Whatever happened to French dressing? I went into a moderately upscale restaurant in Helena, Mont., last week with half a dozen friends. The waiter, a man in his early thirties, delivered up a two-minute monologue on the evening's specials as if he were an oral bard reciting passages of the Iliad.

When one of my companions tried to order a gin and tonic, he was offered six different brands of gin, one of which the restaurant happened to be "featuring" this month. We decided to start with salads. I was second in the ordering rotation. I ordered a house salad with French dressing.

Oh, my goodness. The waiter looked at me with pity and contempt. He could scarcely believe that such a rube had slipped under the radar at the door. What was I, from Ekalaka or something? Looking around meaningfully at my companions, and employing his most sniffy, snippy and condescending voice, he said, "I'm sorry, sir, we don't serve French dressing here. Might I suggest something else?" You know the rest. It was either a cave-cured Gorgonzola with a hint of pineapple or a gum of mango vinaigrette with a dollop of organic whipped cream on top.

In retaliation, I canceled my order of bow-harvested elk medallions with Tibetan mushrooms and a chokecherry reduction.

I wanted to stand up in the center of the restaurant and deliver a spirited defense of French dressing and maybe Jell-O too. At what point in American history did French dressing slip out of its place as a perfectly respectable salad dressing and become the surest sign that you grew up in a trailer park in Havre or Baker? I wanted to say to the waiter, "You are aware that we're in Montana, aren't you?"

Give me a restaurant where they still say Aye-talian. It would be interesting to take a culinary poll to see what percentage of the dining public really prefers a curried raspberry vinaigrette to the basic panoply of dressings you can buy in a grocery store. In my opinion, these innovations are imposed on us not because we find them delicious, but because they are supposed to make us feel like privileged gourmands who are different from the unwashed masses who, in their ignorance, still think French dressing is delicious.

Food snobbery really bugs me. I love good food as much as the next person and seek it out too, but in the end I try to remember that every meal, from my daughter's mac and cheese to boeuf en croute is really just provender. The ancient cynic philosopher Diogenes (died 323 BCE) advised: Eat only to banish hunger, sleep only to banish fatigue. That's not my food philosophy, but I try never to forget that point of view, either.

Here are two other food innovations that bug me.

1. Ciabatta and panini breads. Why, I ask, why? When I was growing, up we disliked the crusts and worked around them whenever Mother wasn't watching. Now, in middle life, it's almost impossible to order a sandwich that isn't protected by a heat shield worthy of the space shuttle. When I am reduced to ordering fat-free, farm-dried slivers of prosciutto with lightly-candied Portuguese pear tomatoes on herb ciabatta, I just sigh for what we have lost in America.

2. Novelty pizza. The thing that makes pizza so great is that it is … pizza. It was perfect in its basic form: Crust, tomato sauce, cheese, toppings. I don't see what we gain by shifting to pesto sauce and sun-dried tomatoes with scattered shards of feta, all on a cornbread crust. It's fine if you want to concoct a flat, round open-face thing with scallion and fig sauce graced by a sheep cheese accent, but please don't call it pizza.

Once, when I was a child, my parents sent me into Lynch's grocery in Dickinson to buy fixings for spaghetti. It was Sunday after church, and according to the blue laws then still in force, only one teeny store was open in Dickinson. My parents stayed in the car. I approached the counter and in my piping boy's voice said, "Can you tell me where I can find parmesan (par-ma-zahn) cheese?" (You know, the old powdery variety in the green Kraft canister.) The 20-something male cashier sneered openly at me and said, "Humpff. It's par-MEE-zion."

Finally, have you been following the anti-Hooters jihad? My goodness, you'd think someone was threatening to open a strip joint or a porn shop next to a day-care facility. I have eaten at a Hooters restaurant two or three times in the course of a deeply sinful life, though never in North Dakota, and what happens inside those orange doors has not struck me as the road to Sodom and Gomorrah. Hooters! Gosh, folks, the next thing you know someone will be wanting to open up a teen center in town.

At Hooters, lightly clad, vaguely flirtatious women with bare midriffs bring your food. They don't linger much once they drop off the giant plate of fries. Beyond that, it is pretty much like Applebee's.

I was at a local sports bar the other night sipping a beer and quietly reading a book (geek), when a large woman at the next table lifted her sweatshirt and flashed the other five people at her table. At Hooters, they keep their shirts on.

Call me jaded, but I thought the cat was out of the bag on the use of sex appeal in American culture as a way of selling jeeps, diet sodas, deodorant and chicken wings. Spend 24 hours randomly watching primetime TV, surfing the Net or playing video games, and Hooters will seem like the Hebron Glee Club in 1958. I lived for 15 years in Reno, Nev., where kindergarten teachers wear gold lame with plunging cleavage and a belly button ring, and the billboards exhibit semi-recumbent women in velvet dresses under the message: "Come to Harrahs, the home of the loosest slots in town."

It's not on the restaurant front that we need to protect whatever's left of innocence in our culture.

I'm not a fan of Hooters, partly because the food is unremarkable, but mostly because I do believe it is one small manifestation of the exploitation of women in American capitalist culture. Nor will I eat there once it is up and running. But no part of me plans to join the picket lines. Given where we are as a culture, it's like worrying about an ingrown toenail when you have gangrene in your leg. If you want to protest the death of American culture, I'd start at the giant box stores, not at a beach-themed chain restaurant.

I never thought the following words would come out of my mouth. But given the irrational hostility some Bismarckians are attaching to this "innovation," I am pro-Hooters.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenksinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)