With all those subtle little messages to hurry up and order, eat, pay and leave, eating at a restaurant is stressful. My friends and family prefer to eat at home, where we can stay at the table and talk as long as we want.

If you eat home cooked food regularly, all you can taste at restaurants are preservatives, chemicals, fake ingredients and plastic.

I get my meat from a local butcher, who buys from local producers. The price of meat at his shop is anywhere from 25-50% cheaper than WalMart. For example, our local butcher's lean, smoked bacon was $1.99 a pound this week. I bought four of his rib eye steaks for $14.00 and half a pound of his smoked ham sliced paper thin ($3.50.). This morning at Kroger I noticed that 4 rib eyes steaks were $37.00.

Maybe its because I live in the country where food is grown by local farmers, but I doubt it. I think urban Americans are being driven like cattle into a corporate food system, called chain restaurants.

The American food system is corporatized. After covid, I suspect food prices at grocery stores have been artificially inflated to try and force people to go back to eating out all the time.

As the author noted, restaurants don't make anything fresh anymore. Everything is made in some factory in gigantic vats, then pumped into huge plastic containers, flash frozen and shipped to restaurants hundreds, even thousands of miles away, where it is microwaved and served.

The whole thing reminds me of concentrated animal feed lots, except its people, not animals being concentrated into feed lots, called restaurants..