The same old, same old meal doesn't satisfy

We have been taking my elderly mom out to breakfast on Sunday mornings for the last several years, and we normally end up at casino restaurants because that’s what she likes, and they’re easier to actually get into. Places like Pegs Ham n Eggs, or Squeeze In are mobbed on Sunday mornings plus the noise levels and lack of room to motor a 93-year-old through is ‘challenging’.

Lately, we’ve been frequenting Gold Dust West Casino in the Fourth Street part of Reno. It’s an interesting people watching venue for this observer of the human condition as it relates to food.

First, the food isn’t bad as casino coffee shops go. Really. And the prices are right. The service is really quite good also. So what’s my beef?

I’d rather pay more, and get less that’s ‘more’. That’s what. I’d rather go away satisfied, rather than merely full. I realize that only people who know me and have been around me for awhile ‘get’ that. What I’m trying to say here is, that a heaping plate of the cheapest, hastily tossed together food that America’s industrial food services industry can produce doesn’t ‘scratch that itch’ deeper down in my soul - on a more visceral level than my stomach.

Perhaps it’s like the difference between fast, convenient and available sex and really great ‘blow your hair backwards’ sex. Uh, I can ‘see’ a lot of men out there that aren’t hearing what I’m saying.

It’s heaps of essentially tasteless ‘food’, and if were just up to me, I’d rather be home with a really great bowl of cooked whole grains and fresh fruit, my husband and the newspaper. This is why I quit patronizing the fast food restaurants of America, and most of the chain restaurants, too. Their food, laboratory crafted to within an inch of it’s existence, is developed to appeal to the broadest possible audience at the cheapest price. It has no ‘taste’, not to mention actual nutrition.

One may as well be eating Soylent Green.

This is why I urge folks to eat local. Patronize the local establishment that, in turn, patronizes local purveyors and farmers. You can do this, even in a place like Reno. You may have to pay just a bit more, but you stand a much better chance of walking away satisfied - truly enriched by the meal you consumed.

-maven