An Edible Lament

Some of you may remember that, a couple weeks ago, I decided I was going to give up red meat. For those of you who don't remember, or who just want to languish leisurely in the tepid, fetid pool of nostalgia, here's the hyperlink.

I've been pretty much on-target with my decision, and, as Michael Palin once said in a perfectly-aged Monty Python sketch, I'm not only proud of that, I'm "smug about it."

This self-denial has gotten me to think a little bit more about food than I have heretofore. I have always had kind of a strange relationship with food, as do I suspect most 29-year-old men who are 6'0" and weigh under 140 pounds. Unlike people my age who do Olympic-level mat gymnastics in sleek unitards and have funny, pale, Slovak names, I eat voraciously, and have not thrown up afterwards in over fifteen years-- and never intentionally. Not even after accidentally seeing a clip of a four-hundred pound woman fucking a chihuahua online when I was in my late teens.

I love eating meat, but I'm just as happy not doing it, as long as whatever I am eating is lovingly slathered in sodium. For instance, last night, I sat happily on the sofa with a gigantic bowl on my lap filled with nothing but raw broccoli florets covered in a sauce made out of House of Tsang Classic Stir Fry sauce, soy sauce, five cloves of garlic, vegetable oil, garlic salt, seasoning salt, and sugar.

And, yes, I farted all goddamn night. My ass sounded like the bass on a Scion xC tricked out by an Asian high school kid. And my breath smelled like the contents of a Chinatown dumpster.

Giving up something like red meat has gotten me to think about other foods I used to eat that I don't anymore. I've never specifically said, "I'm never eating ________ anymore" the way I did with red meat, (and let's face it, maybe "never" is too strong a word anyway) but I've phased out a lot of foods over my lifetime. Here's a few:

* Combos

These things are addictive when you're twelve to fourteen years old. I probably had some of them rolling around in the pockets of my Bar Mitzvah suit just in case I had a mid-service craving. Fucking irresistable to teenagers, Combos should be given to any high-school student who is undergoing treatment for drug addiction or who is flunking out of school. Combos are deceptively simple until you begin to think seriously about the substance in the center. There must be some sort of chemical inside the cheese that makes the centers somehow both powdery and creamy at the same time, leaving me to believe that they were either developed in NASA laboratories by a lot of sexually-frustrated, hyper-intelligent ex-band geeks or in the back of a truck in Jersey City by someone wearing an eyepatch, mutton chops, and lots of strategically-applied Vaseline. I wouldn't dream of eating a Combo as a man approaching thirty. It just isn't done.

* 5th Avenue Bars

God how I loved these fucking things back in the day. Every now and then, my wife will attempt to convince me that 5th Avenue Bars are indistinguishable from Butterfingers. Right. Like a blowjob is indistinguishable from a kick in the nuts.

* Doritos

There aren't many jokes about Doritos that I can make that haven't already been made, so I won't even try. All I can say is that, when I was twelve, I used to love only two things: 1.) NASCAR racing and 2.) Doritos. On Sunday afternoons in the kitchen in front of the white, 9-inch TV, I would combine these two affections until my heart was a-flutter with fits of pre-adolescent tachycardia. I would fill up one my my parent's red plastic bowls with an overflowing heap of Doritos, licking both thumb and forefinger before starting the engorgement process, to ensure that the maximum powderage would stick to both digits, and then I'd fucking have at it. When I was done with that bowlful, in would go another. Then, and only then, would both fingers be sucked dry in an antesexual ritual that was probably as disturbing to witness as it was unhealthy to perform.

* Big-Kat Bars

Back in college, when I was retarded, I would frequently leave my dorm room in the morning, and, instead of making breakfast in my dorm room or visiting the dining hall, I would make the acquaintance of the two vending machines in the lobby of my dorm. There, I would insert a mind-boggling amount of change and out would roll my breakfast libation: a Diet Coke and my breakfast sustenence: a Big-Kat Bar. For the uninitiated, the Big-Kat Bar is made from the same exact components as the Kit-Kat Bar, but it is shaped, more or less, like a brick. Now I eat "Smart Start" because I am old, married, and somewhat less retarded.

* London Broil

Obviously, I'm not going to have London Broil again, because I gave up red meat. Even if I didn't, I wouldn't ever have it again because I don't know how to cook it and would be too afraid to try. Also, I wouldn't order it at a restaurant because it's too expensive. My mother used to make London Broil, back in the days when she both cooked and ate. Now she does neither, and I'm not there to pine for it anyway whilst nibbling on rabbit food or whatever passes for sustenence in her and my father's lives these days. I also used to eat, and will probably never eat again: hamburgers with onion soup mix mixed in, flank steak, broiled chicken, breaded chicken, and all the other dinners from my youth that have faded so far back into the recesses of my addled, sodium-encrusted brain that I can't remember what they even were anymore.

* Roy Rogers Fried Chicken

When I was six or seven or eight or nine or ten or more, I always knew that Saturday morning drives with my Daddy were special. He would drive me to his factory and I would "help" him at work by taking down his answering machine messages, taping up boxes with him, and, the most exciting part of going to work, riding down the motorized conveyer belt on my butt. When he wasn't taking me out to a diner afterwards, he took me to Roy Rogers so I could sink my developing teeth into crunchy, greasy, sloppy, salty, horrendously awful-fer-ya pieces of fried chicken that my mother would have promptly shoved up my father's ass if she knew he was taking me there. But what she didn't know didn't hurt her.

Besides, there are no more Roy Rogers' around here, and I only go to KFC once a year. Invariably, an hour before Passover dinner is supposed to start, I get a panicked phone call from my father telling me that he has everything he needs for the seder plate except for "a fucking shank bone."

"Mummy," he says, "I need you to go to Kenta-kee Chicken and get me some goddamn chicken shit."

"You mean a bone," I reply.

"Yeah, yeah-- come on, already, it's almost sunset."

And so my wife and I take off for the closest KFC drive-through, and I get a leg which I wolf down on the way to their house. And my sweet vegetarian wife lovingly attacks the biscuit.

Better Red Than Dead

Maybe it's because Aunt Mickey is wasting away to nothing down in Florida.

Maybe it's because I just had lunch with a bunch of my wife's old suite-mates at a Kosher, Indian, Vegetarian restaurant in New York City.

Maybe it's because steak is so goddamn expensive, and so goddamn excessive, and so goddamn... American.

I don't know what it is, and I don't know if I'm sliding off the deep end whilst sitting on a giant slab of London Broil, but I am giving up red meat.

And I'm a little bit frightened.

I haven't had to give up a lot of things in my life. I never started drinking alcohol, so I never had to give that up, and I never smoked a real cigarette-- only candy ones as a dubious youth and clove ones as an even more dubious college-level actor. I never opted for pot, LSD, cocaine, crack, E, shrooms, acid, cough syrup, air duster, heroin and life's other fun injectables.

I did smoke cigars for a little while-- from the time I was seventeen until my last one at twenty-three. I was in the underground parking lot of a casino, only there because of my friend, only smoking the cigar because of my friend, and I thought to myself as I sucked in the acrid, thick, foul smoke, "I might as well be performing oral sex on the tailpipe of an idling 1977 Dodge Monaco."

And I put the cigar on the pavement underneath my shoe and I crushed the bejesus out of it-- and that was my last cigar.

So, while I don't have tons of experience in giving up vices, (I still have a very soft spot in my heart for free, streaming internet pornography), I think I'm probably pretty good at it-- and, truthfully, I don't think giving up red meat is going to be especially too difficult for me. Of course, red meat tastes a damn sight better than cigar smoke, especially when it has been lovingly marinated over the course of many a succulent, savory hour, and I respectfully acknowledge that. Red meat, thou art a worthy adversary, but I shall emerge from this fight victorious.

Actually, I'll emerge from it victorious and dead, as opposed to a failure and dead, but I'm hopeful that I'll emerge victorious and dead a few years later and healthier than I would if I failed-- my arteries as saturated and cracklicious as a Bloomin' Onion.

"So, is this one of your schemes to avoid dying?" my wife said to me when I brought the topic of my carnivorous abstension this evening in the car ride back from New York.

"No," I said, "I know I'm going to die-- but I love my life with you so much that I want to live it as long as possible, and I want to be as healthy as I can be for as long as possible."

See-- the key to this battle is not my willpower, it's the fact that I don't eat red meat very much. When I sat back and evaluated the situation objectively-- I haven't been to a steakhouse in at least seven years. I have only brought a steak home to cook once in my life. I enjoy making salmon burgers and turkey burgers and even lamby burgers, but I've only made actual hamburger once. I haven't eaten flank steak or London Broil since before my Bar Mitzvah, back when my mother used to both cook and eat. If I'm stopping at a rest stop, I more often than not order a chicken sandwich, so, really, what the fuck is the big deal?

Of course, the flip side to that is-- how is giving up something I really don't eat that much going to improve my length/quality of life? Well, um.... what are you, a lawyer?

Maybe it's just symbolic. And that's okay, isn't it? My heart's in the right place, isn't it? I don't want to be one of those self-righteous, obnoxious, in-your-face, oh,-I-don't-eat-red-meat kind of people and, if I get like that, you have permission to rape me with a cattle-prod (talk about symbolism!) because my wife has been a vegetarian since forever, and she's not like that. She doesn't mercilessly grill every waiter and every party host about every single ingredient in a dip or a chili. She doesn't say, "Well, I'm a vegetarian!" with that tell-tale annoying emphasis and tell-tale-ier smug, organic, whey-based, gluten-free imitation shit-eating grin.

I want to be just like her when I grow up. Except that I want to continue eating pork, chicken, venison, hen, quail, pheasant, pigeon, lamb, fish, crabs, scallops, shrimp, lobster, squid, plankton, siamese fighting fish, sponges, starfish, and whatever the fuck the Incredible Mr. Limpet was supposed to be.

Glasses and hat and all.

Their Stodgy Old Cuteness

I think it's probably pretty likely that, when most Americans think about English culture, if they ever do, the word "cute" wouldn't immediately leap to mind as an appropriate adjective to describe the British. We tend to think of them as stuffy, boring, uptight-- that's the overwhelming American stereotype (sorry, Sebby-Debs, but it's true). Our minds turn to pomp and pomposity. If we're old enough, we think about the Coronation. If we're not quite that old, we think of Charles and Diana's wedding. If we're younger still, we think of Diana's funeral and, any way you slice those memories and television broadcasts, the word cute is still pretty far afield from what we perceive is the English way.

As many of you know, I am a dedicated anglophile, and my condition as only worsened with age. I first suspected the English of being a cute culture when I began my love affair with Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. There, W. S. Gilbert created an adorable world of parliamentary faeiries, sailors who never swear (well, hardly ever), pirates who are duty-bound and weep when they hear someone is an orphan, police officers who are sensitive and sentimental, and Japanese people named "Pish-Tush," "Pooh-Bah," and "Yum-Yum."

Could this notoriously bombastic, proper, conservative British gentleman with silver-colored sideburns and walrus mustache, clad in his dark frock coat and beaver top hat be harboring the trappings of a cute culture in disguise? Mate his precious characters to Arthur Sullivan's sparkling, glittering, whimsical melodies and there can be no doubt.

If you are wanting for further evidence of the covert cuteness of British culture, go into a bakery there and order a cupcake. Just remember to call it a "fairy cake."

Speaking of food, last night my wife and I were fortunate enough to visit a supermarket located in the next town over, you know, where the "goyim" live! She confronted me upon my arrival home from work and announced that we had "NO FOOD!" in the house. Concerned as I was by this bold pronouncement, I was loathe to venture out to the supermarkets located in our Jew 'hood, as yesterday was the day before Rosh Hashanah, and every Jew in the neighborhood would be at the supermarket, haggling over the expiration dates on their mackrel coupons. I couldn't deal with that.

"Let's go to the market in the goy neighborhood. Deal?"

"Deal."

While we were at this supermarket, we wandered into the "ethnic/foreign" food aisle. You've been there. Lots of Goya products-- frijoles, rice-n-beans, taco shells, and then there's the plethora of soy-and-soy-related sauces, bean sprouts, shrimp-flavored chips, ramen noodles, and the odd Indian meal. And, even in the goy market, there was gefilte fish and matzah, for the wandering Jews who happen to wander in.

"Oh my God, Bobber-- look at this!" my wife squealed. "They have a faggy British section!"

My wife always knows just what to say to me.

I stared in disbelief. Kippers. Fucking kippers. Unbelievable.

There was HP Sauce, which I had read about in "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4," back when I was basically the same age. There were Jaffa Cakes, which I had heard referenced in the British mockumentary "People Like Us," a brilliant and almost totally forgotten-about show that I discovered on BBC America in college. There were Ryvita crackers, which Sybil offered to the health inspector in an episode of "Fawlty Towers." There was salad cream, unforgettably offered by Basil to an unctous little bastard in the dining room of another episode of "Fawlty Towers."

Basil: "We don't have any salad cream. The chef made this freshly this morning."

Boy's Mother: "He likes salad cream."

Boy: "That's puke, that is."

Basil{through clenched teeth}: "Well at least it's fresh puke."

As you can probably tell, I was in Brit Heaven. All of my fond, warm memories of the books, TV shows and films I enjoyed as a boy were coming back to me in that supermarket last night.

"Well, we have to buy something from this section," I said to my wife.

What recession?

I settled on the Jaffa Cakes. I don't know why-- I guess because "People Like Us" was the last British program (ahem, "programme") that my wife and I watched together, in which WPC (that's Woman Police Constable, for you yanks) Jane Thorpe offers some Jaffas to her male partner on the force. It's her solemn duty to offer the male constables tea and cakes, apparently.

As I looked over the box of Jaffa Cakes, (soft, cake-like circles with a dollop of orange jam half-covered in chocolate) I couldn't help but laugh, right there in the supermarket, thinking that the conclusion I had begun to form about the underlying cuteness of British culture way back in my early obsessional days with G&S was still true today. Here's how the Jacob Fruitfield Food Group (which is based in Ireland, by the way), advertise Jaffa Cakes on the box:

"10 Spongy Cakes with the Squidgy Orange Bit."

---------

I'm sorry-- the squidgy orange bit?

Wait. It gets better.

With this box, you get "Bigger Jaffa" and "NEW recipe with lots more orangey centre yippee!"

ORANGEY CENTRE YIPPEE, MOTHERFUCKERS! ORANGEY CENTRE YIPPEE!

I don't know how the English culture, by and large, feels about its inherent cuteness. I suspect it makes certain members of the population a tad uncomfortable. I can imagine Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, all 6'4" of him getting hot underneath his celluloid shirt collar at being referred to as "cute." Maybe only his Lucy could get away with that, but I suspect it's one component of British culture that often flies beneath the radar.

Look at the Japanese-- stern-faced businessmen in black suits walking around with "Hello, Kitty" cellphone charms attached to their Nokias. Cuteness is out there, folks, and it's not just for children. We lose many things in this world when we grow up, and I think that's what J.M. Barrie, another Englishman who was often moved to flights of cuteness, was fighting against as his immortal Peter Pan shouted out, "I WON'T GROW UP!" He was fighting against the loss of cuteness that we so often suffer from as we age. It doesn't have to be.

But, in America, it so often is. Americans, especially men, feel this extraordinary lust for machismo. We need to drive fucking trucks. We need to wear camo. We need to drink 74 ounces of coffee in the morning. We need to eat breakfasts referred to as "The Lumberjack." We need to wear boots, even if we don't work outdoors. We need to wear scruff. We need to scratch our asses and our balls.

I don't know what that's all about, but that's what we're all about. So I guess I'll just sit back with my Jaffa Cakes and enjoy the squidgy orange bit while I sit cross-legged on the sofa with a cup of tea and Utopia, Ltd. plays merrily on the record player.

Join me, if you please. I'll even save you some McVitie's Hobnobs. Be careful, though-- "one nibble and you're nobbled."

In The Belly, Off the Balcony

When I was a young boy and I found out that there were people out there who got paid to go out, eat lavish dinners, and write about them, I thought that the world had finally just plain old gone mad.

And I seriously wanted in on it.

The life of a food critic-- there doesn't seem to be anything better than that, anywhere. I mean, I love to eat, and I love to write, so could there really be a better career choice for me? Trouble was, I had no idea how to get started. I suppose I could have eaten at a dozen restaurants on my own dime, written reviews about all the food, and shown them to a newspaper editor in the hopes he or she would have given me a shot-- but that takes effort and start-up capital, doesn't it?

The other thing is, I have a very bad memory for everything but dialogue. So I would have been able to expertly recreate, in exacting detail, all the witty reparte between me and the waiter, but, when it came time to actually writing the review, I would have completely forgotten which soup I ordered, or whether or not there were croutons on my salad.

Plus, I don't drink, so I would have to invite along a companion who enjoyed alcohol somewhat so I could make mention of the quality of the libations. And my wife doesn't drink either, so, um, there would have to be some inebriated third wheel joining us, and that would be, um, awkward.

So I didn't become a food critic, much to my dismay. It's okay, though. I'm not sure anybody actually reads published food critics like Craig Laban anymore. If we want the skinny on a particular restaurant, we go to websites with user-generated comments, even if the spelling is littered with errors and the prose doesn't flow like a fine cognac (see, I have no idea what I'm talking about).

I mean, seriously-- I just happened to read my first Laban food column in probably six years, and it was a review of KFC's Kentucky Grilled Chicken. He didn't like it. Shocking, I know.

I wanted to write about food this morning even though I know I'm not particularly qualified. Not that most food critics are particularly qualified either. In fact, I don't know what makes you qualified to write about food-- are you an English major or a culinary arts student? Should you be both? Probably ideally, and you should also know a thing or two about hotel/restaurant management as well.

I was a theatre major, does that count?

I've been thinking a lot about food recently. Yesterday, my wife took me out on a hot date to the HK Supermarket. "HK," in case you didn't know, stands for "Hong Kong," and what an experience that was. Now, it's true, certain locations inside the store smelled strongly of dead fish that had been left for weeks in an overflowing outhouse in the August heat, but other parts of the store were not as olafactorily offensive. In the produce section, amidst the regular old fruit and veg, there was a startling array of dildo-shaped vegetables, as well as fruit that looked like it should be growing on the moon. They also sold fronds of aloe as big as your torso.

There were probably four aisles devoted just to candy. If you're looking for a specific item, good luck, because it may appear four times in the store, in random places. You really have to have an eagle eye here, and if you don't have one, that's okay. I think they sell those, too. They also sell a wide variety of shrimp-flavored candy and chips, if you're into that. All the food has quaint, faintly bungled Japanese marketing slogans or instructions. "Noodles Make With Japanese Technology." "This Norin traditional is to hang outside the home make for status. Today, Norin is found for common families inside or out." My favorite was the Ramen-type noodle bowl with a picture of three Japanese men in white lab coats and name-tags, each holding up one, two or three fingers, presumably to make the claim that making this dish is as easy as "1, 2, 3!"

For those who like their food moving, there was plenty of that over at the seafood counter. There was a box of live crabs, one was burbling up air bubbles (I don't know if that's a good thing or not) and my vegetarian wife was pretty fascinated. There was a large, elderly black man who was criticizing the shape and fitness of some of the fish (that he was purchasing nevertheless) and he was surrounded by a mob of dour Asian fishmongers who stood around him with their arms folded in front of their chests. I thought it was going to be Sharks & Jets time, so I grabbed Mrs. Apron's arm and pulled her away.

The seafood wasn't the only unusual aspect of the market. At the butcher's section, there was very little read meat to be found. Oh, except for cow's feet. They were chopped up and ready to go. You have to do the walking, though. There were also frog's legs, quail and duck eggs (how those huge honkers come out of little ducky poochies I'll never know) and there were also blueish-looking plucked birds that were literally swimming in their own blood. At least, I hope it was their blood.

I come from a Jewish family of pretty uninspired, inept cooks. We don't, for instance, cook vegetables, we overcook them, killing them until they're beyond dead, making sure every ounce of flavor and nutrients is gone and that they're as flaccid as an octagenarian's weenis. My great-grandmother would make us blackened liverwurst burgers that my sister and I would pretend to eat and then throw off her 18th story balcony at unsuspecting passersby. My grandmother's speciality is baked beans and hot dog pieces. My mother, thankfully, is markedly better in the kitchen, but nowadays most of the cooking is done by my father anyway. Coming from this culinary world as I do, I walked the aisles of the HK Supermarket like a babe in the new world, wide eyed and filled with hope and wonder, even as my nostrils were filled with the abundant smells of oversalted haddock and shrimp chips.

I may never be a food critic, but I suppose being a blogger will just have to do, and it'll have to do nicely. And I have steamed pork buns for lunch today, and I'm a better man for it.