So I'm trying to take an approach to this post that's relevant to the entire semester. I was going to say something about how I thought doing this assignment on Tru Burger is a little bit harder than it would've been had I done a service learning project. Yes, of course it was more convenient as far as my schedule; I'm already here 40 hours a week. But I didn't have the advantage of an outside opinion. What would I say? "At Tru Burger we serve burgers. They are good. We are more friendly to the environment than McDonalds. We are less friendly to the environment than slaughtering your own cow." I think it's hard to analyze something that's so familiar, y'know?
And then I was reading through The Ecological Thought and remembered: duh! Week one, or whenever it was, we read what Morton had to say about the strangeness of familiarity:
As anyone who has a long-term partner can attest, the strangest person is the one you wake up with every morning. Far from gradually erasing strangeness, intimacy heightens it. The more we know them, the stranger they become. Intimacy itself is strange. As the passenger side-view mirror on your car reads, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." We ignore the mesh because we're so familiar with it. Our familiarity forms the basis of the threatening intimacy that we too often push to the backs of our minds. (41)So I tried taking a step back and becoming aware of the mesh, the momentum1 or disruption of which, didn't matter. What can I say about the mesh as it pertains to Tru Burger? Who are some frequent strange strangers?
So here it is: a brief object-oriented ontological criticism of Tru Burger.
Don't worry, it's easy to spot a bag of buns that's been torn into, and we'd never serve a bun that came from that bag. This point is not about food safety, though, it's about Tru Burger's solution to "the mouse question": traps. Some other employees and I, upon hearing about the infestation and proposed solution, suggested the traps be of the no-kill variety. So Tru Burger did not get the Tom and Jerry style traps. Instead it got these:
You're supposed to put peanut butter or some other thing that takes forever to go bad in the center of these pads. The mouse will obviously go for the food, and gets stuck to the point of immobility. (Sounds a little like entrapment to me.) There's no way any mouse is going to get free unless someone peels the mouse away from the pad, potentially tearing off its skin or limbs. I guess we got what we asked for: it's not the traps that kill the mice, it's the starvation or the removal from the traps.2 I know, you're thinking, "Those poor, cute little mice," right? Wrong! We don't call them cute, remember? I just think it's a little screwy to sentence something to certain death all because it just wants a bite to eat! What if I trapped and starved every neighbor of mine who picked from my orange tree? I don't have an orange tree, but what if? There is such a thing as a truly no-kill mouse trap.
1. I was gonna say "stability" but that's not really a characteristic of the mesh. "The mesh isn't static." (Morton 30)
2. I did successfully rescue a single mouse from one of these traps. I endured two bites through that experience, and I no longer actively seek opportunities to play superhero.
3. See my little beef boo-boo.
4. I didn't understand this until I worked here. We cook our burgers medium unless a customer specifies that he or she would like it at a different temperature. The reason you can't get your McDonalds burgers rare (or anything but well done) is because yuck, that meat (if it's even meat) is so old. Beef is not really meant to be eaten well; it loses a lot of the nutritional value and pretty much all of the flavor. The whole draw of in-house, fresh-ground beef is the ability to get it at lighter temperature than well. Basically, ordering a well done burger at Tru Burger is like asking for Kraft singles at St. James Cheese Company. Okay, maybe it's not that bad but it's heading in the same direction.
The insider's view...I like it!
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