Tuesday, November 15, 2011
F&W Hmm...
F&W Curiosity
F&W The Chew
F&W Damn It Pollan
F&W Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
Monday, October 3, 2011
F&W I'm Thinking Arby's
>>Before entering the work force, I never thought that I could ever work in a restaurant. I thought being around the same food all the time would turn me away from that food and make me a picky eater all over again, like I was when I was a child. Not to mention I figured anywhere I worked would be nasty and turn me away from wanting to eat out altogether. In retrospect, I realize I was just silly and had no idea what was really going on.
>>As of sometime in September, I have officially been working at Arby’s for about a year and a half. Certain things on the menu—such as the Reuben, the French Dip and Swiss, the Philly Beef Sub, the Classic Italian, and probably more—always stick out to me when I go to other restaurants. At that other restaurant I think to myself, “Oh, I can eat that at work.” For a split second I feel rebellious and look for something else to eat, but that familiarity pulls me back to the common option between the two restaurants and I get it. It’s delightful because while I’m eating it, I’m not just enjoying it; I’m comparing it in my head to our version. Who is cheaper? Not just in how much I am spending, but how much the restaurant spends on making the sandwich, for instance the Classic Italian at Arby’s only has a few banana peppers on it but if you got it at Subway, you could get probably three times as more. Which tastes better? Which sauce is better? Which bread is softer? Is their sauerkraut edible? How is the meat’s texture? (At Arby’s we pride ourselves on getting the meat sliced as thin as possible, which affects the flavor immensely.)
>>Sometimes the people are so unbelievable I want to scream, sometimes the hours are so slow all I want to do is go home, sometimes the rushes are too much and my brain may as well be mush, and sometimes the works seems so monotonous that after this long I can’t believe I still work there, but in the end it’s worth it. There’s that small satisfaction in the paycheck (of course), in winning the glove-ball war among colleagues for a brief moment, in telling sly jokes through the headsets’ walky-talky feature, in seeing returning customers smile as you greet them by name, in seeing the small child sweetly ask for a spoon so they can eat their Value Vanilla Shake like it’s ice cream…it’s good mood food, after all.
F&W Hand Me That Nintendo Controller
>>If only life were like a videogame.
>>In Zelda Ocarina of Time, some Lon Lon Milk hits the spot like nothing else. In Harvest Moon, you can find random berries in the wilderness in the outskirts of town and for some reason not be afraid of poison. In Earthbound, fresh eggs heal a little bit of HP when you’re in a tight spot, unless of course you wait too long, and then it turns into a little yellow chick and takes up a spot in your inventory. Unless you’re willing to just drop it off in the middle of the dungeon, anyway. Mario has mushrooms, Donkey Kong has bananas, Pokemon have bait (at least in the Safari Zone) and rare candies, Dark Cloud 2’s Toady eats weapons…
F&W Cravings
>>I am starting to believe that my stomach has a mind of its own, or maybe it’s just got multiple personality disorder. A few years ago, it was a Hispanic and constantly craved nachos and cheese, meat, salsa, and lettuce (nachos y queso, carne de res, salsa, y lechuga…), in my late highschool years it was a twelve-year-old who microwaved all their food, consuming Americanized super-processed Mexican foods [taquitos, pizza rolls (which are essentially empanadas), burritos, chimichangas, the list goes on] and pizza, and all that time I had prided myself on never really craving sweets. Perhaps this is the reason why I was under the delusion that cravings were meant to lead us toward food containing the certain nutrients the body was low on.
>>But now it’s hit. The estrogen has been full-on for a few years now, getting me past puberty, and now with nothing else better to do to my body (since I’ve not gotten it pregnant) it now sends waves through my nerves, screeching, “Chocolate! I need more chocolate!” My surroundings are of no help. I work at Arby’s 5 of 7 days a week…the shake machine has chocolate, the Jamocha Oreo Shake (medium size only) requires chocolate swirl in the cup so that chocolate is always there, there’s chocolate icing for the turnovers, those specific turnovers have chocolate filling, and there’s chocolate milk…so. Much. Chocolate. Not to mention my particular Arby’s has a CVS right next door just filled with Reese’s, Snickers, Milky Ways, and so many other chocolate bars for about a dollar…
>>So now when I have a craving, it’s an internal debate. Do I want to satiate that desire, feed the whim, or would I rather hold true to my fitness challenge?
>>…Usually the shake machine wins.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
F&W And Eat Yo Brains
>>The other day, I decided to visit my family, more specifically my mother and younger brother. He’s almost six years old and has more love to share than anyone I’ve met in a good while, so his innocent presence and sing-song voice is a breath of fresh air in the midst of my immensely cluttered life. Again and again it has happened where as soon as he sees me and our hellos are exchanged, the first thing he pries me for is to show him how to beat Plants vs. Zombies. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a videogame that has become multi-platform (PC, Nintendo DS, as an app on your iDevice-of-choice, perhaps others) and obviously, this is the zombie apocalypse and you must protect yourself from the various types of zombies by planting plants, such as “peashooters” which shoot seeds, kernels, watermelons, and many other plant-related things at the opposing force.
>>What does this have to do with food and writing, you ask? The food part. Zombies eat brains. The thought seems so foreign to humanity, Hannibal Lector was frowned at for enjoying it (especially when he shared it with a young child and called it lamb), yet there are people on the other side of the Earth who eat monkey brain fresh. People write books that sell about preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Film has a broad range of comedy and horror films involving zombies. I am part of an event of Facebook called “Zombie Apocalypse Party” which is supposed to occur December 21, 2012, and I am one of over three thousand people who have responded if they are attending. (I put “maybe” because you never know if you’re guaranteed tomorrow.) There are even catchy love songs about the forbidden love between a zombie and human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCVMuevcCvY
>>But boiling back down to the Plants vs. Zombies game—it’s a fight for survival. The plants claim to be protecting their planters (you, the player), but they benefit in being planted by their species still existing. You the planter are fighting to be able to plant another day and eat from your armed forces oddly enough. The zombies are fighting to fill their stomach. It really just comes to the fact that all parties involved in the game are hungry. My point? Play the game. It's intoxicating and fun for all ages.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Reality Feels So Physical
>>We tend to perceive thought as this anomoly (forgive my spelling) which just is. Or maybe that's just me. But the truth is that if you cut the epidermis, there is tissue underneath, organs too, and their teamwork makes your existance. The brain is really in your head and not heavy at all, yet it processes the world into something that makes some sort of sense so as an organism you can survive in it...and it all boils down to chemicals. Seratonin, endorphins, opioid peptides (peptide bonds keep protein structures together, or maybe it's nucleotides, either way) are all just simmering in that mass of organized cells right behind our eyes...our brain has pretend auditory and visual cognition, imagination, we call it thought...
>>Call me crazy, blind, blonde, what you will. I think it's amazing that we are at all.
Monday, August 29, 2011
F&W The House of the Spirits
>>Allende doesn't mention food often, but I did often notice that when it was brought up, it was tea, aside from one almost grotesque mentioning of a roasted pig with a carrot put in a very awkward location and some poisoned wine. Granted I am only two and a half chapters in.
>>The first tea I noticed was "barley water flavored with almonds." Nothing else is said about the drink other than that it was "made on holidays", and so I was curious to know more. Upon some googling I discovered that people take the grain, boil it, pour the hot water over the pulp and skin of a fruit (usually lemon or lime, I imagine an orange may be good), and then add sugar and maybe some of the fruit's juice for flavor. Better instructions and health benefits are listed here:
http://www.tandurust.com/health-faq/barley-water-benefits-to-health.html
>>The next tea mentioned is linden tea, which in the novel was drank for its therapeutic effects, despite all the sweating it can cause. Although, I suppose perspiration can be considered therapeutic, otherwise why would we have saunas? To bake ourselves? Anyway, I've ordered some out of curiosity; I'll give a report on a later date how it tastes and if it actually helps with fever and airway inflammation. (I'm 90% sure I have asthma, so a natural remedy may be nice to try.)
>>The last tea I've seen so far is cinnamon tea. Allende's translator (the novel wasoriginally written in Spanish) and editor definitely misspelled cinnamon as cinammon. The English major in me winced, the dyslexic stutterer in me thought "cinnaminamon" as I read it to myself, but it is just a typo so I kept reading. Apparently all cinnamon tea is is hot water and pure cinnamon. It's supposed to lower your cholesterol if you have a half teaspoon of cinnamon a day. It either sounds very potent or very bland. I plan to try it too.
>>Stay tuned! The House of the Spirits may bring to my attention more odd foods from 1960s-1970s Spanish haciendas.
Friday, August 26, 2011
F&W Grief
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Amurikin
(Through the drive-thru speakers.) "Hello, welcome to Arby's, may I take your order please?"
"Yes, could I get a Jamocha shake?"
"Certainly. What size?"
"Jamocha."
At this point I have to stop myself for a moment, catch my breath, and remember that in Amurikin it is common to replace words you hear as you see fit for communication efficiency. What they imagined I asked was the flavor again. So I take a deep breath and attempt to ask with a straight face, "I'm sorry, but what size? We have Value, Small, Medium, and Large." They then get the picture.
>>Another Amurikin word-swap: Again, I'm taking a drive-thru order and they tell me they want whatever size shake. So I ask, "What flavor would you like that to be?" "Jamaica." Perhaps instead of it being a word swap it's merely a vowel swap: "oh" for "ay" in this case. Either way Amurikin is very versatile in the sense that it has no logical patterns.
>>The language has even reinvented contractions! Things like "we'ze", "I'mma", "youz"...the rule, I think, is to add extra unrelated letters and if you feel so inclined remove some from the original Engrish word. Well, I suppose that works for all nouns in the Amurikin dictionary as well: "Git in the core!" translates to "Get in the car!" It's really fascinating.
>>Btw? The National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993 stated the following findings:
Nearly half of America's adults are poor readers, or "functionally illiterate." They can't carry out simply tasks like balancing check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job.
>>So it makes sense that now in 2011, those people in the early 90s who raised children...out of this emerges the new Amurikin language complimented by our already distorted American dream of selfishness and individualism.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Analyzing Stephen King's "Why We Crave Horror"
>>The philosophical question of “What is moral?” has always been looming in the back of human minds. Different cultures pose their own theories on what is “good”—religions of all kinds give guidelines, societies’ views form rules as a whole per society, and both groups’ acceptance of whatever action is on the spotlight. So the idea of a true hero or true villain is difficult to fathom if it must be universal, considering what the hero or villain stands for can only be seen as “right” or “wrong” by a limited amount of eyes. In analyzing horror film audiences, Stephen King has given an intriguing hypothesis to this conundrum that there is no hero who can walk the Earth: instead, the planet is populated by antiheroes.
>>King did not blatantly state this of course—he was not even writing in terms of heroes and villains—but it is clear that when he brings up the boy and the “chocolate-covered graham crackers” that he is discussing if the boy chooses to be “good” or “bad” to society’s standards, which translates into if he is acting heroic or villainous (or at least in which direction he is growing). An antihero is a hero who may deontologically not have the best ethics and often he or she is very flawed, but this person still works toward their sense of order (which for an antihero would be society’s heroic sense of order). To continue with King’s example, the boy would be an antihero because he does the “right” thing for others (adoring his little sister), but he is flawed since he still commits acts of violence (slamming his little sister’s fingers in a door for fun) and he only does the “right” thing because he knows there will be a reward (the chocolate-covered graham crackers). He may not act that way otherwise. This is his flaw, but he still is in society’s eye as “good” because he is still learning and abides by his family when they punish him.
>>The purpose of “Why We Crave Horror” was to subtly say that all people are dualistic in the sense we both possess “good” and “evil” inside: normally people act to their society’s standards, but once in awhile they must let their evil which exists inside “be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass.” (King) King argues that the majority of people are more “good” than “evil”, but that the “evil” part of us manifests itself as “emotional muscles” (King) that “demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone.” (King) Translation? We all have the flaw of being somewhat “evil” alongside our “good” nature, and that everyone is a bit morbid—his example was the existence of dead baby jokes. They are repulsive but for some reason they still make people laugh.
>>Horror films take this concept a bit further—instead of your average person merely thinking of something considered politically incorrect as amusing, “the fun comes from seeing others menaced—sometimes killed.” (King) In most societies (and certainly the American society King writes from), murder is considered taboo and there is an array of punishments for doing such a thing, such as life in prison or being sentenced to death. Yet watching it on screen for entertainment is okay. It introduces a dark element to any individual yet simultaneously to the masses—after all, who skips on watching scary movies? King is correct when he states, “we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better.” When thinking that all people are antiheroes, heroes who seek their “good” while deontologically flawed, this makes perfect sense: horror film audiences are flawed since they enjoy watching the suffering they are supposed to be against.
>>Of course even with this flaw the antihero can be heroic, “[a]s long as you keep the gators fed,” King concludes. What he is referring to is that the antihero must use those “emotional muscles” (King) fueled by evil once in awhile in order to keep the evil within at bay. After all, one evil action here or there does not mean a person is no longer “constrained by an ethic” (Alsford 83) as any society’s hero is supposed to be. It is just that we must acknowledge the “‘beast within’, a lawless predatory creature that wills to do all the reckless wickedness that civilization, society, religion and ethics are designed to keep submerged and suppressed,” (110) which Alsford brings to our attention. What it all boils down to is if our antiheroes of society choose to let their “good” or “evil” natures rule their actions and thus their effect on the society.
>>Works Cited
Alsford, Mike. Heroes & Villains. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. Print.
King, Stephen. “Why We Crave Horror.” http://drmarkwomack.com/pdfs/horrormovies.pdf