276. Whatever Happened to Plates
I'm not sure exactly when it happened but I think it's fairly safe to say we can blame the 70's. Oh sure there were pre-cursors before hand: absurdly huge and inexplicably orange and brown plates, bizarrely shaped victorian moustache cups and the such but the 70's took what had been a strange and un-natural fetish and took it mainstream.
You might be lost at this point. So I'll start at the begginning. In the beginning there was a plate and a knife, or a dagger or a broadsword. Basically couple a dish of some sort with something you could use to stab the things you were eating that didn't conveniently contain a inbuilt bone handhold. Anyway after a while people decided that One plate and one knife wasn't really all that dignified so they invented cutlery and bowls. Pretty soon though we all got bored again and we invented new types of fork shaped like demented squid and then laughed at the people that didn't know that they were supposed to be for eating soup. Eventually the number of plates and courses reached critical mass and in order to stop mankind being buried under an ever increasing pile of crockery the chicken in the basket was developed.
Chicken in the basket. It seems so harmless. Chicken and chips, deep fried and served in either an actual breadbasket or more disturbingly a small pottery imitation of a actual bread basket. That was it though. Chicken in the basket broke the system. Chicken in the basket was the first crack in the dam that allowed everything to go horribly, horribly wrong. Within weeks people were serving seafood in wine glasses and trying to eat molten cheese with a toothpick...
By the time it reached the 80's things were spiraling out of control. No longer contained by the reassuringly functional plate fork system, chefs in the 1980's were free to mess with forces beyond their ken. Food started to be served in all manner of receptacles. Oh sure it started with wine glasses and baskets but like all adictions it grew and grew, relentlessly searching to redesign the plate, making it squarer, larger and less full of food. Seeking to find new implements to put food in, serving food in kidney shaped hospital dishes and lattices made out of other foods all of course artfully covered in rasberry coulis no matter how unlikely to go with rasperries the teaspoon of food in the middle of the hubcab sized plate was.
Nowadays you can't actually find a pub that will serve you food on a plate the way it's supposed to be served. The last 3 pubs I ate at used the following items: a floor tile, an actual size breadboard which was incapable of fitting on the table and finally a stack of 4 plates on top of each other ranging from vast to a side plate. Of course it doesn't end there either. The restauranteur of whatever the hell we are calling this decade can't be seen to serve all their food on just one of whatever domestic implement they have lying around. If you were to serve all your food in one place you'd be laughed out of the buisness. Chicken and Chips on the same Plate? You peasant! In order to preserve appearances today's host has to have at least 1 flower pot full of chips and a collection of thimbles filled with insufficient quantities of condiments. I have no idea what they serve salad in, but that's just because I don't pay to eat salad...
When did flower pots become the approved delivery method for chips anyway? I remember when people used to laugh at KFC for serving chcicken in a bucket as if that was the end of all taste and decency but now it seems they just got there first. It's not even as if it's original or whimsical anymore. I can see how the first few times someone got chips in a flower pot it might have been delightful but now it's just industry standard. Chips come in a flower pots, end of. No argument.
Don't get me wrong I don't actually care at the moment. As long as the chips come in something that gets them to my table and then ultimately to my belly I'm relatively content but Where does it all end though? Think about it, in 4 decades we've gone from serving food on plates to serving food on a floor tile with smaller food beside it in a flower pot and that was in a period when people actually had a concentration span of longer than 20 seconds. What happens when generation 'hold on a sec I'll google it' really gets stuck into rethinking food receptacles? If we project forward at that rate of evolution, and I don't think such an assumption is unreasonable, then in another 40 years will we all be drinking restaurant soup out of an old shoe and using a ladle to eat chips from a toilet bowl filled with the combined food orders of everyone in the restaurant? How quirky and delightful!
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