About my troubled relationship with Burger

In the second half of the twentieth century, the world witnessed one of the most important revolutions in human history: the agricultural revolution, one of the most notable results of which was the massive production of all kinds of cereals and a significant drop in food prices all over the world. Since that time, the world began to say goodbye to the era of famines (at least relatively) and people's relationship with food began to change radically.

Obesity, for example, was previously a problem only for the rich and the wealthiest segments of society; while at the end of the twentieth century, it became a cross-class phenomenon, and thinness became a landmark of wealth. In the third millennium, people in many countries began to travel and wait in long lines to try new restaurants, coinciding with the explosion of the fashion for gyms among young people to get rid of what was previously considered a sign of material ease and wealth.

In the Western world – Europe and America in particular, the food revolution led to a decrease in the price of meat, so chicken became; in general, meat is a daily meal for all segments of society instead of bread and cooked cereals. This phenomenon began there in the seventies, while the second and third world had to wait until the late eighties and nineties to introduce meat as a relatively cheap diet for the middle classes.

Our relationship with meat and chicken in particular shook and shook with it a whole value system (nostalgia of the village and the peasant) that connected everything that was slaughtered with power, obscenity, and wealth. Our parents and grandparents used to tell us that the chicken was slaughtered only on holidays or on important occasions, while in our time the chicken has become a meal for everyone. In cinema and literature, in popular memory, and the collective imagination, meat has been a symbol of power, luxury, and luxury that only high-class people can get. Oh, my god, how much our parents misunderstood meat!

The upheaval of our relationship with food has had a huge impact on an entire generation of intellectuals, especially those from leftist backgrounds. Many intellectuals of the nineties began to pay tribute to fast food restaurants, portraying them as the American attack to penetrate us culturally and destroy our social habits. Strangely enough, this criticism did not apply to shawarma restaurants, which were the very daughter of the revolution, our dear intellectuals unconsciously decided that shawarma with its melted fat resembled the US, and fried chicken, burgers, pizza, and cola all came to kill us.

We indeed read a lot of this nonsense from the Frankfurt School students and the Communist internationals, who were horrified by the power of imperialism, brutal capitalism, and other frightening terms (that is, we imported the idea of horror from the West itself); however, we Arabs also have enough narcissism and self-injury to imagine that the world does not sleep a night before preparing a new plan to expose our offer and take revenge on us.

In general, we had to wait a little longer to realize that falafel is not necessarily better than chicken, that America never cares if we are flying around the table or eating our sandwiches while walking down the road, and that in any case, our problems are much more complicated than all these hacks.

Well, why am I writing all this I don't know why. But I decided last night that I love burgers very much and that I'm not ashamed and I'm not afraid of it, and that I will pursue it if I can.