Unfortunately, George Orwell’s rule of thumb (”roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it”) never applied to pizza franchises.

As the backlash against the two coworkers guileless enough to upload videos of their back-room chicanery continues (now, to the point of Dominos apologizing and the duo facing felony charges) I’m reminded of his classic Down and Out in Paris and London and one of its themes, that the working class and poor have a special code amongst themselves binding them to reverence and respect when they’re in a service role for those at or equal to their station.

This is probably best shown in Orwell’s time as a dishwasher at a Paris hotel. Here’s an excerpt; you can read the entire book online.

The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario. ‘Why kill the poor animals?’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup– that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers into the gravy–his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COMMANDE’ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten–I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s, and the PATRON’S. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the PATRON, and as for the clients, S’EN F–PAS MAL!’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered–a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.

Apart from the dirt, the PATRON swindled the customers wholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast, unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked VIN ORDINAIRE. There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. The PATRON was as mean to us as to the customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there was no place to wash one’s hands, except the sinks used for washing crockery.

Of course things have improved, and now we’ve got regular health department inspections with all sorts of sanitary rules.

But dirty and contaminated are two entirely different concepts. There’s a massive difference between a kitchen being filthy like Chef Mario’s and Tyler Durden pissing in the soup (but guess which one is worse for you, save the shock and horror of the latter).

There’s something special about pizza franchises that causes the class code, in whatever form it exists now, to be non-existent, and brings the Tyler Durdens of the world together. Maybe it’s the terrible hours, or absurd pay. I think it’s mostly the lack of supervision and latitude in what gets prepared or how to prepare it. I worked in restaurants quite a bit growing up, but all the horrible things seemed to happen at pizza places.

Two disreputable pals of mine actually managed pizza shops, and each of them was a bit on the sociopath side, in his own way. Messing with the food never seemed to be a priority, but the general mayhem that went on just seemed to spill over. For instance, one had a contest with coworkers to see who could sling a fully cooked pizza onto the 35+ foot sign outside the restaurant, like a floppy vertical discus. The one time I observed, this happened in broad daylight, and there were no victors. Later I was informed they’d managed to get one of the pizzas to stick, but then had to toss up balls of frozen dough so it would fall off the sign before a customer saw it and complained. They didn’t serve the pizzas, just tossed them around.

The most shocking instance comes from the other dude, who once sliced his finger open while cutting something and bled himself into a bin of sauce for five minutes before bandaging his digit. He explained it to me mater-of-factly the next day and I remember almost fainting.

(Neither of these were at Dominos franchises, by the way.)

So what’s the executive summary, for those of you high above, reading in the jet? I have no idea; this is a pretty scattered entry. I guess:

• Corporate assembly-line food production invariably gives rise to dumbassery in staff groups equal to or under three persons; even the pig ignorant don’t like their intelligence being insulted, and will take their revenge out on customers in most terrible ways.
• If you’re going to worry about what gross stuff goes into your food, make it yourself. Something gross probably won’t kill you (though that blood was definitely a biohazard).
• Orwell’s rule doesn’t apply to chain pizza shops.

An aside, on uploading video of yourself committing crimes to the internet: Over time, I’d imagine, video evidence of a violation of every single piece of criminal code will be uploaded to YouTube by slack-jawed jabronis. No one will ever wise up. I look forward to the pieces of criminality that perhaps don’t translate well to video, such as money laundering and mail fraud.

Hope in the Jungle, originally uploaded by nparish.

Early last month, as the historic nature of our presidential election set in and the national night light grew a little brighter, images and stories of people celebrating all over the globe flooded in. I got to wondering.

How many people around the world DON’T know Barack Obama was elected president of the United States?

Finding out who’s remote enough to miss big news was not as easy as I’d hoped. Turns out, the fellows pictured above in our photo composite above aren’t the only ones cut off from regular news, despite a prevalence of communications methods and information dissemination capabilities unheralded in the history of human civilization.

Some groups, like scientific surveys in our far reaches, may make contact weekly or monthly; they’ll eventually hear. Some, such as the religious devout, are cloistered from such information and may not have access. Would a monk who’s granted ten minutes of contact with an outsider once a year ask for current events updates, or just look for a dump of monastery-relevant information? Some, exceedingly rural peasants on the other side of the globe in China, for example, probably concentrate what attention they can spare on local news, things that affect them more directly. I wouldn’t count, for example, a Russian living in Arizona who was unable to speak English among those that we’ll call Newsless, though–context clues speak volumes. And any social contact, however small, goes a long way.

It seems like you can classify the newsless into a few different groups.

I’d call The Removed those living in North Korea or other repressive or dysfunctional areas, like the four scoring in the 90s on the very bottom of this list. In fact, North Korea’s state media website has over a thousand mentions of Bush but not a single Barack Obama reference. Together with Eritrea, Turkmenistan and Burma, that’s around 80 million people

For our purposes The Indigenous are those whose traditional cultures aren’t concerned with matters of media, however large or small. Tiny tribes, nomads, people speaking rapidly dying languages–you’d imagine information like the Senator’s triumph has no bearing in their lives, no relevance or no way
of making it through the filter of translation. The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs estimates at least 350 million to be of their ilk.

The Remote are people who, socially, belong to an established ethnic group that has developed its own media yet are out of radio range, without satellite TV, etc. The largest majority are probably simply
living in places that are extraordinarily impoverished. I’d count cloistered religious and the
willfully ignorant among them

Remotes are probably the most difficult to classify, and it doesn’t look like too much work has been put into it. However, there are some interesting surprises. Such as, household television penetration in China is 95%. That leaves some 66,000,000, give or take, “media-dark,” a term the people who study this stuff have applied, mostly to the Indian subcontinent. (Like Bangladesh, where, as Shahab Enam Khan of Jahangirnagar University estimates “28.5 percent of all Bangladeshis have no access to regular media.”) That’s 37.5 million people. Unfortunately Mr. Khan’s terminology hasn’t been extended wholly to other nation-states; it’s tough to figure out what to call the extra-media, or whatever you’d like to term people like them. Another interesting component to this is Africa. Turns out, Vijay Mahajan’s Africa Rising says the continent isn’t media dark, as many would believe. Given the particular gravity to the Obama news for all Africans, that one of her sons has ascended to such heights, it’d be safe to rank Africa higher in this instance than you normally would for news from the States.

So, a really, really rough number, based mainly on indigenous populations and The Removed would give you around 430 million; adding the figures we see for China and Bangladesh, the former probably fuzzier  gives you just over half a billion, 13% of the world’s population. Despite personally wanting the Hope Dope to spread to as many possible and the whole world to know about what’s happened here, in my gut it seems like a more accurate measure would be closer to 30%. If you’ve got any leads or know of anyone who’s studied stuff like this with some degree of knowledge and rigor, please speak up.

At any rate, it wasn’t too surprising to see the large majority of information available on the web, studies and such, were conducted by advertising entities. As in, let’s figure out how many people in the world aren’t being advertised to so we can get them buying the right kind of toothpaste.

Speaking of advertising involving folks not normally invited to the party, Burger King’s forthcoming Whopper Virgins stunt campaign (a taste test among people “who have no word for burger”) puts a crass point on all of this thought, for me. I’m glad a few have already voiced their objections, however muddled they seem.

It’s poignant that everyone seems to agree this is “wrong”, but telling they can’t explain exactly why. Maybe that’s why no one spoke up against this during the entire costly production process–they simply didn’t have the words beyond “Hey, guys, wait–is this right?”

Well, it feels wrong largely because we’ve long since realized the idea of a Noble Savage is outmoded and incorrect. In the early 1700’s Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author wrote would-be authors should look for the “simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce.” That’s precisely what Crispin, Porter + Bogusky is going for in this; they’re looking for an uncorrupted mouth to taste the product. Problem is, this doctrine, that those untouched and unstricken by our society are somehow in a vaunted moral position is in the very least entirely incorrect, and at worst the soft racism of consumer culture.

‘Sir, may I recommend the 1989 Leflaive Chevalier Montrachet?’
new guinea man 04, originally uploaded by FriskoDude.

Someone who’s never had a burger doesn’t make a better judge of a burger. Imagine if you’d asked a member of the Hagahai tribe from Papua New Guinea to choose your wines at Per Se. The gentlemen of Village X who’ve been fed on a diet far from fast food have no compass by which to judge the quality of a Big Mac or Whopper. Plain and simple. Conceivably that leaves coercion and selective editing as the primary persuasive forces in a situation like this.

Either way, like the GOP, things like this serve to “energize the base”–BK’s target young male demographic, which will actively comment on blogs and vent adolescent frustration in the form of abusive comments (eg “BK rulez fuk u hippy fagets”) as the most vile element of social media. And, of course, the more brain time we devote to this, and the bigger piece of the newshole your local telecast gives it,  the more we’re wondering where the closest Whopper depot is for some flame-broiled deliciousness.

om nom nom, originally uploaded by nparish.

While I’m mid-chew at this week’s five borough-sourced dinner, Jeff sez: can you believe the sea salt isn’t locally sourced? Frakkin’ travesty.

Read more on the event at Creativity Online.

(And no this isn’t turning into an ego-tripping Tumblog; something of substance soon I promise.)

Video from the evening if you click through…

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/g7zYh1xWoBQ&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/g7zYh1xWoBQ&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>