Why Food All Tastes the Same Now | The Deep

In the last year, I've ordered french fries in Phoenix, Arizona, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Bar Harbor, Maine, Washington, D.C., and several airports in between. And I couldn't tell you the names of the restaurants. But everywhere I went, I found fries so perfectly familiar, I could have just stayed in my hometown and had the same lunch. And there's something comforting and safe in knowing that whether I'm in Phoenix or New Jersey, I'm in Phoenix. French fries are waiting for me, but have we lost something else as a result?

When I saw headlines saying that Cisco had just made a $29 billion deal to acquire Restaurant Depot to become the biggest food distributor in the world, I started wondering, why does it feel like an invisible, unnatural force absorbed all our foods and left them all tasting the same? America isn't some tiny country with one and one cuisine. It's one of the most geographically diverse places on earth. We've got lobster fishermen in Maine and shrimp boats in Louisiana, dairy country in Wisconsin, wheat fields in Kansas.

We have salmon in Alaska and cattle ranches in Texas. For centuries, Americans developed distinct regional cuisines because they had distinct landscapes. People cooked what grew nearby when it grew nearby. They preserved food for winter and recipes evolved over generations. So, if you traveled across the country, you expected the food to change with the scenery. But now, how we eat in one state can be totally interchangeable with how we eat in every other state. And sure, you can dig up traditional local foods, but the fact is, you don't have to.

You can always find a Chili's or an Olive Garden, a Burger King, or a McDonald's. And you can have strawberries from Driscoll's any day of the year, anywhere in the world. It feels like an invisible, unnatural force absorbed all our foods and left them all tasting the same. Just like chain architecture, suburban retail, streaming entertainment, and social media algorithms, what we eat is so convenient and predictable and standardized. So, where did regional seasonal eating go? Did we all just wake up one day and decide it would be great if Phoenix tasted just like New Jersey?

Or did unseen players seduce us into sacrificing something precious? Menus from the early to mid-20th century reflect a golden era of American comfort food. Before interstate travel and high-tech refrigeration, local middle-class restaurants relied on hearty staples like meatloaf, deviled eggs, and whatever was being grown locally. The city diners reflected America's long history as a melting pot. You didn't just get barbecue. You got Texas barbecue, or Kansas City barbecue, or whatever you want to call it. Or Carolina barbecue, which is the best?

Wisconsin meant cheese curds. Philly meant cheese steak. Louisiana meant gumbo. Food told the story of a place and a people and a past. Food was culture. Now, obviously, regional specialties still exist, and independent ethnic restaurants serve up authentic recipes from their homelands. You can still find remarkable local restaurants doing extraordinary work. And I'm thinking of the farm-to-table movement, where committed local foodies source everything close to home. But those are increasingly the exception. And even local independent restaurants are increasingly using national distributors as their sources for ingredients and even whole meals.

Almost every independent clam shack or pub along the shoreline here in Connecticut serves the exact same style. Of battered pickle chips, identical crinkle-cut fries, and the exact same branded cheesecake slices. And the clam chowder? If it's not pre-made and frozen, the cream and the onions and the broth, everything but the clam, and sometimes the clam as well, might be shipped in from thousands of miles away, weeks before the chef starts chopping. The chowder arrives frozen, the kitchen heats it up and pours it in a nice bowl.

We sprinkle on a little fresh Parsley, and suddenly I'm paying $18 for a glorified microwave dinner. It turns out there's a pretty simple explanation for the state of affairs, because one company truly has the corner on the big food market. Cisco. We have all seen the Cisco truck outside our college cafeteria, taking up eight parking spots on Main Street and behind the grocery store. In fact, we've likely all eaten Cisco just this week. So, where did Cisco come from? In 1969, nine regional food distributors around Houston, Texas merged into a single company.

In other words, Cisco started big and became something much bigger. Cisco didn't grow by building new operations. It grew and continues to grow by buying up existing distributors. Over the decades, it acquired scores of regional food distributors across the country. Folding local businesses into one national network. In 2026, Cisco landed its biggest deal yet and cemented its near-monopoly on the American food distribution business. Jetro Restaurant Depot owned 166 warehouse locations in 35 states and, until this deal, operated on a very different model.

They were a wholesale cash-and-carry warehouse club, where food service operators could drive in. Load up their own carts, pay at the register, and take their products back to the kitchens. In return, they got very sharp pricing on staples, fresh meat, and produce, on paper, and kitchen equipment, and it helped keep Cisco pricing honest. But Cisco just paid $29.1 billion to gain overnight access to more than 725,000 independent restaurants and food service operators, doubling its reach. From $730,000 to almost $1.5 million.

So, what does Cisco do with all that access? Cisco is what's known as a broadline distributor, a supply chain intermediary that provides a massive, diverse inventory, vast logistical networks, state-of-the-art warehousing, and fleets of delivery trucks. It's an incredible feat of human engineering and logistics. Broadline infrastructure enables frequent… And reliable deliveries, crucial for the food industry where freshness and safety are top priorities. I'm a fan. Cisco gets that food and an astonishing range of other products to our restaurants, and also to our schools, our hospitals, sports stadiums, hotels, caterers, retirement homes, military facilities, and even prisons.

Analysts estimate that Cisco supplies food or food service products. ...to somewhere between one out of every five and one out of every six independent restaurants in America. So, if your town has 20 local restaurants, four of them are likely ordering from Cisco. The same fries, the same mozzarella sticks, the same frozen calamari, and the same tiramisu. The chicken is from Tyson, and the berries are from Driscoll's. Cisco also provides your paper napkins, cleaning chemicals, disposable containers. Cookware, kitchen equipment, everything needed to keep a commercial kitchen running.

And they don't stop at food and supplies. Need help with your menu? They have a graphics team. Do you need inventory software? Done. Bookkeeping support? They have that too. Pricing guidance? You bet. For a price. Cisco isn't just distributing food and equipment. It's selling a complete operating system for restaurants. Sounds amazing. And it is. Imagine opening your own neighborhood diner a hundred years ago. You would painstakingly build relationships and drive bargains with a local butcher, a nearby dairy, a bakery down the road, a produce wholesaler, and maybe even a fisherman, and most importantly, in a pre-refrigeration culture, the local iceman.

Today's independent restaurant owners deal with far more regulation and safety recs, which as a consumer, I appreciate. And on top of that, they're facing a host of issues for which broadline distributors offer real solutions. In spite of slowed inflation since the Biden era, food prices still increased almost 6% between April 2025 and April 2026. Fertilizer costs jumped 30 to 50%.

Because of global supply disruptions, and that cost was passed on to consumers. More than half of American farmers, 56%, reported labor shortages in 2025. Small operations simply can't absorb these kinds of hits without turning to big solutions. The United States lost 15,000 small farms in 2025 due to consolidation or sales to larger farm corporations. That brought the number of existing farms to around 1.9 million, an 8% decline from 2 million in 2018. A local food supply is increasingly difficult to find.

Your restaurant might sit in the heart of Utah farmland, but all the nearby farms have been sold to Ag Reserves, or another massive farm corporation that only sells through middlemen like Cisco. The reality is, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about it. We have been witnessing a structural transformation in the heart of America's food story for the last 60 years. It's nearly impossible to be all local, all the time, even in the heartland.

As one Nebraska restaurateur put it, we can't just sell root vegetable pies for four months. Cisco is always right there with self-propagating solutions that exacerbate the problems Broadline Distribution promises to solve. Exhausted restaurant owners today can log on to one website, load up their cart, and everything arrives Tuesday morning. It's astonishingly efficient, affordable, and generally pleasing enough to customers. What was once eight or nine business deals with a variety of vendors is now one enormous logistics system. And there are trade-offs.

Costs are what Cisco says they are. And if this year's deal makes it past the FTC, Cisco will have almost no competition. Unless local chefs and their customers place a higher value on local sourcing than on the bottom line, Cisco is the obvious out. And even the highest ideals of building community, relationships, and living close to the land may not be enough to keep you afloat when harvest time is months in the future. At this point, most big food YouTube videos conclude by making Cisco the villain, the Goliath, laughing at a beleaguered swarm of little Davids.

And after digging into it, I want to say they are not far off. Corporations measure their success in terms of size and numbers, and Cisco's appetite for growth has been unchecked. As a result, American food culture submitted to the standards of industrialism. Small, local answers are beneath its notice unless they can be bought up and absorbed into the vast logistical machine. Holdouts are fighting an uphill battle. The farm-to-table restaurants that pull off the thousands of details and bargains that go into survival in this economy deserve enormous respect because they are doing something incredibly difficult economically, but more importantly, they are doing something incredibly difficult economically.

They are choosing local flavor and community over apparent convenience. They're maintaining relationships. They're coordinating dozens of independent producers. They're putting up with the fact that Farmer Bob is always late with his delivery on Tuesday. They're allowing nature, with the help of some logistic software, to craft their menus. And they're taking risks. These are very expensive risks. If one of the 1,036 dairies that closed in 2025 was your supplier, you're going to have to pay for it. You're going to have to pay for it.

You're going to have to Cisco's access to a reliable supply of milk and cheese starts to look like a great solution. And when the restaurant down the street is ordering everything from one truck, it's very difficult to compete. Convenience wins, not because anyone set out to destroy local food, but because efficiency usually wins. And there's something really amazing and totally human about the rise of broadline distributors. Freshpoint, Cisco's produce division, coordinates enormous networks of commercial farms and importers so that restaurants can order vegetables nearly year-round.

Frozen foods travel through refrigerated warehouses and trucks. Vacuum-sealed packaging dramatically extends shelf life. Improvements in flash freezing have preserved texture far better than they did a generation ago. We don't eat everything out of cans anymore. Food-borne illness like botulism. Listeria, salmonella are still serious, but blessedly rare. We've become so accustomed to abundance that we've stopped noticing how incredible it is, or what it costs. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and no one gets to have their cake and eat it too.

Modernization gives us refrigeration, safer foods, and fewer shortages, but standardization a la Cisco gives us the same fries in Maine and Arizona. Modernization solves genuine problems. Standardization replaces them with a monoculture. Wendell Berry, the bard of Forgotten USA, often reflected on the fact that by embracing, often because we feel we didn't have a choice, the corporate solutions to our food woes, we sacrificed our roots. He wrote, In the old days, you didn't go to school to study agriculture.

You knew that every nook and cranny of a field was You knew that every nook and cranny of a field was And so, you spent a lifetime trying to get to know a single farm. He said he used to ask people, where are you from? But he stopped, because now the answers boil down to everywhere and nowhere. Food was not the only thing that became interchangeable. Think about downtown America, the same Starbucks, the same apartment buildings, my favorite, a Lululemon in every gentrified neighborhood, the same upscale burger restaurants with exposed ductwork.

Edison bulbs, reclaimed wood, and locally sourced typography. As deeply human as a desire for convenience and safety is, we also hold in ourselves an impulse to explore the unknown. We sail for distant lands. Columbus brought back chocolate, tomatoes, and potatoes from the New World, and the Italians infused new possibilities into their own food culture. But they did it without abandoning their roots. Sometimes Chili's is just That is the thing when you and your husband have both had a long day at work, and the dishwasher breaks, and a kid is sick, and you just need something predictable in your crazy life.

Ask me how I know. It's not that we're without an American culture now. It's more accurate to say, though, that we've replaced local culture with one big monoculture that's safer and more convenient. But it's propped up by massive corporations and monopolies that By their very nature, disdain what is small, local, peculiar, and unpredictable. The problem isn't that you can't get authentic 1776 New England clam chowder. It's that we've lost the roots of everything that built our beautiful regional food cultures.

Standardization makes our places interchangeable. The breakdown of the family and the chosen family craze tries to make people interchangeable. Religious practice has all melted into an interchangeable spirituality, and perhaps most devastating of all, we can't remember or we choose not to remember our past. In a society unmoored from its roots like that, it's no wonder that food, like every other human art, has also become a point of safety in sameness. I don't think this happened because Americans stopped caring about good food.

I think it happened because we started valuing something else even more. Cisco didn't invent our appetite for convenience. It satisfied it. The French fries are identical because over the decades, millions of ordinary, reasonable decisions by farmers, restaurant owners, distributors, and customers all pointed in the same direction, toward efficiency, consistency, reliability, and, yes, profit. And we won't escape the Cisco machine anytime soon. And to be honest, I like being fairly certain that I can find french fries I like everywhere I fly.

But we can be more aware of how big food has shaped us and contributed to a much bigger story of the sameness of everywhere. Only then can we make self-conscious and intentional decisions to resist where we can and remind ourselves that places and people If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.