Tag Archives: Food

Eat First, Ask What It is Later


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

Note: This post is excerpted from a letter, entitled One Saturday Morning,  I wrote to friends on February 22, 1999. It was originally posted several years ago, but vanished from the Poobah archives because of the incompetence of my former web host. Welcome back.

Dear Correspondents,

The sky is low and gray and the temperature, at least by California standards, is frigid. Maybe 45 or 50 degrees. I awoke early enough this morning to indulge myself with a little reading and a wonderful breakfast.

Food Face

BON APPITITE - When you eat anything except rocks and calf's liver the world become one huge grocery store.

My current read is “The Man Who Ate Everything – And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits”, by Jeffrey Steingarten.

Steingarten, whose original job was improbably as a lawyer was appointed food critic of Vogue magazine. (He never explains specifically how he made the jump, but it certainly seems like a move in the right direction if you ask me.) When he was appointed, he found that he had numerous food aversions – not a career-building trait in a food critic. The book is the story of how he learned to eat nearly everything. It seems a redundant tale for someone like me who never saw a food he didn’t like, but it is a good read nonetheless.

For me, the world is a gigantic grocery store. When I go to zoos I don’t think of the beauty of the animal on the hoof, but rather how it might look roasted, on a plate, and surrounded by tender baby carrots and squash. I don’t view those National Geographic travelogues about boys hunting monkey with blowguns so much as adventures as narrated serving suggestions.

I eat anything except rocks and calf’s liver – and I’ve even consumed two wonderful portions of the latter before. I am an omnivore. I’m a highly-developed example of millions of years of successful breeding, producing a specimen who can gain weight in any climate or condition on earth – so long as there is something to eat other than rocks and calf’s liver.

Darwin would be proud I’m sure.

After reading a chapter on surviving on a subsistence diet (which inexplicably included recipes for perfumed rice with lamb and lentils and Swiss chard and bean soup with ricotta toasts), I got hungry and made breakfast. I scrambled up some delicious eggs with bits of Jarlsberg cheese, a touch of cumin, a light dusting of garlic powder, and some chives. As accompaniment I prepared a small bowl of fresh cantaloupe and strawberries, some buttered whole wheat toast, and some aromatic French roast coffee (made with a pinch of salt added before brewing). I savored every bite.

Now I’m floating around on a full belly, quite content, and intensely interested in food. I think I’ll have to spend the rest of the day watching cooking shows on PBS. This, in turn, will lead to an orgy of cooking this afternoon and a full belly tonight. Satisfying, but not healthy. Oh well, better to die with a smile on my face and a full belly, than hungry and pissed because I missed a good meal.

Your Omnipotence,
Poobah

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

A New McEpoch on the Horizon


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
You Deserve a Break Today

McCHANGE ON THE HORIZON - The times they are a-changin.

Fast food is an American way of life. We jam gigantic globules of fat down our pie holes and chase them with a hot tub-size cup of high-fructose corn syrup. And for dessert, there’s always a 50-cent apple pie the size of Wisconsin. But all that gluttony has blinded us to the true meaning of today’s  fast food.

It’s almost never fast and one could make an argument it isn’t really food either.

But as a person who remembers life before the McDonalds arches morphed into a sort of wimpy, lazy “m” and the sign said “thousands sold” I can tell you it used to be different.

Will That Be ‘Regular’ or ‘DeLux?’ Hon?
Fast food used to come from places like Pop’s Drive-In. You sat at a cramped counter and ordered up your ‘burg – regular or De-Lux, no more no less. It arrived in about the same time it now takes a half-hour old burger to go down an assembly line that would’ve given Henry Ford a hard-on, into a bag, and somehow magically turn into a McRib as soon as you leave the drive-thru and check your greasy bag.

And it was good. The beef was fresh. The fries were unsalted because – revolutionary idea – they had condiments on the counter. Frank the Fry Cook might have been a rough ex-Marine chow cook and Betty the waitress might have been a cigarette smoking harpy, but between them they managed a piece of apple pie that was better than Mom’s and came ala mode for a few cents extra.

The first of the “modern” fast food joints were much the same except they forced patrons to eat in their dusty cars,  piled high with Dixie Cups and hamburger detritus from previous visits. No worries. Mom and Dad scooped the garbage out when they stopped to empty their overflowing ashtrays onto the roadside.

That’s right, the big technological edge for those pioneering hamburger joints – that’s what people called them before they became multinationals – was foisting the busing of tables off onto customers.

Then came the dreaded drive-thru. People didn’t even have to get their lazy asses out of the car and the lazy hamburglers didn’t have to roller-skate over to take the orders. Who knew this would beget multi-lane drive-thrus bigger than some Oklahoma freeways?

Suddenly one day they inexplicably started to add back so many items menus became as big as Las Vegas billboards with all the glitzy, awe-inspiring, unfathomable glory intact. It made me envy the blind, who can just feel some unadorned braille dots pasted to the counter and make a simple order.

Just Like Home

JUST LIKE HOME - Care to join me in the den for a #2 Meal with a Diet Coke?

Even Al Capone Got a Moveable Chair

They’ve even let us back inside. You can come in and sit in a prison- made bucket seat bolted to the floor for your protection and their convenience. You can even send the kids away to an indoor Disneyland, but you can’t enjoy the peace and quiet because the roller coasters and screaming kids are way too loud.

But now there’s word we’re entering a new fast food epoch. McDonalds is going to redesign their restaurants. Nearly 30,000 of them will be converted into hip new hangouts with cool hanging lights, funky graphics, and photos on the walls. There’ll be wi-fi access and premium coffee too.

It seems we’ve come full circle from Pop’s Diner, to proto-drive-in, to a squishy entity that’s neither drive-in nor sit-down restaurant – a place that’s scientifically engineered to squeeze every drop of pleasure from the dining experience and be really unhealthy to boot. Now we’ll sit in a faux den drinking $10 a cup coffee made from beans sent through the digestive tract of a civet and playing video games via wi-fi.

Sigh. I guess that’s progress.

Related articles by Zemanta

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]