I spell baloney with an "-ey" because "bologna" seems a little too dignified for an animal ground down into a sludge and then reconstituted into a homogenous textureless disc. Actually, every ingredient in a baloney sandwich has undergone such a process - from the wonderbread to the individually-wrapped slices of cheese to the neon-yellow mustard - everything was, at one point, something textured and complex, that was then ground down into a kind of uniform slop to be reshaped into the cynically bland sort of foodstuff that was all the rage in post-world-war America. (Fun fact, the technology to do all this was invented to feed soldiers, which is kind of interesting to consider if you already know where I'm going with this.)
I wonder if the culinary experts and foodies of the day were offended by the emergence of baloney sandwiches. In the days before ultra-processed food, there was probably a richer tradition of developing good recipes, since your only options for food were to either eat raw ingredients or to manually turn them into something palatable through your own labor. Surely the baloney-like foods threatened this tradition by making it so people didn't have to work for their food or respect their ingredients. Let's pour one out for the pre-atomic-age home-cooking culture that has now been lost to time.
...except it was never really lost, was it? People still cook their own food, and while it is true that some people subsist entirely on pringles and fruit gushers, there's not really any confusion about which of these is the healthier lifestyle, and as a culture we don't look very highly on these foods.* I think the moral of the story is that the sloppening of an industry only really affects the consumers who don't care much about the quality of their food, and the producers who, prior to the new technology, made their living making the most economically viable product, who might now be out of work.
I'm going to pivot to a story from the war-on-slop from about 14 years ago. At the time, "clickbait" was the hot new slang for a new kind of shitty internet content, spearheaded by companies like Buzzfeed and Zynga and slowly infecting everything else. In the internet animation scene, it started to be sort-of viable for an individual to make their living making cartoons for Newgrounds and Youtube**. Only problem is, getting people to pay attention to you is hard when no one knows who you are***. But we knew you could get substantially more views by leeching off the popularity of existing works (video games, TV shows, etc), and so, for the few internet animators who seemed like they had a serious shot at making a career out of this, Minecraft and Breaking Bad parodies became the norm.
Being an impassioned and idealistic young animator, I thought this was a travesty. I declared all such parodists "sell outs," and being 15 or 16 in the year 2012, I probably deemed this practice "gay." I made several blog posts about this actually, which I can't stand to read now because I sound like a whiny and elitist little dweeb, and by "sound like" I mean "was one." At the time, some people who were older and smarter than me tried to calm me down and say "it's fine, these things can coexist," much like the baloney sandwich can coexist with home-cooked food, and much like the other thing that this blog post is actually about can coexist with its handmade equivalent. I didn't really accept their wisdom at the time, but in hindsight, they were right - if your primary concern is making good things, the existence of baloney sandwiches is mostly irrelevant outside of "big picture" concerns like environmental damage and conditioning the masses to expect a little less. And to those people who have convinced themselves that the big picture concerns are real and pressing enough to warrant ostracizing people for using the "wrong" tools, like the ones that grind real things down into a sludge and reconstitute them into homogenous textureless things, where were you when I was boycotting Mario parodies, man?
In the current year, ultra-processed food is still big business, but good cooking never went away, and there's also a weird hybrid sort of movement where you can buy homogenous protein bars that pride themselves on only having 3 ingredients, or meal-replacement powder that isn't designed to be addictive but is purely utilitarian, for the people who really don't care about how their food tastes but need to get their nutrients somehow. Also today, about half of the cartoons on the front page are still video game parodies. I have been really enjoying everything by Golfinho and Xandrecos lately - if you haven't been watching their work, you're really missing out on some of the best stuff happening in indie animation. I can even go back to some of the stuff that I thought was especially hacky and stupid in 2012 with a newfound appreciation - Wardog's old cartoons were fucking crazy in an outsider art-y sort of way, something I would never have allowed myself to appreciate at the time. In fact, if any one artist has to be canonized as the prime example of 2012 newgrounds cartoons, like how Picasso is the cubist guy or Scott Joplin is the ragtime guy, I'm picking Wardog. I love Wardog. And yet, if the world took a page from Wardog and internet animation kept drifting in a Wardog-like direction, I would be in hell. I would be convinced that Wardog's influence has rotted culture and undermined democracy and depleted the Earth's natural resources. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the world was never really in danger of being overrun with Wardogs or Buzzfeeds or baloney sandwiches - it just took a minute for the strange new thing to settle into its rightful place.
You know what? I like baloney sandwiches. I like the unnatural squishiness of wonderbread, and the scientifically-perfected light sting of neon-yellow mustard. I like how ultra-processed food is unchanging and eternal, how you can eat something you haven't had in years and be transported back to when you used to eat them every day, like an old song. And I take pride in calling the blandest, most inoffensive cheese on earth "American cheese." It really is American, in that everything we touch gets ground down and reconstituted into something spiritually bankrupt, but that we can have infinity of if we feel like it. Food, cultures, art, life itself... for better or worse, this process is the thing we're the best in the world at. Today I'm going take a moment to just exist in the spectacle of that - the beauty in the homogeny, the achievement in its coordination and sterility, the humanity of the gluttony and striving for mass-appeal - and try to appreciate it without passing judgment, in this world where so many people want you to take a stand against the corrupting influence of everything.
* Honestly they should be sold as "fruit gusher" because I have never opened a pack of gushers where they weren't all fused into one piece that I had to pick apart and wash my hand after.
** it didn't last.
*** much harder today, actually.
