我们吃饭的方式

“我们应该在哪吃点东西呢？"也许再没有别的问题更能激发消费技术创业者的积极性了。当然我半开玩笑说的。

After the age of the Yellow Pages, we’ve all used multiple services that guide us to a restaurant seat. We’ve hunted for restaurants on Google, researched options on Zagat, and offered reviews on Yelp. The trend for how we search for restaurants has shifted from directories (phone books) to guides (ratings) to people influencing our decisions. Today, there’s stiff competition amongst mobile services to drive us to the next restaurant, whether it’s a Living Social daily deal, a Foursquare check-in reward, anUrbanSpoon recommendation, or simply word-of-mouth, serendipitous suggestions that filter through conversations on various social networks or, heaven forbid, in real life.

在使用电话黄页之后，我们都习惯了多样化的服务指引我们去哪些餐馆。我们在Google上搜索餐馆，在Zagat上查询可选择的地方，在Yelp上写上去过的感受等。我们查找餐馆的方式已经从电话书中直接查询变成了需要旁人建议来影响我们的决定。现在激烈的移动服务竞争引导着我们去下个餐馆，是否是Living Social 网上每日的兑换交易，Foursquare网站登录奖励，anUrbanSpoon网上的推荐，或者是简单的渗透进各种社交网站大家口头的信息交流中，偶然获得的建议，当然真实生活中不可能得到。

These services help drive us to eateries and hopefully create incentives between restaurants and customers to foster repeat business and loyalty. But the restaurant business is hyper-competitive. Many don’t make it. Turnover is the norm. And for those that are able to survive, either because of killer food or location, the majority of them offer adequate food, service, and ambiance, yet are able to turn a buck because we keep going back. Instead of competing on quality, most compete on offers and optimize to fill open seats. For the most part, it at least appears the majority of restaurants worry less about word-of-mouth goodwill and are more focused on accumulating badges and stickers to paste underneath their menus as patrons window-shop.

这些服务带领我们到达吃饭的地方，同时也期望可以在餐馆和顾客之间创造一些激励措施以保证回头客。但是餐馆市场竞争太过激烈。许多人都做不成功。营业额一般般。对于那些可以胜出的餐馆来说，一个是因为他们的吸引人的菜肴以及优势的地点，他们大部分都提供美味的菜肴，优质的服务以及很好的氛围，这样可以创收，因为我们成了回头客。代替只是在质量方面比拼，大多数也致力于提供和优化开放式座位。对于大部分餐馆来说，至少看上去很多餐馆并不特别担心大家口头所说的信誉好坏，更注重积累一些奖章和标签贴在菜单下来向顾客宣传展示。

Having spent a decent portion of my life working in restaurants, I know markups and margins on tickets are healthy, even excluding those businesses with liquor licenses. People are perfectly willing to fork over two to three times the cost of goods sold, even if those goods are not so tasty. The time saved, the ease of ordering, and the feeling of eating out somehow translates to a juicy premium. All the while, oftentimes the food is suspect, both in terms of quality and nutritional value. Yet we continue to go back, line up, gorge ourselves, and repeat. And as the economy continues to recover (slowly), individuals and especially families are under enormous pressure to stock up at big box retailers and focus on food quantity at the expense of quality.

在餐馆工作过很久后，我了解到票面上的涨价和利润是可行的，这还不包括允许范围内的酒水生意。人们愿意付比实际产品价格高出2到3倍的价钱，尽管那些食物并不那么好吃。节省时间，点餐容易，外出吃饭不知何故就变成了可赚的生意。一直以来，食物都不是那么有保障，不管是质量上还是营养价值上。然后我们还是不停地去餐馆，大吃一顿，接着再去。随着经济的复苏（慢慢地），个人，特别是家人，压力很大的情况下吃的都很多，不顾食物的质量而是只注重食物的数量了。"

当餐馆和这些服务持续竞争赚饭钱时，许多新的消费网站的开办大范围地填补了某些空白，开创了我们让我们大吃一顿新的方式。如Gobble和Grubly这些新的公司开创了本地家庭式菜肴，既可以送外卖也可以过来取。不用再加热冷冻的披萨或者点些普通的外卖，这些服务帮助家庭式菜肴打响了名声（同时也赚了点钱）。Kitchit's 的目标和别人有些不同，他对于经常做饭而且将饭带进我们家的人实行免费，为的是我们可以有朋友过来吃晚饭，将我们的公寓和住所变成餐馆。

这些服务主要是家庭式用餐，其他的则是让我们走出家去结识新的朋友。'和我们吃饭吧'就是一种鼓动朋友们或者陌生人去新餐馆，在给店主一部分定金的情况下餐馆提供一些座位，可以使用餐者有机会结识新人或者欣赏到喜欢的用餐设施。“家庭用餐”是一项和其他人在做菜人家共用家庭菜的服务，可以在你所在的城市也可以在旅途中。我们都有过经历，和同一个人吃好几次饭这种很单调，或者是在旅途中陷入旅行设置的陷阱餐馆，期待能尝到当地的特色菜。‘和我们吃饭吧’与'家常菜'可以打破这种单调，还不错。

All of this is happening because of the convergence of a number of trends. Our economy is struggling to regain its footing. We’ve become more educated about the dangers of poor nutrition, the hazards of frozen food, and dietary effects of portion sizes. Diabetes is a legitimate health threat. We have to commute more, from suburb to suburb, as job tenures become shorter. We marry later in life. Then, we divorce. Both parents work, or there’s just one parent. Kids don’t take as much of an interest in cooking their own food, let alone having any curiosity as to where it comes from. And with technology to make us more productive and/or to distract us, we oftentimes get caught in situations where we turn one of humankind’s most social habits into an anti-social event, a means to an end.

所有这一切都因为一系列新趋势的推广。我们的经济正在逐步恢复稳定。我们变得更加担心营养不良的危害，速冻食品的危害以及更关注饮食的效应。糖尿病被认为是健康的一种危害。随着工作任期的缩短，我们不得不更加频繁的通勤于郊区路上。我们晚婚，而后离婚。父母全职，或者单亲。孩子们对于自己做饭没有太多兴趣，更别提会好奇饭从哪里来了。随着技术发展，我们更加忙碌，也更加无暇顾及，经常性的，我们陷入各种困境，在那我们将人类最富社交的习惯变成了反社交的事情，成为只是达到目的的一种手段。

As Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, might say, we’re also “Eating Alone,” at least some of the time, and we’re content with it. Despite the popularity of the Food Network, one of its most attractive personalities, Jamie Oliver, wasn’t able to take healthy eating and education mainstream—his show, Food Revolution, had six episodes in 2010 and was yanked off the air after two spots in 2011 because of low ratings, replaced replaced by Dancing with the Stars.

Bowling Alone的作者罗伯特普特南，可能会说我们也会单独吃饭，至少有些时候，我们还挺乐意这样的。虽然食物网站非常流行，其中最吸引人的个性，吉米奥利弗，吃的不健康也得不到主流的思想，2010年他的6集表演，食物的变革在2011年由于低收视率被拉下2个点，同时被与星同舞代替。

We are separated from what we eat. We lose that connection as to where the food came from in the first place, where it was planted, harvested, and how it ended up prepared on our plate. That’s what excites me about this particular batch of startups. They may or may not create a Google-like technology giant, but that’s not the point. They’re riding social networks and creating peer-to-peer economies, allowing us to connect with others around food and offering an interesting (and sometimes cheaper and healthier) alternative to frozen dinners and overpriced restaurants. Technology will probably never be able to answer the question “Where should we eat?” That’s OK. What’s important is that how we answer the question could be different in the future, and that’s a good thing. After all, we’re not just what we eat—we’re also where we eat and whom we eat with.

我们被所吃的食物分开了。我们不再关心我们吃的食物最初是哪来的，哪里种的，哪里丰收的，怎么端上盘子的。这就是一系列新兴开办让我感到兴奋的。这些可能或者不可能创造出像Google一样的技术巨头，但是这不是关键。他们正驾驭着社交网络，开创着点到点经济，让我们和其他人通过食物来联系并提供了一种代替冷冻晚餐和昂贵餐馆的方式。技术可能从来不能回答例如我们应该去哪吃这种问题。没关系。重要的是我们未来对此的回答会有所不同，这是好事情。毕竟我们不会再仅回答我们吃了什么---我们还会回答我们在哪吃的和谁一起吃的。