Delivered Colonel Sanders to Davey Jones' Locker

First of all, cue Louis Armstrong's most maudlin take of "What a Wonderful World" while you contemplate this sentence:

''These products display a kind of fantasy: that your Italian grandmother made this sauce for your pasta,'' says Katchadourian, who first assembled the family tree for a magazine called The Believer."

I'm not sure who reads the NYT magazine, but most of them have not heard of the Believer? Isn't it pretty to think so? Somehow, "a magazine called The Believer" even in this non-Believer context, smacks of the sort of faux modest "I went to college in Providence" naifitude that over time has reduced so many erstwhile Believer readers to fits of pig-biting apoplexy.   
Anyway. Mr. Latte unbuzz aside, Hesser's actual receipts are usually solid, but today she appears to be cleaning out her fridge, because we jump from a reset of a reiteration of an albeit-droll-at-the-time family tree of food logo icons in an old Believer to a meditation on the devolution of Betty Crocker, a propos of a new book called  Finding Betty Crocker, to something so unutterably perverse I had to prepare the way with the suggestion above of a Chester/Debbie love child:

Stephanie Allen opened the first ''food assembly store'' -- a new business category -- called Dream Dinners in Snohomish, a Seattle suburb. Customers make a reservation and select menus online. When they come to the store, they are given recipes and a prep station. All of the shopping and chopping is done in advance. Over the course of about two hours and for about $200 (including ingredients), they prepare 8 to 12 dishes for a family of four -- like cashew chicken and peach-glazed pork chops -- to take home and freeze. Dream Dinners now has 59 stores in 17 states.

Where to begin? A new business category that takes the worst aspects of the DIY stirfry restaurant and combines it with the fun of transporting hot meals in your car? I'm keeping the pension in Kenny Rogers Roasters stock, thanks all the same. For $200 + an evening of my life spent in the company of strangers, I have cashew chicken in my freezer? I'll be in the corner, breathing into a Boston Market bag and sobbing. The conclusion:

We aspire to be chefs who shape a meal, not the prep cooks who do the shopping and chopping. In the genealogy of the supermarket, there is no icon for the weary shopper standing in a checkout line.

In Codland you take away the shopping and the chopping, you are not a chef, you are a dietitian. Back in May, it was all about the ingredients. What happened?

Comments

[Jette]

I am feeling really dumb now because I have never heard of The Believer. Chalk it up to living in Texas maybe.

[alizinha]

Jette, be glad you haven't heard of it. It sucks.

'Fesser, I just KNEW you'd have something to say about this latest Hesserania. Love that you pulled the quote about chefs versus prep cooks.

Ah yes, Amanda, we all aspire to be the Mario Batalis of this world, not the nameless, faceless Mexican prep cooks who actually make the food...

[JL]

smacks of the sort of faux modest "I went to college in Providence"

Hey!

On the other hand, people who say things like the above may simply have attended RIC and want the listener to make a different assumption (nothing against RIC, mind you, I've got friends there.)

And remember, many of today's students on the East Side are the appalling sort who will be more like, "I went to Brown, bitch."

NPR had a story on Friday, I believe, on the same "Dream Dinners" business. It was one of those "beat your head against the dashboard" moments they pride themselves on.

I have to decide what to do with a pile of fresh peas from a Westport garden, soon. Aside from just eat them raw, I mean.

[Fesser]

Jette- Bmuse is on the case, as usual, but basically, imagine the yearbook kids hooked up with the popular kids and they had a baby in Dave Eggers' treehouse. A magazine baby.

[max]

All about the Believer.