Necessary Foods

The plan was to leave Dallas just after midday and drive as far as Muskogee, OK for the night. We took a slightly different route and here we sit in the Microtel Inn & Suites on the fringes of Tulsa, OK. It's not bad, once you get used to the smell. My wife says the place is "pet friendly," which means we are smelling the odors of dogs and cats (and chickens and fish?) that have been welcomed into our room in the past.

We asked the front desk clerk, who took all of 45 seconds to acknowledge us, even as I stood looking down at him from the front desk, for a recommendation for a good place for dinner...not a chain. He offered up two places, neither of which he said he had been, but which he had "heard good things about." I have decided he was listening to comments from dogs that had not eaten in days. The first place he suggested is only open until 2:00 pm. The second place, Pauline's Buffet, is a throwback to the fifties, but the food is straight out of the cheap-as-you-can-get-it-discount-food-warehouse-for-bad-diners-store.

Miserable "country fried steak" turned out to be post-processed beef components shaped into a very tender and completely flavorless little patty, then breaded with god knows what, then deep fried in flavorless oil. Fried fish parts were mostly the fleshy meat of fish, but there were significant bits of skin and, I think, lips and scales thrown in. The whipped potatoes were not bad, but they were also probably not really whipped potatoes. Ditto the pinto beans. The $6.99 per person price tag was a tip-off, but the only other options seemed to be Arby's (more on that below) and a raft of other fast-food restaurants that serve chemically manufactured food substitutes...of course, that would have been better than Pauline's.

Backy to Arby's. I had lunch with a guy yesterday who works in market research, mostly conducting focus groups. He is in the midst now of a series of projects involving fast food restaurants (a fish chain at the moment). He told me he learned, during another series of focus groups, that Arby's does not have any real cheese in its restaurants. All the cheese is chemically manufactured. And, get this, the "roast beef," he tells me, is made from real roast beef, but the real thing is simply the basis of the meat served in the restaurants; he says the meat's essential essences are extracted from the real deal, then re-constituted in a form that is identical, for each piece, in size and texture and consistency. It is made to look like fresh roast beef, he says, but is not even close. It's re-constituted roast beef! At least that is what he told me.

I'm counting on better food for the remainder of this trip. It's necessary.