I used to work in fast food.

All in all, it was awful. It’s easy to see that kind of work as a soulless exercise. A degeneration of capitalism, a stain on modern society. I spent my teenage years as such an imposter. I feigned this glamorous, cultured persona when in reality to afford it I was spending most weekends in the deep fryer.

I started to think about what Dr Thompson was saying about the commercialisation of holy items. Communion wafers on Amazon. Holy wine in serving sized plastic containers. And I kind of get it. Dr Kaa talked of history as a spiritual process of becoming. It’s not something to be sad about. Every era of history is just a continuation and extension of the last. We adapt to fit modern times, and often modernity will shock and disgust people before it becomes normal.

I was probably the happiest deep fryer in that joint. Of course I’d like for everyone to harvest their own vegetables and have fresh produce, but when you work in that place you have to put politics aside and just accept capitalist reality for a bit. Fast food offers a new mode of community. It’s kind of the holy communion of the lower class. I would agree that it’s a fake and contrived exercise orchestrated by corporates to exploit the poor, but you can’t ignore the sense of togetherness that fast food creates. I would serve families of 10 on paper plates and be touched at how happy they were. It’s not destroying human connection. It’s the same connection and community, the same ritual, on a different medium.

There’s a Twin Peaks reference for everything.

Graham R., 2017, Cakes, community meals and charity: Responses to food insecurity, In Johnson E. (Ed.), Kai and Culture: Food stories from Aotearoa, (pp. 130-135), Christchurch, New Zealand: Freerange Press.