Much has been said re the growing homogeneity of the American Experience, whereby 12 year olds in Mansfield, Ohio are walking the same supermarket aisles as insurance brokers in San Francisco, minds psychically tethered via what’s trending, and thus parallelly noting a 67% discount on bananas.
So I won’t re-iterate these things.
The point is: what I see is what you see is what we all see. And so I’m sure We Are All Seeing, consumers that we are: High Protein this and Low Fat that; see for ex. Chipotle’s near-infantile rebrand…
CHIPOTLE UNVEILS ITS FIRST-EVER HIGH PROTEIN MENU FEATURING A NEW SNACK-READY HIGH PROTEIN CUP
…of a side cup of chicken 1.
This all strikes me as a very American response to our very American problem, namely whatever the fuck Las Vegas is.
The superhot red sportscar of Post-WWII romanic overindulgence (which everybody correctly said, mouthful of fries, “Can Not Be Shushtained”) is finally, mercifully breaking down. And but from the ashes is rising an even more annoying sort of human being; chiseled young men who do not skip morning-peptides, that will interrupt you with why YOU, ALSO should be killing tubs of kimchi after smoking fat bowls of weed 2.
Yes, America now cares about health 3. But in the style of how we used to not:
Our youth are still eating cinnamon rolls and cookies, but the frosting is whey-based, the sugar is artificial, and the dough is keto. They’re working out, but it’s really the evil spirit of the new looksmaxxing hierarchy. Our obese middle-aged are shooting up Ozempic and playing outrageous amounts of pickleball, possibly the corniest game ever 4.
There is also to be mentioned an invisible underclass I saw just yesterday, digging through trash of a DTLA McDonald’s. Forever the capitalist, America is still shafting the Poor:
Turns out it’s not all of us seeing what I’m seeing.
Which
Fairlife®, Core Power® High Protein Milkshake, Chocolate 26g 1a
Goodles® “Cheddy Mac”, Creamy Cheddar and Macaroni (microwaveable)
Halo Top® Light Ice Cream, Chocolate
+ 300 Calories Per Pint
+ 18g Protein Per Pint
Chomps® “Original Beef Stick”
+ Made with Grass-Fed & Finished Beef
The Good Crisp Company® “Spicy Jalapeño” Potato Crisps - All Taste, No Guilt™
and even Chipotle®’s High Protein Cup proving very successful advertising campaigns on a certain R.K.↩“Aight so basically when you smoke it is literally toxic to your skin and blood but most of all your gut health because your body has to prioritize clearing out the weed…But when you have kimchi or sauerkraut or any fermented food it fights against the negative it’s not like something that you’ll probably find researched but if you look into nutritional science you can apply the concepts together…The best way to say it is that imagine you have a cup and you have a knife going down it not puncturing the cup but scratching it that’s what weed does to your body which causes the inflammation and all the good bacteria from fermenting acts as like neosporin to help it recover”
Q: I thought it all had smtg to do w inflammation I feel like I remember you saying that at some point
“Yeha [sic] that is a huge point…But that’s more like vanity and not exactly health”↩- More specifically, wellness.↩
- The success of which has not not reached a certain R.K. and friends this past summer.↩
I added the COVID-shade, the effect of which event is magnified on this particular graph 5a because, as Claude informs, it answers: if this year's death rates froze forever, how many more years would a 25-year-old get?
The point to take is: the lines are trending increasingly away from each other.↩