August 21, 2009

Seattle -- not quite as gay as you thought

From a 2006 NPD press release about which cities are most vs. least desiring of more healthy items on restaurant menus, we see that Seattle scored among the least, along with a bunch of cities that the SWPL crowd would never live in (although they might visit just to have a story to tell about their brush with gritty street life).

Of course, "healthy" items means high-carb garbage with no intrinsic taste, and so therefore has ten pounds of sugar dumped on it -- blueberry muffins, pumpkin spice bagels, etc. Or a bunch of empty carbs with fat heaped on top to provide some actual taste. Unfortunately that won't stop the pasta or rice from spiking your blood sugar and raising your insulin levels, so you'd be healthier to just heap the fat on some more fat, along with protein.

Most restaurants don't do that unless they charge an arm and a leg -- after all, a high-carb meal is for starving peasants -- except for those Brazilian grills that are popping up all over. Perhaps being from a third-world country, they know that you don't fuck around when people plunk down $15 - $30 for dinner. Poor people get enough bread, rice, and sugar at home because it's cheap. When they go out, they want envigorating food like sirloin, chorizo, and quail eggs.

4 comments:

  1. It would be a lot of fun, if one was a waiter, to get to "by mistake" (ha-ha) set down a plate with some quail's eggs in front of a vegan.

    That would almost be as fun as telling them that faux-meat-soy-souffle was really roasted housecat.

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  2. If that study was actually done well, it's identifying market opportunities, and it says that restaurants in Seattle already offer enough "healthy" items on their menus to satisfy Seattle's restaurant-goers.

    Sacramento's place on top of the list is not surprising - the restaurant infrastructure is for a more middle-American city than Sacramento is anymore, now that it's been flooded with economic refugees from the Bay Area. Portland and San Francisco are on the list as markers of the insatiability of swipple appetites.

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  3. Given that Seattle isn't totally colonized by restaurants that only offer soyburgers, and given that they have junk fast food places in line with the rest of blue state America, this means that Seattle residents do *not* have insatiable SWPL appetites.

    The losers with such tendencies were driven out of Seattle and moved to Portland. So it is a real difference in tastes, not in the availability of healthy restaurants.

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  4. i wish the world was full of brazilian women. the more the merrier we'd all be.

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