My brother was telling me the other day as we waited in line at the Wendy’s drive-through, about how he read something a while back that McDonald’s adds artificial beef-flavoring to all of its burgers, so that wherever you go, the burgers always taste the same. Weird, but it makes sense in a way.

But I was just thinking about how media and culture sort of serve that same ends with people: they fill us all up with the same flavorings, so that wherever we are, we’re all roughly the same.