organizational communication is not the focus for this article. Instead, the speed of answering text messages is the propulsion for my inquiry. Why are text messages read immediately and responded to rapidly? What is learnt about the priorities when negotiating analogue and digital time and space? Odd behaviours are emerging, with physical events, people and experiences displaced in favour of digitized correspondence. Analogue lectures and funerals are interrupted. Dinners and meetings are suspended, delayed, mediated and extended to make up for interruptions and distractions. [5] Such practices are normalized and accepted, if occasionally attacked, critiqued or questioned on the basis of manners or efficiency. This is a displacement culture. There is a desire and decision to deny and indeed lose the present and the
doi:10.32855/fcapital.201301.003 fatcat:jkurfldtuja2rcus2secd427k4