Good Enough?

I have trouble sleeping at night.  Oh, I can get to sleep, no problem.  Staying asleep, however, can be a problem.  Thus, I leave the TV on all night.  (Everything I read says that this just adds to the problem.  Oh well!)

Sometimes, there just aren't too many shows to choose from late at night, so I gravitate to a couple of the same format.  One is called Bar Rescue.  The other is  Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. There is a third called Tabitha Takes Over, but I don't like it at all, so I stopped watching it.

All three have the same premise.  A business--bar, restaurant, beauty salon--is losing money and at risk of closing.  Someone calls in the expert for a rescue.  The experts look askance at the staff, the cleanliness of the establishment, the feasibility of the facility, and the acceptability of the food (served both in bar and restaurant).  There is a lot of profanity in the shows and a lot of yelling. Tempers flare. Kitchens get closed down until they can get to the bottom of problems.  The chef expert and/or patrons of the restaurant find the food inedible.  Each "expert" almost always mentions "that this is the "worst situation [they] have ever encountered in all their years of doing this."  Facilities are remodeled at the expense of the show.  In the end, voila!  Everything is hunky-dory, thanks to the experts.

Watching these shows gives me somewhat of a bad taste in my mouth (no pun intended) for eating out.  But I ate out today, with some radio friends of mine on their way to the Dayton, OH, Hamvention.  I pulled some sort of a piece of cellophane plastic off my country-fried steak, and it occurred to me that I have never, ever, sent a meal back to the kitchen.  The people in the shows would send steaks back to the kitchen because they were cold when delivered to the table.  I have had cold meals before but never sent them back.  I didn't send my meal back to the kitchen today because of the piece of plastic.  I pulled it off and kept eating.  Why???  I don't like to make a scene, I guess.  I mean, I cook too, and sometimes stuff appears in my food.  I just remove it and move on.  Should I expect more from a place that I am paying to feed me?

I was raised in a family that ate home-grown vegetables.  When I was in second grade, I remember my mother putting a bowl of home-grown broccoli on the table.  Yum!  And then I spotted the worm in it.  At closer inspection, the whole bowl was full of worms--all dead, of course--but there, nonetheless.  Had there just been one worm, we would have removed it and continued to eat.  As it was, Mom just took away the whole bowl and it was never spoken of again.  Buckshot in the rabbit on the table...a cherry pit in the cherry pie.  Are we so picky that we can't see past the cat hair in the Alfredo sauce?

I'm still trying to decide if I'm not picky enough and thus teaching people to treat me poorly, or if I'm just a result of my raising.  I've eaten plenty of dirt in my day.  Drank out of garden hoses.  Brushed the dirt off carrots or strawberries from the garden and popped them in my mouth.  I even walked barefoot and just scraped glass pieces out of my bare foot and kept on walking.  Yet I'm still alive.

I bought a Michelina frozen meal at the grocery today.  When I got it up to the check-out, I noticed that one whole side of the cardboard packaging was open.  I decided right then that I needed another, so a stockboy was sent to get one for me.  I was apologetic, but the thing was clearly defective.  Most likely, it was safe, but why risk it?  Maybe I'm no so hopeless after all.

I guess if I am eating an expensive meal out sometime, and it doesn't meet with the proper expectation, I'll feel obligated to send it back to the kitchen and hope for something better.  In the meantime, I will hope that it's good enough.