A primetime show doesn’t challenge you, frighten you, or fuck with your allergies. Its ethnicity is denuded of anything “dirty.” You don’t have to know a secret handshake or special pass-phrase. You don’t have to do any work. It isn’t scary.

Most people fall along a continuum of “raised by home cooks” vs. “raised eating out of boxes and bags.” The raised-by-homecooks contingent goes for the authentic food experience, and that group gets smaller every day.

For people who grew up eating prefab boxed meals or being served in restaurants and fast-food joints, all food is mysterious. They have no idea what the ingredients are, what they cost, how raw foods are transformed into meals. They don’t care. The key experience of food is its packaging. The important thing isn’t how the food tastes or what it costs, but the Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark fantasy you can have about yourself while you’re eating it.

PF Chang’s is the future. When I was growing up, having dinner in a restaurant was a rare, twice-a-year treat. What family can say that now? In 50 years, cooking at home will be a specialty craft. Hardly anyone will know where their food comes from or how to make this mysterious chemical tranformation work in their own kitchens. Places like PF Chang’s will be the only choice — not because corporations are evil, but because we are rich and lazy.

A continuing series of noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over. Corporate Food is Evilpsu goes completely insane about how P.F. Chang’s (and its equivelent alter-ethnic wannabe brethren) are destroying the American palate and wallet, and it’s just suc…