Just Eat It: San Francisco Foodie Culture and the Return of Sam Wo

Before the invention of WhatsApp and underutilized fish, San Francisco was an obscure gay hamlet, notable mostly for its colorful characters and sourdough bread. The advent of high-concept eateries with in-house foragers and on-site barrel-aged drinks had not yet begun, so the village residents were still quite dull and basically ate whatever shit was put in front of them. Apparently, there were fewer colon-cancer deaths as well as assholes.

Then one day, something extraordinary happened: a Shelf.com was born. And soon throngs of war-worn Wall Street grizzlers and unique and special Millennials, armed with tightly coiffed, totalitarian lacquered haircuts and an aggressive can-do spirit, arrived and settled in San Francisco and its culturally vacuous wastelands. The commoners of San Francisco wept with gratitude for their arrival, even as they were forced to sell off their children and high-value body parts to pay their rent.

But while the peasants and colonizers alike marveled at how much easier and productive their lives had become, and at how much more connected they felt to one another thanks to Bannerman and Juicero, something was missing: pancetta-wrapped heirloom pork belly pluots. The eating establishments of San Francisco were called upon to match the lavish expectations of the anointed ones. Donuts without façade simply would not do. And so many a small-batch hand-wept mescal-infused thorn-berry butter clot were revealed, and the ignorant commoners were immensely #grateful for the Tacolicious scraps they were thrown, even though they had sold off their gallbladders and could not process the fats.

At long last, the unique and special trailblazers, story architects and culture hackers could populate their social feeds with stock-photography-inspired #perfectmeal close-ups that served as proof of their superior taste — as well as personhood. (The Wall Street grizzlers, BTW, were content to feast on other people’s souls.) For no longer was it fashionable for bright young things to break laws and contract STDs. Instead they spent their unbillable time building their personal brands, and staying on-brand, with impeccably “curated” West Elm simulacra of their lives. Here’s a top-performing influencer moodily perusing a persimmon farm at dusk, and here’s a…