You’re at your desk at 11:45 a.m., and you open the Sweetgreen or Cava app and begin to build your bowl: quinoa base, blackened chicken, a choice of vegetables that represent tired trends — shredded kale, maple-glazed brussels sprouts, jammy roasted tomatoes — all for $17, a price that feels just a little too high. But you’re hungry and stressed, pre- or post-meeting, and you think you’re picking the healthy option, so you shell out.
When you walk over at noon, your bowl is waiting on a shelf with forty other identical paper or plastic bowls, each labeled with someone’s name. You join consultants and junior analysts in the line of hollow men, aware but resigned that the chain is using sensors to analyze your behavior in line — clocking just how long customers are willing to wait before giving up and leaving, in order to maximize efficiency.
Congratulations: you are a member of the professional-managerial class, and you are eating bowl-slop.
The bowl is the flagship dish of “fast-casual” dining, a trend that sprung up in the mid-Aughts as a bridge between fast-food and restaurant dining. Fast-casual promises a restaurant’s better-sourced, healthier, less-processed, and more thoughtfully prepared cuisine, but presented with a fast-food chain’s ease, convenience, automation, and lower prices. The OG fast-casual, Sweetgreen, was founded in Washington, DC, in 2007, and now operates more than 250 locations in 24 states. Today’s fast-casual is an international phenomenon, and the Sweetgreens, Kavas, Choppeds, Pokeworks and their ilk were projected to rise to $318 billion in value by 2033, up from around $179 billion last year.
Sweetgreen’s website promises “fresh, plant-forward, Earth-friendly food” — whatever any of that means — and lists calories, protein, carbs, fat, and the weight of each dish. Cava, whose branding virtue-signals slightly less, offers “classic flavors,” a vibes-based “Cava feel,” and has correspondingly chiller metrics: it lists only calories for its deracinated Middle-Eastern food. Dishes include spicy lamb and avocado with “Crazy Feta”; garlicky chicken with “skhug” (hot sauce, but from Yemen); and avocado with fire-roasted corn, “SuperGreens,” and harissa.
The food is engineered to appeal to people with Yuppie pretensions of having a sophisticated, global palate, and wants to make them feel that they’re making good choices, yet it’s actually blandly corporate, joyless, expensive, and requires zero thought or human interaction. You order on your phone, grab your bowl, and then eat alone at your desk or maybe alone on a park bench if you need sun. The convivial human rituals around cooking and dining-out are degraded into raw consumption and “getting macros.” Perniciously, this kind of generic, automated eating feels good: by reducing the number of variables and getting calories on the go, we hold the line against the ambient anxieties of daily life. The dopamine hit comes from optimizing your order rather than eating it. But the thin valence of measured, predictable benefit masks bowl-slop’s alienating effects.
“Bowl-slop is a perfect artifact, perfectly formed by capitalism.”
Bowl-slop is a perfect artifact, perfectly formed by capitalism, and is as much a symbol of the present as the degenerate gambler hunched over DraftKings or the #Girl-Boss on Hinge rejecting thousands of men at a time. Like Hinge swipes, the fast-casual menu gives you the illusion of choice while in practice eliminating it; you’re choosing between the same 10 ingredients as everyone else, just rearranged. The ingredients themselves are inoffensive and forgettable: the animal flesh reduced to “protein,” the lukewarm grain base, the A/B-tested three-spice blend, the kale (always kale) that’s overdressed and flavorless. Eating lunch, an opportunity to reconnect with your body and your humanity during the work day, has been digitized. You can even extend the digitization by recording the precise calorie intake in your weight-loss app afterward.
In some ways, fast-casual is part of the longer evolution of fast food in America, and represents its rebranding for the aspirational classes. The trendy, global ingredients and adapted restaurant best-sellers like brussels sprouts and kale are targeted toward the PMC. If you are calculating calories, protein, soot oils, and so on, you’re still high-status, right? Bowls are neurotic McDonalds, allowing anxious urbanites or affluent suburbanites to feel, if not superior, at least neutral about their disordered eating choices.
However, in other ways, the trend represents something new: the total colonization of food by the internet. This started before the pandemic, but accelerated during it, when the PMC locked in on shopping remotely online via InstaCart and Fresh Direct, cooking from sanitized pre-prepped boxes delivered by meal services, and ordering takeout from apps. “Ghost kitchens” — which prepare food to service the delivery apps without any human-facing storefront presence — are a growing threat to the restaurant industry. This was terrible, stupid, and stultifying even during Covid, but people haven’t gone back. Even dine-in restaurants have become technologized and alienating: QR-code menus are here to stay, for example — and I have a flip phone.
Like so much else in the present-day West, this form of metastasizing homogeny slowly eats away at our individuality. Bowl-slop consumption is fundamentally self-hating consumption; it turns us into machines. And it erases little touches of charm and intimacy in human life, such as packing a spouse a lunch, making dinner for friends, picking up food at a farmer’s market — or even going to a grocery store.
We are cattle in a decentralized feedlot, and subconscious knowledge of this makes us insecure, self-hating, lonely, unsatisfied, and spiritually malnourished. The worse we feel, and the more we replace healthy behaviors with neurotic behaviors, the more we click click click on our phones. Also, aesthetically, bowl-slop is an example of the material world starting to resemble the home screen on an iPhone. We flatten food into bowls and experiences into squares: the square phone, SquareCash, the rectangular credit card, the round bowl, the wheels of the CitiBike or the Uber.
I’ve found that after months of slop, actual food becomes overwhelming: too rich, too complex, too much work to think about. Preparing it myself becomes inconceivable. When someone under 40 knows how to cook, I’m surprised.
Our guilt-free, frictionless feedlots also pull capital away from family-owned restaurants and bricks-and-mortar businesses like grocery stores. They reduce our options to be physically among other humans, and they pull our time and attention away from the ritual and physical pleasure of eating. As we distance ourselves from food — and by extension, from the land, animals, and plants — we increase our physical and emotional distance in other ways, too, primarily from each other.
Bowl-slop chains don’t seem like great places to work, either. The bowl-slop worker cannot claim the pride or skills of the cook, waiter, or restaurant-host. She is paid close to the minimum wage and depends on tips, mediated by the grimy surface of the infamous flipped-around tip-screen iPad. These workers will easily and relatively soon be replaced by robots. Sweetgreen, for instance, recently acquired the robotics startup Spyce, an MIT spinout, which has prototyped a fully automated kitchen.
Maybe we’re not psychologically ready to be served our bowl-slop by robots, but one day, we will be. However, the optimization and automation of colors, designs, flavors, and experiences is not something we ought to accept. A moral resistance to bowl-slop is not, I think, an overreaction, but a meaningful resistance to indifference and despair — which will be neither fast nor casual when it reigns triumphant.
