A few years ago, I found an old article, clipped from The Gazette, buried deep in my dad’s office. It was a “Life Stories” column, half cracked and caked in dust, titled “Food for Thought: A Survival Guide to Family Dining,” dated October 4th, 2004.

I wasn’t shocked. Like many of his species, my father kept a lot of shit in there: broken chargers, photo albums, hundreds of books about The Beatles and/or one of the World Wars. For the life of him, though, what he could never keep was a secret. Big or small. He'd manage to hold strong for a week or two, then as soon as a remote would break or a toe would be stubbed, the truth just had to spill itself out. So, oblivious as ever, I kept reading.

The article was a fun little 500-word field study on the pitfalls and ketchup-based consequences of taking picky kids out to eat. The writing was witty and irreverent. Sincere yet sarcastic. Practical, with a fantastical flair for the familiar. It’s only when I got to its end that the frightening, if predictable, Shyamalan twist took shape.

Unbeknownst to me, the call was coming from inside the pantry. Turned out the father of the piece was my very own, and I, the clumsy, chocolate milk-mustachioed nightmare at the story’s center.

Stunned, I confronted my parent, the liar. He smiled and, after reading over his deception, had only two things to say. One, it’s hard to lie about something so easily forgotten and even weirder to take it personally (hurtful, yet fair). But stranger than that, what he couldn’t get over was how much the food has changed. How, not just the meals but the way we eat them and talk about eating them and write about how we should be talking about eating them, has all collapsed in on itself since the last time I asked for crayons with my dinner.

“If you were a kid today, I wouldn’t have anything to write about. Where would we go? What would we eat? Do family restaurants even exist anymore, or has everything just become a worse version of everything else?”

At the time, I didn’t answer—we have a biological predisposition to assume our parents are grossly exaggerating most of the time, and this was no exception. But now, I’m fairly certain that we’ve all seen it, right? Felt it. Tasted it—or the absence of it—this great culinary migration from simplicity. A changing of the guard from tiers of affordable dining with fun menus for the whole family to slightly different versions of identically unaffordable, Instagrammable “experiences.” The same Simons-bought skinny stick-on tiles, the same scribbly-fonted specials. In a world where even Happy Meal toys have service surcharges, it’s hard to remember the irony-free excitement that came from a salad bar, or a themed lunch buffet, or, god forbid, a branded reusable cup that could be taken home… for free. Call it blissful ignorance, or some sort of hospitality nostalgia, but even if the quality of options might have been a little worse, is it possible that we might have been all the better for it?

Would the world be a better place if every restaurant morphed into a combination Pizza Hut/Olive Garden circa 2006? Probably not. That doesn’t change the fact that there is an ethos of care, value, and fulfillment that seems to have left a lot of meals, and their consumers, on the outside looking in. And that feeling isn’t missing in fast-casual chains either. You struggle to find it in over-Yelped hipster dives and the $27 simple sandwich shops too. It’s in needlessly fancy bar snacks and slop bowls and the ghost kitchen graveyard of Uber Eats accounts. It would seem like there’s never been more awareness of what goes into fine dining, and never been less emotional attachment to the plates they produce. No such thing as middle of the road anymore; it's all sidewalk or highway from here on out.

We live in a world that's been commodified and Bourdainified, down to the studs. Our foodie gods are dead, and we are the ones who ate them.

Somewhere along the way, there was a small-plates-ification of everything we once held dear, leaving us a little more confused, a little more broke, and tragically, a lot less full. All in the name of swapping balance for burrata.