food courts i have loathed.

I hate malls. As someone with more than a passing interest in urban planning, malls are just a bad idea. As a liberal with a difficult relationship with market based economies, malls are downright evil. They represent the privatization of public space, a coarsening of commerce, and are poison to local businesses. Many of my memories of adolescence are of being dragged to malls in a vain attempt to get deals on clothing that i neither desired nor needed. As i have grown older I myself have been drawn into the quest for "deals," despite knowing full well that capitalism is made to screw you, and mall based capitalism aims to fuck you and then kill you.

within malls there is the institution of the food court. growing up the food court was the teddy bear the mall gave you to apologize for its repeated batteries, only to resume the beatings when you didn't show enough appreciation. after being dragged through innumerable identical clothing stores, peddling cloths that might have been hip in the 1970s, my only hope would come to be the thought of food. getting said food required tearing the adults in my life away from their orgy of consumerism with repeated lobbying. i would focus on my dad, inevitably the more disinterested of the adults in the situation.

"dad, im getting hungry"

"ok, we'll get food after this."

time would pass and the clothes would fly and i would be forced in and out of changing rooms, as my superiors quested for the clothing that, despite being made by a philipino sex slave based on the measurements of a plastic dummy in new york that bore only passing resemblance to a human, somehow would fit me just right, and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future even though i was still growing, hated the garment, and already had several that fit fine.

"dad, im really getting hungry."

"so am i" my sister would offer

"the kids are getting hungry"

"ok, i just wanted to get to a few more stores."

my previous low level anger at the situation would now blossom forth into full fledged rage. with the exception of my sister there was no one in a five mile radius i did not want to die horribly. the pop crap being piped into the store, sung by some blonde dipshit who hadn't even heard of music theory, began to sound like someone stapling glass. i liked to image that if i stared hard enough my eyes would turn into lasers and bore a hole through my victimizers.

if we were lucky my dad would intervene in these grand schemes of consumerish glory and we would get food first. then we would arrive at that grad feeding trough of america's unwashed masses, the food court.

they are basically all the same. the chinese restaurant, with some kind of cloyingly racist reference to stereotypes, such as "panda" or "wok," was my favorite destination. the thick, doughy noodles of the lo mein were very comforting, and helped recharge my batteries after all that rage. there is also the generic national fast food restaurant, and the inevitable sabarro. This latter chain has somehow managed to bring passable pizza to every food court and rest stop in the country, displacing the pizza huts and dominos for the past 20 years despite having no market penetration outside of these locales. there was also the inevitable cinna-bon, some kind of ice cream place, and maybe that cajun chain where everyone collects their free sample and never eats. i broke this rule once, in south station in boston, and ate at the cajun place. i regretted it, not because the food was bad, but because it was the same food as they had at the chinese place. why have two places, and why besmirch the good name of cajun cooking?

in recent years i have seen some encouraging changes in food courts, including the penetration of this market by independent restaurants, usually serving Mediterranean food. this might be something limited to my region, as new jersey is seeing an influx of middle eastern individuals. there has also been an influx of sushi places which, while not great, present some alternative to the usual pap. there has also been the advent of charlie's cheese steaks, which are bizarrely good, made fresh to order, and offer some great deals.

last week i found myself once again in a food court. my lady friend needed some shoes (no, really) and so we headed to the jackson outlets. this institution is one of the many outlet malls that have grown across the country, promising their customers another "good deal." factory outlets were an invention of the 80s, in which canny chains sold their slightly defective items at a discount. soon, chains realized that by cutting out the usual retail middleman at an outlet they could undercut their competition. by the late 90s outlets were so popular chains realized that simply by calling something an outlet theyr could do away with the pretext of any kind of discount, put some signs up talking about sales, and people would just assume they were getting a good deal. the jackson outlets are a far cry from the old outlet malls, which resembled nothing more than dollar stores, with boxes and merchandise spread across the land willy nilly by urgent-eyed overweight housewives clawing their way through stacks of boxes trying to find the right size or model.

while the waistline of the customers has remained, the jackson outlets are located in a very wealthy area, and they look it. the mall is actually a ring of stores surrounding a parking lot, attempting once again to replicate the homey feeling of the old downtowns they continue to destroy. the rule in these stores is high class, as the stores are polished and clean and the employees polite. the brands represented run something of a gamut, but a large large portion of them are upper crust brands like harvey and david and bose. nestled in a fold of the ring is the mall's food court, a polished affair encrusted in tvs blaring teen pop stars. the consumers of this cultural disaster are now afforded the ability to request the next music video by texting a selection of numbers to another number.

this is by far the worst food court i have even endured. despite a large space, the court offers its patrons a dizzying array of three food options: a subway that does not honor the current 5$ footlong promotion, a nathans, which is always overpriced, and a very affordable, very generic, Chinese restaurant which also offers sushi. given the alternatives, i chose the Chinese restaurant. though there may not have been any really good options here, this may have been an error. i have never seen vegetable lo mein screwed up before. there weren't really any vegetables in this vegetable lo mein. nor was it seasoned properly. since the only seasonings generally found on lo mein are vegetable oil and soy sauce, i mean that these were noodles bathed in nothing more than water, the barest hint of soy sauce, and some very very sad onions. the other items i was given with this meal were on the disappointing side of mediocre, but nothing will ever top the failure to properly prepare a mean as ridiculously simple as lo mein. fail. fail Fail FAIL!