Whats Fa Dinna?

This Thursday I am packing up all my things in a truck and moving back to upstate NY. Hudson, NY to be specific. I have spent the last several months making the decision to leave NYC, but the details weren’t firm until just a few weeks ago. A big part of my decision to leave the city has to do with food and eating and my ability to care for my body in a serious way while living the life here.

A lot of my calories in NYC are consumed in a hurried, unintentional way- a bagel here, a slice of pizza, a paper cup of coffee, always walking somewhere or on the train, always on the go. I consider it a luxury to sit down to eat, either at home or away. An even greater luxury to sit down with my morning coffee. It gets on my nerves. But thinking of this, I also think of the things I won’t be doing upstate- sitting at the counter in Veselka having borscht on a rainy night, stopping into a bahn mi (Vietnamese hoagie) shop on my lunch hour, eating samosas out of a paper bag before a show, getting brunch in the garden at Life Cafe with 10 people the morning after a party. I won’t have the world’s weirdest grocery store on the corner, I’ll have to get into a car and go shopping when I have a solid hour to do it.

I’ve also been preoccupied with local food availability- New York City has very few things that are truly locally grown. Most “local” foods come from the Hudson Valley, where I’ll be lucky enough to live in a few days. I have some connections to farms in the area, and would like to make more. I want to be involved in food, from the dirt to mouth, every day, professionally and personally.

And on top of that, I need to get my health back. I have spent my years since college living with chronic pain, infections, allergies, thyroid dysfunction, and all manner of complaints that no 25 year old person should have. So I’m focusing a lot on changing the way I eat food to be healthier, safer, more local, more sustainable, and most importantly, more enjoyable and more delicious. I want eating to be a pleasure I look forward to each day in a real way that helps my body work right.

So as an exercise for myself, and perhaps to inspire you to the same, I’m making a resolutions list for the way I want to eat in my new location. I’m sure it can be done anywhere. It’s just a good time to start.

(By the way, none of this applies if someone is cooking for me. I would never turn down home-cooked food, unless it was kidneys or something.)

-Eat at least two meals a day seated, off of dishes with metal forks and spoons,  at a table or in some other suitable eating place.

-Eat 3 different kinds of vegetables each day. Purchase organic and local vegetables whenever possible.

-Eat local, organic meats, whenever possible.

-Use a full spectrum of grain foods.

-Eat pastries, cookies, cakes, ice cream, and other sweets only when they are homemade or artisanally made, and no corn syrup.

-Drink soda and sweet drinks only on special occasions. Lots of iced tea, booch, sorrel and fresh juice instead.

-Always carry water.

-Keep my home cooking planned 3 days ahead. As in, I have at least 3 days worth of healthy food and veggies at home ready to cook. That way there won’t be any “oh shit I am so hungry I am just gonna eat some hot dogs and microwave popcorn” nights.

-Host dinners and potlucks regularly to make eating homemade food easier and more fun for everyone. And try everyone’s cooking.

-Cook for visiting musicians and other guests whenever possible. This was one of my favorite parts of being a show booker in college and I have missed properly hosting guests with a good meal while living in NYC.

-Use time as an excuse as little as possible. There is always time to eat well and make good things. It’s the most important thing.

(UPDATE: This post never got posted. I’ve been living in Hudson for 2 months now. And haven’t really implemented all of these ideas. Alas! More on Hudson Valley eats coming right up…)

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I am off the wagon. I think it’s time I officially come clean about it.

Since spring of 2003 I have considered myself a vegetarian, and have eschewed meat of all sorts, making occasional exceptions for fish. I “cheated” a few times (a bite of salami from an xmas cheese plate, a bite of a corndog at Coney Island, etc.) but have largely maintained a vegetarian, and sometimes vegan, diet. I have lived in four vegetarian/vegan households, worked in two vegetarian kitchens, and collected vegetarian cookbooks.

I have also reamed out countless friends, peers and family members in various ways for eating meat. Well this is it, folks! The moment you’ve all been waiting for.  I’m off the wagon, big time.

I could blame it on reading this book, which reframed my inner dialogue about industrial food consumption in general. Or on my summer spent at a sustainable organic farm enjoying the smells of various manures wafting in from yonder meadow, the squeals of contented piggies fat for the slaughter bringing me back to our collective fantasyland of responsible animal husbandry. Or on the shock and emotional trauma of moving to the city/moving apartments/breakup/discovery of chronic health problem which colored my fall and early winter. Or on continual pressure from loved ones, including my happily ex-vegetarian brother and stepbrother.

But who am I kidding? Bacon is freaking delicious. So is a turkey sandwich. So is pepperoni pizza. So are corndogs, goddammit. And pork roll. (Please, take a moment to educate yourself about my hometown’s signature processed meat product, Pork Roll.)

 And charcuterie, and fried chicken, and sausages, and kielbasa, and oxtail butternut squash gniocci from Swoon. And those slices of roast pork in the ramen.

So, yeah, I’ve eaten all that stuff.  And then some. AndI’m loving it. No burgers or steak or MacDoh for me, but I am totally not a vegetarian anymore.

Sorry to my comrades who might see me as a traitor. I am not all that sorry really.

Sorry to the animals I’ve eaten- I still feel ya.  But I’m only human, after all.

This weekend was a really weird one, food-wise, since I felt that I let food sort of sag as a priority while i tended to other things, such as walking around Prospect Park, going to a rollicking staff xmas party, and other varieties of good clean fun.

Here I’ll sing the praises of potato leek soup. It’s seriously EASY to make and really, really good.

For potato leek soup you will need:

bag of potatoes

a couple of leeks

some veggie boullion

butter or EB

cream or cheese if you are so inclined.

So, all you do is clean and cut the leeks, peeling off outside layer. slice them up and put them in a big pot with the sliced potatoes and sautee in butter for a few minutes. Cover the whole mess with water and let it boil, add boullion, then simmer, til potatoes smash apart. You can then blend it til creamy or just mash up the taters with a fork. Add cream if desired or put shredded cheese (gruyere! jarlsberg!) on the bowls as garnish/cheese bonus prize.

Babs and I made this delightful little soup this evening, as well as brussels sprouts (also fried in butter) and some Tofurky kielbasa.  Polished it off with some Green & Black’s chocolate, food of choice for girls talking about feelings all over the world, throughout time. 

Potato leek is a great soup to serve as a main course, but also works with European cuisines of all sorts and can be dressed up with other veggies, fake meat, fancy dairy products, etc. It also goes well with FEELINGS.

All the while, through shopping, cooking, eating, digesting, and cleaning up our meal, we talked about our feelings, boys, past relationships, future relationships, sex, love, intimacy, honesty, getting our needs met, and related matters. I feel like we went to a sauna and sweated but it was like a sauna for feelings, man.  Totally cathartic and awesome girl time. Plus, the food was good.

If you are experiencing a transition, or just wanna bro down with your pal and validate each other, I highly recommend this recipe.

Babs, you rule a lot.

Last night Yoko and I practiced music and she made a delicious Indian dish called khicheri. Incidentally, it’s a specialty of Mumbai, where a few of the fanciest hotels in the country’s entertainment and cinema capital were recently subject to an itchy outbreak of terrorist attacks. I doubt any of the guests were served humble khicheri, but it interesting that we ate a regional specialty only days after that region made global headlines.

I’d never had it, but had heard of it, mostly because Joanna says she used to date someone named Khicheri, after the dish. He is some kinda Hare Krishna or guru-cult child. You’d be surprised how many people you may know who grew up in guru cults. They don’t all have obviously weird names, either. My mom was a pretty die-hard Ram Dass fan, (aka Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s right-hand man and devout prophet of LSD) and a few friends of mine grew up in the Meher Baba community which has centers all over the country. Anyway, Khicheri the man was one such individual, so I’m told.

It’s one of those foods that is unquestionably healthy and wholesome, and is prized in ayurvedic cooking as very easy to digest.

It started with soaking basmati rice and lentils, mung or adzuki beans (we had adzuki) in water for an hour or more. Then you chop up some root veggies and fry them in ghee with spices, add some water, the rice and legumes, and cook til it’s all a big mess. The soaked rice cooks down into a sweet pasty porridge which basically was my favorite part of the whole thing. I ended up sort of picking around the veggies and just going for that. So much for mature eating habits.

I think the ghee is key here. Ghee is this weird semi-opaque clarified butter, which is simmered after clarifying, and which is often made of buffalo milk in India. Other equatorial cuisines use varieties of clarified butter, such as Moroccan “smen” and Iranian “yellow oil.” This makes a lot of sense, since these rendered butters can keep for a long time without refrigeration before turning rancid and can be more easily used for frying and sauteeing than fresh butter. They also have mysterious health properties and taste delicious.

Khicheri is the kind of food one should eat when one is a)ill b)cleansing or c)a spiritual vegan. Evidently it is not the best thing to eat when you are very hungry, have PMS and are in wintertime nesting/fattening mode, since we blew through several bowls each and I was craving pizza by the time I got off the subway in my neighborhood. Unfortunately the pizza joint was closed, so I had to scurry home and make due with some weird-ass pasta salad leftovers from this weekend’s invasion of our apartment by a group of friendly neighborhood folks who needed a space to gather in. I nuked the pasta salad and put parmesan cheese all over it, only to learn that the creamy reddish sauce was not vodka sauce or alfredo, but mayonnaise mixed with juice from the halved cherry tomatoes.

It was actually kind of good. Hot mayonnaise pasta salad seems like something only perverts and elderly Depression survivors would even consider eating, but I was feeling frisky, and more than a little economically depressed. There was a car alarm blowing out in front of the house, I Robot on the TV, and a sense of impending adventure and excitement about whose origins I can only speculate…

Last week I partook in a rite of passage of the food service industry, when I attended the SYSCO Metro Area Food Expo at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secacus, NJ.

SYSCO, for those of you outside the biz, is the largest food service distributor in the United States. If you ever eat in a restaurant, cafe, cafeteria, hospital, airplane, catered event, summer camp, or anywhere else for that matter, you have eaten SYSCO food and used SYSCO products. They OWN food.

They have some competition, but they basically win. They sell almost everything you eat, everything it’s made and served in, and everything in between, from the dish soap to the toilet paper to the little stir sticks for your coffee. The company formed in 1969 in Houston Texas through a merger of eight other small-time distributors. Since then they have gobbled up distribution companies in cities across America, employing a warehouse-saturation strategy similar to our lovely all-American Big Box store, contracting wholesalers and manufacturers to work exclusively through their network, and homogenizing the food supply so that anything you want can be brought to your establishment in neat cardboard boxes from a nearby warehouse.

Anyway, this delightful corporate behemoth supplies the cafes I manage with many of our supplies and ingredients. Therefore I was invited by our delightful sales representative to attend the annual Expo, where wholesalers who distribute their products through SYSCO gather to market their newest wares, spend face time with customers, win new establishments for their products, etc.

Imagine, if you will, a huge corporate expo center, wall-to=wall with cubicles bathed in eerie neon light, no windows anywhere, and at each stall is a little restaurant giving away free samples of their yummiest goods, with stacks of packages behind them. Many people are wearing suits, some are wearing silly chef hats. One can consume an egg roll, antipasto sampler, cookie, small cup of the latest all-natural juice, breakfast sausage, pancake, sandwich, fried shrimp, or hunk of fancy cheese every 10 feet. Luckily, I was not very hungry and had eaten breakfast, so I took it easy.

We were given bags to fill with our marketing swag, from pamphlets to business cards to small sample-sized packages of things like Craisins, Goldfish and Gruyere cheese. We were also given a magnetized card, which could be swiped at every expo station into an electronic console. Every swipe would be recorded and sent to our sales rep, who would then follow up with us on the products we were interested in, and presumably continue trying to sell them to us.

We consumed San Pelligrino sodas as we walked the sprawling aisles of corporate food distribution Christmas. Salespeople hocked their ware, pitched their pitches, made eye contact and smiled. They had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve to make you stop and try a bite.

All told, we spent about an hour getting there, and 1.5 hours getting through all the aisles, making sure to try stuff that looked good without pigging out too seriously. By the time I got to the part where all the awesome desserts were, I was too stuffed to care that there was free cheesecake everywhere.

It was sort of fun, this SYSCO expo. It was weird, it was exciting, people were EXCITED and they were doing business. The ectoplasm of commerce was collecting in the nooks and crannies of the expo center, and the smell of magnetized plastic was heavy on the air. People whose lives center on doing business, buying and trading and selling food, were very happy. But the whole experience strikes me as very unreal, totally bizarre and pretty upsetting.

I’ve always known that most consumers experience a disconnect from the reality of the food supply, but the disconnect between what food actually is, where it comes from, and how it transitions from raw plant or animal material to the thousands of commodities it is made into is also experienced by people at higher levels of food service work. Even the people who sell and cook and market food don’t really seem to know or care what that food really is, or where it came from.

One man we spoke with at length was exclusively selling pre-made guacamole, and frozen, peeled, halved avocadoes. Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.

I’ve been eating more mac and cheese lately than I have in a long time. The last two rounds were Annie’s Deluxe, preceded by several days of Hot Dish.

I used to eat tons of it in college, and in high school, and come to think of it my whole life. It was the only dish I ordered from restaurants for a long, long time as a kid, and was the constant but of jokes about “turning into a noodle” if I ate too many.

Well, parents, no need to worry. If I resemble a noodle, it’s a ravioli, or maybe stuffed manicotti. Ha, ha.

In light of two posts ago, where I claim that dairy and wheat are bad for a person most of the time, writing a whole entry on mac and cheese seems a little silly. But, like I said, bad or not, many of the cells in my body are built of this humble stuff, so why knock it.

Today I worked all day in one of the cafes I manage at NYU. This one is in the math and computer science department, and most of the people who frequent are middle aged white men, sometimes with exotic accents, who drink black coffee and can scarcely interact with other humans, let alone female non-mathematicians who serve coffee for a living. It is an interesting place to spend time and I often find myself thinking of the Mentats in Frank Herbert’s Dune books, engineered from childhood to behave like computers. I also find myself becoming very rude to these poor geeks, which probably makes me a bad person.

I also feel conflicted about the kind of food and drink we serve here. On one hand, coffee and bagels and pastry are what people want from cafes. Our soup and sandwich offerings are pretty classy and well-made, but still emphasize wheat, dairy and meat. Just about everything we serve here is something I consider to be at least partially toxic and unhealthy. Soda, coffee, tea, chips, cereal, bagels, muffins, scones, lattes- none of it is very good for anybody, even if it’s good.

But it’s the sort of fare the institution of the coffeeshop is founded upon, so I comply. I can’t help but to wonder whether our collective consciousness, and therefore our political situations, cultural norms, degree of freedom and happiness, etc would be altered if we did not eat and drink poisonous, exploitative crap like sugar and coffee and wheaty baked goods all the time. Perhaps. But then coffeeshops would not exist, and all of the great moments of culture that have taken place in cafes around the world would never be. But maybe we wouldn’t need them, either.

Since our cultural dietary habits, and bionic modern bodies, are hard to kill, at least a few awesome and reputable institutions still exist in the proud tradition of café-cum-bookstore/salon/meeting place, authentic places with good music on the speakers, attractive, educated, hip baristas, good lighting and comfortable seating.

Starbucks can try all they want to make coffee culture suck like McDonald’s but they shall not prevail as long as people recognize the important social function of little independent coffeeshops.

My top 10 places to get coffee and hang out in nyc:

Cake Shop

cake shop is my favorite place in manhattan. its everything a girl could want- show venue, record store, bar, cafe, cupcake-seller, wifi, cute little tables, and there always seems to be a place just for you to sit and hang. I’ve spent two days solid in here and only got sick of it at the very end.

Bluestockings

best and only feminist/political bookstore/infoshop in nyc. they also have yummy coffee and lots of amazing books. best place to meet punks and their dogs.

Goodbye Blue Monday

hell. yes. everything is for sale, there are very few rules, the owner is awesome,  shows are sometimes bad but always exciting, and there is a strange crew of regulars, bartenders, and Bushwick neighborhood artistes around all the time. A quiet, dreamy place to work and hang out during the day, when it’s nearly empty and there is free wi-fi, the couches and tables all available to you.

Housing Works Used Book Café

i work here. when i first entered this place, i thought to myself “i want to work here.” and now i do, and we sell really good coffee. sweet books,too.

Vox Pop

my new neighborhood cafe. have to say, i havent spent much time here. but it fulfills the multi-function cafe-cum-salon role very well. there are shows, an open mic, readings, meetings, books thru bars, and a self-publishing business.

Hungarian Pastry Shop
just go here, once in your life. its freaking awesome.

Everything Goes Bookstore Café

Staten Island’s used bookstore, cafe and show space, run by the friendly, furry folks at Ganas, a communal stronghold on the island since the 70s.

Verb on Bedford (no link)

ok so people here might be a little bit snobby, “hipsters,” even, but if you are on bedford you know what you’re in for. Earwax is on the corner, that’s my excuse. At least you know where a good cup of coffee and an old wooden chair can be found.

Joe The Art of Coffee Waverly Place

This is a tiny-ish, unassuming coffee-only kind of place. Their coffee is truly delightful. I used to walk a good 15 minutes out of my way to get coffee there before work, and there was a line. The staff was always pleasant and prompt.  Sitting here works if you miss the rushes, otherwise it’s too crowded.

Mud Truck at Sheridan Square

So ok, it’s not a “shop.” But this Mud truck is great. The girl who works here is amazing and cheerful and sells delicious coffee. It’s just parked there, flaming in the middle of the most flaming neighborhood in the world.  I don’t know how I feel about Mud’s weird branding campaign, but I admire their homemade aesthetic and their hardcore, almost Turkish coffee. They have one size, which is more awesome points. I also have a thing for cool food trucks.

Last night one of my new fabulous roommates cooked some delicious casserole to fuel our karaoke outing. It was comprised of pasta, mushrooms, zucchini, corn, cheddar cheese, cream of potato soup, and topped with American cheese slices and potato chips.

GODDAMN that was good. Alarmingly good. Equally alarming was the presence of single-serve American cheese slices in my home.Let’s just say it’s been a while since I bought anything lower than Cabot-grade cheese to bring home (that Annie’s DLuxe no-mix mac sauce doesn’t count!) Laura’s delicious Krafty casserole fueled an adventuresome evening of belting out Kate Bush and Pat Benetar tunes.

Which brings me back….

One of my beloved college roommates was from Minnesota, and schooled us east coast kids in his people’s proud tradition of Hotdish. Wikipedia offers:

“Hotdish is any of a variety of baked, casserole dishes popular in the Midwestern United States, and especially in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. It consists of a starch, a meat, and a canned vegetable, mixed together with canned soup, which serves as a binding ingredient.

Hotdishes are filling, convenient, easy to make, and well-suited for family reunions, church suppers, and potlucks, where they may be paired with pan-baked cookies known as bars.”

(What we ate was not strictly hotdish, as it did not contain a meat. It did, however, contain freshly cooked mushrooms and zucchinis, as well as canned corn, which for our purposes ssubstituted for a meat.)

The members of my college household, featuring the Minnesotan plus two more of my closest pals, would to convene in our kitchen  late in the evening when we were done with classes, work, library study, etc., and prepare a collective small meal, such as noodles or cheese and bread or soup or leftovers, which we took to calling “Hotsnack.”

For “Hot Snack,” The Urban Dictionary offers the following definition:

“It is when you are just sitting around minding your own business and you have a little unexpected burp and a small amount of acidy puke comes up with it and you have to swallow the ‘hot snack’.”

That’s totally not what our hotsnack was like, but it’s a nice surprise to learn that the phenomenon which I have taken to calling “throwing up in your mouth a little” has a concise, catchy little name. Thanks, Urban Dictionary!

Anyway, if you are about to feed a bunch of folks, especially pre- or post- drunk folks, consider Hotdish. It’s comfort food to the max, cheap, easy, plentiful, filling, and perhaps even healthy by some definitions. I hear

tater tots are the potato ingredient of choice, but I gotta say, potato chips melted into the cheese on top was absolutely scrumtrillescent.

Things like hotdish make me really excited for winter, for carb-loading, hibernating animalian behavior, for cheesy baked things and squishy happy boozy evenings dressing up a little more butch than usual and going out to sing karaoke with a new posse of entertaining roommates who like to hang out at home and cook sometimes.

Me n Dibs went out for a delicious meal at Curly’s Vegetarian Luncheonette tonight. Wow is that place good. Anytime I got out to a vegetarian place and I can order everything on the menu it’s a little overhwhelming. Plus it was a place that had lots of awesome fake meat and fried food. So I was happy.

I got the Cobb salad, which always puzzles me a little bit. The Cobb salad is a really weird salad. It’s also always a little different. Here’s what wikipedia says about its history:

“In 1937, Brown Derby owner Robert H. Cobb went into the restaurant’s kitchen to fix a late-night snack for Sid Grauman, operator of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He browsed the refrigerator for ingredients, and chopped them up finely. Thus, the Cobb salad was born. From then on, Grauman often requested that a Cobb salad be prepared for him. Word soon spread about this creation throughout Hollywood, quickly increasing its popularity. It became such a hit that film stars started requesting “Cobb’s salad”, and it was eventually added to the menu of the Brown Derby restaurant.”

So that settles the mythology, and the name. But why those ingredients? I guess they were just in the fridge when Mr. Cobb went to work that fateful night. Even so, it’s a pretty wacky salad. Sometimes chicken, sometimes turkey, sometimes both, always bacon, always onions, always eggs, always cucumbers and lettuce, sometimes carrots, avocadoes, sometimes many kinds of cheese, sometimes one. This one had balsamic dressing but I’ve seen it with ranch or blue cheese .

I’ve also seen people throw corn on there, probably because the name is confusing. I mean,you hear “Cobb” and you think “corn on the…. Plus corn goes good with bland, fatty, all-American things like bacon and fried chicken pieces and bleu cheese and avocados.

The original recipe, also from Wikipedia (who knew it was such a wonderful resource on the history and ingredients of food?)

1. Lettuce (head lettuce, watercress, chicory, and romaine)
2. Tomatoes
3. Crisp bacon
4. Chicken breast
5. Hard-cooked eggs
6. Avocado
7. Roquefort cheese
8. Chives
9. Special Cobb salad vinaigrette

I guess that all makes sense with the other versions I’ve seen. Kinda like the Waldorf salad; you can mess with it, but the major players remain the same. Anyway, the one at Curly’s was pretty delicious. It involved a pile of awesome fake fried chicken, fakin bacon, avocado, cukes, red onion, lettuce, bleu cheese, and some pretty dang good balsamic vinaigrette. It was also huge. Dibs ordered the Tostada salad with chorizo (also fake of course) and only ate half. It was really big. A whopper of a salad, really…

What is going on here?!?! I really hope this is art and not some bozo’s idea of feeding the children of the world. They don’t want goddamned garden salad.

Once again I find myself struck mid-blog by the audacity of my own existence, and by the kind of self-indulgent bullshit I’m allowing myself to write about. The idea of this blog was to sort of tease the self-indulgent, egocentric blog format, but I find myself totally loving it. But I get so carried away…

I’m really really glad I haven’t had to live through a food shortage or famine. We’re all pretty lucky in that sense (Probably. Sorry if you’re reading this and starving. Maybe try a non-food-themed blog? Or Dumpster diving? See links.)

While our government’s (and others’) colonial, capitalist exploits and conquests and retarded feudal economic order have kept millions of people hungry, they have also ensured that people like me have been very well fed. Well fed enough that we have all kinds of fun things like eating disorders, obesity, war for oil, diabetes and high cholesterol, gastric bypass surgery, liposuction, Stacker II, indoor gyms, fat camps, plus sized clothing, pilates, fashion magazines, veganism, fast food, Hollywood, pro-Ana, fat activism, the list goes on. Not than any of these things alone is particularly bad. Fat acceptance and pro-ana help a lot of people deal with having different bodies as a result of eating and food issues. (Yes that’s right I am grouping pro-ana and fat acceptance as two sides of the same coin. Think about it for a while before getting outraged.) Gyms and veganism can help people feel healthier and more connected to their bodies. But I think these are all parts of a bigger picture of a really warped and sick culture surrounding food, eating, bodies and privilege. Perhaps all facets of the same many-sided die.

The logical visual way to highlight our culture’s insanity around food is often to compare starving people from poor foreign nations to obese Americans, like this:

But really seeing this textbook anorexic supermodel is somehow more decadent and upsetting than obesity.

The thing is, this woman has all the resources she needs to have a healthy body, yet chooses to live in a sick one. Seeing people who really starve themselves at will is more upsetting to me than seeing huge obese people, who are probably just pretty normal cool people who ate too much or have a poor metabolism for some reason. Maybe because a human’s natural response to food abundance is to overeat in preparation for the (naturally) consequent food shortage. You eat a lot in the fall to get chunky for the long, cold winter. Since that shortage rarely ever arrives, we just keep overeating. Maybe that winter will come for us someday and we’ll all be psyched that we never lost that last 10 pounds, because it’ll keep us stronger.

But the idea that the culture could create such unnatural abundance, and then psycholigically poison people into starving themselves to conform to the aesthetics of social constructs like women’s fashion, Hollywood, what have you, seems completely terrifying. Mind control is indeed upon us and it’s literally eating away at us.

And perhaps to illustrate how wrong things have really gone, we have people dressing their babies up like hot dogs:

Hot dogs are made of slaughterhouse scraps and refuse, like this:

I guess we are what we eat after all! A bunch of filthy rotten pigs, trying to do things as best we can between getting born into hot dog suits and dying of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of us will eventually turn into dirt anyway.