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In a recent restaurant email advertisement, the restaurant declared it National Eat Out Month.

As the words crossed my eyeballs, I nearly spewed already-digested homemade scone all over my keyboard. A month to celebrate all that "restaurants bring to the table during these wack economic times." (Yes, whack was misspelled in the email. I find that almost as offensive as the rest of the email.)

SERIOUSLY!?! People are struggling to make ends meet and you want people to celebrate that 69% of surveyed people with families find eating at restaurants makes their lives easier? Or that 68% of adults said their favorite restaurant foods provide flavor and taste sensations which cannot easily be duplicated in their home kitchen (that's because you don't shake tablespoons of MSG into your homecooked food)?

I understand that the restaurant industry is huge employer in the United States and employment is important. However, I can't help but wonder if it is huge because of the distorted sense of "ease" that is prevails in the national consciousness. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver gentle argues over and over that we have become so disconnected from our food that we don't know the life cycle of a hen or a tomato plant. Our perception of morbidity in food production comes being disconnected from the process of birth, growth, and death. But I think our disconnection runs even further. We don't know how to prepare the food. We want the food to appear tastily on a plate or in a wrapper in our laps, on the table. Our concept of tasty is distorted to crave overly sugared drinks and overly salted crisps masking the true subtleties of flavor in food.

We don't know where our food comes.
We don't know how to cook our food.
We don't know what our food tastes like.

An email declaring National Eat Out Month seems to be not only an ill-considered marketing scheme but a highly offensive one. It assumes the reader is ignorant of the cost of eating out. It propagates a lifestyle that makes my stomach churn.

Our concept of necessity and luxury is out of whack. The economy is just symptomatic of that.