You have spent the last decade apologizing for your country's culinary exports. The international soccer fans weeping over a thirty-two-ounce fountain soda are here to show you how to live.
You scroll past them on your phone, don’t you? The shaky, vertical videos of grown men in replica soccer jerseys weeping openly in the parking lot of a suburban strip mall. You watch a group of traveling World Cup fans from Manchester or Madrid unwrap a paper-clad hamburger with the delicate reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts. You see them marvel at the violently orange hue of a mass-produced cheese puff. And you, in your infinite, tragic wisdom, probably smirked. You probably thought you were better than the cheese puff.
You have spent the last decade curating your palate, apologizing for your country’s culinary exports, and pretending that a grain bowl brings you emotional fulfillment. You have dutifully memorized the names of local farms and treated the drive-thru window as a shameful, midnight secret. But the arrival of these international tourists, armed with smartphones and a complete lack of coastal American guilt, has exposed the hollow core of your gastronomic purity. They are looking at our fluorescent-lit convenience stores and seeing the Louvre. You are looking at them and seeing a gas station. Which one of you is really impoverished?
We are in the midst of a profound generational realignment. For years, the prevailing aesthetic was one of aggressive subtraction: fewer ingredients, less processing, zero joy. We punished ourselves with austerity disguised as wellness. But the viral dispatches from these visiting soccer fans—who are currently treating a cardboard sleeve of uniformly salted potato sticks like a triumph of human engineering—are signaling the death of the artisanal apology. We are entering the era of the Industrial Romantic.
It is a shift that is already reshaping the vanguard of taste. Just ask Chloe, a ceramicist in Brooklyn. For years, Chloe spent her weekends foraging for bitter greens and hosting natural wine tastings that tasted faintly of damp earth. Last Tuesday, she watched a TikTok of a Swedish midfielder’s family discovering the endless refills at a casual dining chain. Something broke inside her. Now, she tells me, she hosts her dinner parties in the back booth of a twenty-four-hour diner, serving guests tap water in heavy plastic cups and encouraging them to fully embody the majesty of a laminated menu. She has finally stopped apologizing. Have you?
The genius of the visiting World Cup fan is their lack of domestic baggage. When an Argentinian family orders a thirty-two-ounce fountain soda, they do not see the collapse of the American healthcare system. They see a chalice of effervescent syrup, chilled to an impossible temperature by machines of unimaginable power, available for less than the cost of a bus ticket. They recognize the sheer, unadulterated audacity of a nation that looked at a potato and decided it needed to be extruded into a hyper-crispy geometric shape and coated in a synthetic dust that stains the fingers for days.
To reject this is to reject the very essence of the culture you inhabit. When you turn up your nose at the perfectly cylindrical, chemically stabilized meat tube spinning quietly on a heated roller, you are not demonstrating your refined taste. You are demonstrating a profound lack of imagination. You are refusing to engage with the sublime.
The international gaze has finally given Americans permission to stop pretending they prefer a foraged radish over a mechanically separated poultry nugget. What we are seeing on social media is not irony; it is a mass spiritual awakening triggered by deep-fried corn batter.
Evelyn is right, of course. You have been treating your consumption of mass-market snack foods as a moral failing, a temporary lapse in your otherwise pristine lifestyle. But the joy of the visiting tourist is not ironic. It is entirely sincere. They are engaging with the product exactly as it was designed to be experienced: as a perfectly engineered dopamine delivery system, wrapped in foil, and handed through a sliding glass window by a teenager who does not care about you. There is a brutal, egalitarian beauty in that exchange.
Think about the sheer logistical miracle required to deliver a soft-serve ice cream cone, perfectly swirled and structurally sound, to a highway rest stop at three in the morning. The global supply chains. The refrigeration technologies. The generations of food scientists who dedicated their lives to ensuring that the synthetic vanilla flavor hits your palate with exactly the right amount of aggressive sweetness. The visiting soccer fans see this miracle. They document it. They celebrate it. You, meanwhile, are still worrying about your gut microbiome.
It is time to let go of your exhaustion. It is time to stop pretending that the pinnacle of human achievement is a sourdough starter you forgot to feed. We have built a society capable of producing a violently blue, carbonated beverage that tastes like a fictional fruit, and we have made it available on every street corner. That is not a dystopia; it is a triumph of the human will over the natural world.
So, tomorrow, I want you to do something radical. I want you to walk into a brightly lit convenience store. I want you to walk past the bottled water and the sad, refrigerated apples. I want you to stand before the mechanized cheese pump. I want you to press down on that lever with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a holy relic, and I want you to watch the neon-orange liquid flow over a bed of salted corn chips. Do not post it on social media. Do not call it a guilty pleasure. Just eat it, and for once in your life, allow yourself to feel the industrial majesty of what you have been given.