Delanceyplace

In today's excerpt - the homogenization of America, the phenomenon that works to turn suburbs and medium-sized cities (large cities are not immune) into placeless places, and comes currently, at least in part, from "new age chains."

"Main Street in our minds - the ideal that many of us grew up with or got from postcards, black-and-white movies, and trips to Disneyland - starts with a brick church at one end of town and a granite bank at the other end. In between, there is a string of two- and three-story buildings, each looking a little different from the other and selling something a little different. All the shops have window displays and half-opened doors. They sell hometown newspapers and Life, penny candy and fresh-cut meat, clothes for Easter and the new school year, and chocolate shakes and Cherry Cokes paired with thin burgers and shoestring fries. The owners know their customers' names, sizes, and fashion sensibilities. In the middle of all of this is a quirky Woolworth's or a J. J. Newberry's - that's it for national stores.

"Sure, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia in these memories, but the downtowns of the past were different from today's upper-end downtowns. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Charleston, South Carolina, to Pasadena, California, you've got chains - not, in these places, McDonald's or Burger King, but 'new age chains,' as the Canadian activist-writer Naomi Klein calls them, like Starbucks, the Body Shop, and Qdoba Mexican Grill - outlets with small yet still distinctive signs, that use natural-looking products and color designs, and talk about community and corporate social responsibility. Along branded Main Streets from Maine to California, Einstein Bros. Bagels stands next to a Barnes & Noble next to a Banana Republic next to a Ben & Jerry's next to a Chili's next to a Starbucks.  

"In the next town, there is a Gap (which owns Banana Republic), Cosi, Borders, the Body Shop, and Starbucks. Out on the highway, Applebee's saddles up next to Borders next to the mall with a Gap, Foot Locker, Children's Place, Sunglass Hut, and Build-a-Bear. Inside as well as in the parking lot, there is a Starbucks. Across the highway in another sea of parking spaces are The Home Depot, Petco, and Target with a Starbucks kiosk inside. The next town over has the same strip. It is not like there is one Main Street and then another anymore, or one commercial strip and then another. It is more like there is one single, low-slung, set-back Main Street of branded stores in America, and it gets repeated over and over again like a film trailer in a loop.

"There is a tipping point here, however. Too much sameness alarms, rather than reassures, many bobos (borgeois bohemians, a term coined by David Brooks to describe those who heirs to the yuppies want to be safely different and to be viewed as socially conscious) and creative class types; it cuts into their sense of individuality. '[C]hain stores,' Houston's Thomas L. Robinson lamented, 'have homogenized the landscape so that there are few remaining external clues [to] where you are.' Like others anxious about the most recent spread of 'generica,' Robinson blames Starbucks. This isn't entirely fair. Starbucks isn't the only chain out there, and the predictability it sells wouldn't work if people didn't want it. But Starbucks has grown so rapidly and spread so far, so fast, that is has replaced McDonald's and as the symbol for many of the newest and most troubling wave of homogenization."

Everything but the Coffee, Learning about America from Starbucks by Bryant Simon; University of California Press, 2009

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context.  There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came. 

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Delanceyplace: In today's  excerpt - the Culinary Institute of America, perhaps the finest chef college in the world, includes among its many courses a class in killing the animals that will later be served as the culinary offerings of its students. Jonathan Dixon, a student at the Hyde Park, New York, campus, describes the experience:

"[My classmates] Adam, Lombardi, and I all signed up to go and kill animals the following Friday. Meat class would be over, and we'd be in the thick of fish class - Seafood Identification and Fabrication. But this was something necessary. If I really asked myself some tough questions, which I did in the days going forward, I realized that the truism was right: Unless you're a vegan or hard-core vegetarian, if you are going to consume animal flesh, then you should kill an animal. Not just watch the killing and the flow of blood, not be an observer, but touch an animal and end its life. ...

"The farm [where the class would be held] had a dirt driveway that cut through green fields, and a few yards down from the road a sign read WELCOME CIA STUDENTS AND BROOK FARM FRIENDS. For most of the ride, the four of us in the car had talked food, [restaurateur] Thomas Keller and the cult of celebrity, run down other students we didn't care for, and generally avoided the topic of killing. With the farmhouse in sight the conversation swerved down a darker bend; we made jokes that weren't all that funny and laughed too hard at them. We parked the car, gathered the knives, and took heavy steps to the backyard.

"As we walked toward a set of tables to put our things down, we passed a mobile chicken coop, presumably filled with the work at hand. A dozen or so feet beyond that was a fifty-five-gallon drum full of bubbling water on top of a propane burner, and next to it a cylindrical tube with finger-sized rubber pieces extruding off the interior sides and on the bottom. Nearby were a few tubs filled with water. And throwing their shadows onto the tables were six traffic cones upended and nailed to a crossbeam. ... I had a good idea what the traffic cones were for. Beneath the cones, someone had dug a trench about six inches deep. On this assembly line, no one part of the process was more than a few feet from another. ...

"By the coop there were two wooden cages. The [farm owner] took a few of us to the coop, crawled inside, and handed out chickens two at a time. Six chickens were put into each cage. The cages were carried back to the crossbeams; we reached in and each picked up a chicken by its feet and held it upside down - if held that way long enough, chickens go into a trance; they'll fight you, though, when you first try to turn them feet up. Once they were sedated, we drew them headfirst through one of the cones. Sebald spoke his softly accented instructions: Hold the head with your thumb under the chicken's beak. Put the bottom end of the knife blade against the bird's throat. Draw the blade across, applying firm, even pressure. The head should pop right off. All of us stood thronged together, knives in hand, waiting. The first bird went into the cone. ...

"That first bird: a young woman from school was the first to kill, and it didn't go as well as it could have. The knife seemed to stick; the bird freaked out; she responded in kind but got the knife through the neck. She had blood running down her cheeks and held the head in her hand. She was blameless; it's hard for your hands to know what to do. In the cluster of students around her, I saw one of the teaching assistants from school, her eyes also shining with tears. Most of us were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. I held my knife with a tight grip. Other students were reaching into the cages and pulling out the chickens. I watched people lifting the birds up, watched their wings flap frantically, heard them squawking, saw them being killed. ...

"My turn came. I could feel the bird's pulse under my thumb. I positioned the knife as instructed and drew it hard across the chicken's throat. And then I was holding its head in my hand, blood on my arms and shirt, watching the body convulse. My foot slipped and slid into the trench. My work boot was glistening with blood.

"The body was dunked into the same hot water that had cooked the corn. When the feathers began pulling away, it was removed from the water and put into the cylinder. The cylinder whipped the bird around and the rubber extrusions pulled away the feathers. Any feathers left were plucked by hand at a nearby table. Then we gutted the chickens, the viscera still hot. The carcass was then washed and put into a tub. We went through this for hours, until past dusk, stopping when the hundredth chicken was finished. ...

"At the end of the [class], the husband and wife [who owned the farm] asked us to gather in a circle and tell them what we'd learned. One by one, we each mouthed the same platitudes about respect for food, being closer to the food source, and like that. But what I actually learned I still only feel."

Author: Jonathan Dixon  
Title: Beaten, Seared, and Sauced on Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Date: Copyright 2011 by Jonathan Dixon
Pages: 60, 75-78

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context.  There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.  To visit the homepage or sign up for a daily email click here