Brunch Sucks
Last week, Burger King began testing a new brunch menu. On Friday, people paid $250 to hear Joe Biden speak at a brunch fundraiser. Today, socialite person Julia Allison ate two back-to-back brunches. Let's talk about the problem of brunch.
It is Saturday and not much news is happening. Many people are lazing around, napping off last night's drinking or meticulously planning tonight's. But some people are probably eating brunch—that unholy marriage of breakfast and lunch. Fuck brunch.
"Brunch." The word is the worst part. No one in the world can say the word "Brunch" without sounding like a smarmy prick. Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Paul Krugman could pen the most trenchant analysis of U.S. fiscal policy ever to grace the pages of the New York Times, but if he used the word "brunch," he might as well be smearing feces around at the bottom of a well. Wikipedia says the word "brunch" was coined by Hunter's Weekly in 1895. Is it any coincidence that the magazine went under the next year? Or that less 20 years later World War I happened? In fact,"Brunch" might have been the original seed from which sprung a long, sad strain of American portmanteaus that reached its terrible climax with "frenemies." This is reason enough to firebomb any restaurant with a "Build-Your-Own-Bloody-Mary Bar."
But who eats brunch? The Telegraph wrote that "The main theme of Sex and the City was brunch." Joe Biden and Julia Allison clearly love a good brunch. Like these people's lives, brunch is simultaneously overstuffed and empty. It's no coincidence that Portland, Oregon—that utopia of new-age fauxhemian slackers saving the world one backyard chicken coop at at time—is also a brunch stronghold. Brunch contributes nothing to the culinary landscape. It is a meal whose sole appeal comes from its combination of the most fat-laden lunch and breakfast dishes. Brunch is a bastard; a poisonous freak.
There is an excellent dystopian sci-fi novel to be written about a society so overflowing with wealth and so obsessed with consuming it that the only meal anyone ever eats is brunch. Breakfast lunch and dinner: All brunch. They walk around in a constant post-brunch haze until the hero finally realizes the importance of segregating meals and leads a rebel group armed only with bowls of cold cereal and apples. Brunch represents a kind of decadence unique to our time. It's a decadence born of indecision, of being confronted with infinite choices but ultimately being afraid to chose. Make up your fucking mind, people: Breakfast or lunch. If you want a Bloody Mary on a Saturday morning, go to a grimy bar and order one. In this way, maybe you will finally realize you're an alcoholic.
