We regard the genial fast-food worker — overalls and paper garrison cap, standing between counter and kitchen, offering with both hands a meat product cooked in less time than it takes to boil water — as having become parodical tableau some twenty-five years back. With a little effort the inculcated grin can be restrained and the value of a cheap lunch or even a high school income, exclusive to liberal modernity, recognized. And then we grin.
After a two-year moratorium on account of mad cow disease, dining colossus Yoshinoya D&C Company celebrated the resumption of American beef imports with a Tokyo press conference, its beef-and-rice dish the centerpiece. Company President Shuji Abe was probably well aware of humor associated with his industry when he plucked the contents of a meal from a ceramic bowl but, looking to sales predictions showing not the slightest loss of interest from the product's suspension, had reason to smile himself.