Tag Archives: Food

Notes from the 18th Hole

She secured her summer job at the local five-star golf resort during a period of wreckless personal abandon. The things she would only say yes to included shots of Wild Turkey, narcotics, one-night stands, pornography, drunk driving, self-pity, cigarettes, and parties hosted by Eastern European amusement park employees. She only applied for the job because the golf resort was owned by the Anheuser-Busch company and she’d heard that once a month every resort employee received a free case of Bud or Bud Light.

She was hired to drive the perimeter of the 18-hole golf course from 8am until sundown in a tricked-out golf cart with coolers on the side that she’d fill every morning with snacks and cold beer. It was a dream job. Most of her time was spent parked at the top of manicured green hills, waiting for businesspeople to tee off. The rest of her time was spent circling the course at high speeds, hoping that she wouldn’t get hit by an errant ball. If a businessperson felt desirous of her refreshments, he would flag her down, and she would pull up alongside whatever corporate retreat collective he belonged to and sell him Buds and turkey sandwiches wrapped in plastic.

Though overnight guests tended to have charge accounts with the resort, it was mostly a cash business. She quickly realized that Misters Anheuser and Busch weren’t trying to profit from her golf cart—they merely wanted to provide their clientele with a convenient service—so she provided the convenient service and then skimmed off the top accordingly. She would have gotten rich that summer had it not been for the Wild Turkey and narcotics.

But this lucrative era of driving a golf cart around a landscape radiant with sunlight and Round-Up had its dark and weedy side as well. She soon discovered that the high-calorie snack food she was charged with transporting in her felonious gyre was actually quite tasty. And not only was it tasty, but for minutes at a time it could quell her raging hangovers and self-hatred. And the food was right there, within arm’s reach, in her mobile 7-11, at all hours during her shift. And if the food ran out, she could just drive back to the kitchen for more, because no one was overseeing her inventory.

Foods she could only say yes to: hotdogs, ham and cheese sandwiches, oversized chocolate chip cookies, relish packets, 3 Musketeers Bars, Snickers Bars, fruit snacks, granola bars, Cheetos. The binging would start at 8 in the morning and not end until she plugged in her cart. It was a nightmare. She just could not keep her hands off the hotdogs. If she had been leading a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, she wouldn’t have made it five miles without devouring all the supplies. Her whole family would have starved to death or eaten her younger siblings. She felt miserably ashamed of herself, but the only thing that made her feel better was a pork product washed down with Gatorade and Skittles. Sometimes she pulled off into the woods just so she could smoke, cry, and eat potato chips at the same time.

She soon outgrew her work uniform. Not only was she sweating through her Cintas-issued khaki mom shorts every afternoon thanks to a malodorous physical cocktail of alcohol withdrawal, social anxiety, and her immune system’s infuriated response to all the nitrites, but her gut had burst open her zipper as well. The old white men on the course stopped flirting with her. The cute boys in the kitchen no longer hustled to replenish her sandwiches. She found out that the resort’s other two beer wenches—both slim and pretty blondes with the ability to say no to things—had been wing-womaning each other at the bars after work without extending her an invitation. Her tongue and the corners of her mouth were stained orange with processed cheese. In the cart she felt like one of those morbidly obese people who had to get around on motorized scooters. It was only a matter of time before she got fired.

But against all odds she did not get fired. She just stopped showing up for work long enough that some distant supervisor decided that she’d quit. She didn’t even collect her final case of free beer because she was so mortified that she’d finally been broken, not by hard drugs or two-day blackouts, but by mundane American gluttony. She could no longer pretend that her depression was continental and poetic when it involved six tons of Doritos. She was just a fat girl on a golf course—less like a tormented Woolf or Plath and more like a pouty Trump. She didn’t get out of bed for several weeks. When she finally did, it was to say no to something: the suicide spiral, which in her mind looked a lot like those circuits around the green.

*This has been a paid advertisement for Anheuser-Busch.

Hey birds, come feast on this block of food

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So far the birds in the backyard have not started flocking to the block of food I provided for them. I don’t know what their problem is. I happen to love blocks of food, especially in wintertime. This bird meal cost me $7, and it’s basically a family-style lasagna. If any birds are reading my blog, I urge them to give this food a chance.

My Dinner at TGI Friday’s

A few weeks ago I went to Penn Station at 8pm to meet my mom’s midnight train from Virginia. I was excited about spending four hours under Madison Square Garden, exploring its subterranean wealth of eating and drinking options. I’ve been to some tasty restaurants in Manhattan, but you don’t truly know a city until you’ve dined in its train stations. I thought I could get some good writing done in the back of TGI Friday’s. I ordered wine and french fries. I noted in my journal that TGI Friday’s is exactly the opposite of the way it’s depicted in TV commercials. The waiter didn’t want me there. If I had ordered a $17 plate of buffalo wings, or if he’d been accustomed to Salman Rushdie drafting novels at one of his sticky tables, perhaps things would have been different. At a certain point I could no longer deny that both he and the waitress wrapping flatware in paper napkins were judging me harshly.

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Wait for it. . . an eating video game!

Video games enable people to do their favorite things: shoot guns, steal cars, play golf in the living room. So what about a video game – or even an online application – that lets you eat all the delicious food that you want without ingesting any calories? Instead of a handheld console with ten zillion buttons, you wield an electronic fork, or, if you’re an expert, maybe an electronic knife and spoon as well. Then you assemble virtual meals on the monitor and take virtual bites all day long until your eyes burn. You won’t actually taste anything – this isn’t the year 3,000 – but visually you will be able to fulfill your cravings for the worst, most decadent things. Perhaps Gourmet Magazine could sponsor the eating video game. Or the This Is Why You’re Fat website. God, I’m smart. In this context, “smart” means “lying in bed on Monday night frantically brainstorming about how I can shove more food in my mouth without blowing up like a manatee, my totem animal.”

I envision three gaming levels for three different modes of eating:

Level 1: LOCALVORE

This level is for those who like to be in touch with the land. They can actually plant their own kitchen gardens and slaughter their own backyard livestock on the screen, staying involved in their food production every step of the way, from soil to table. Remember that all of this is a pretend world created by computer programmers and you will not get any agricultural tax credits from the government. Also, you’ll have to kill your pig with a fork.

LEVEL 2: DEFAULT PLAYER

This level is for average grocery shoppers who occasionally buy organic or local food if it doesn’t cost too much more than toxic food from other continents, and who like to eat three square meals a day that incorporate some roughage, and who also like meals to take 30 minutes or less to prepare. They drink two gallons of water and a glass of red wine daily, but they occasionally suck Pepsi through a Twizzler.

LEVEL 3: LAZY FATTIES

This level is for people who just like to say “Fuck it” and go to Golden Corral when their bellies rumble. Also those who like to eat their ice cream out of the carton and their potato chips out of the pantry late at night while their significant others are sleeping. You don’t have to be a lazy fatty in real life to beat this level, you just have to be able to think like a lazy fatty, which I think we’re all pretty good at in America, especially me (not to brag). In fact, I anticipate a lot of people using Level 3 as a weight loss tool, much like the Wii Fit. The eating video game will let you indulge all of your lazy fatty cravings without consequences. And Golden Corral and Applebee’s won’t have to go out of business even after this game is a runaway hit; they will simply move their more obesity-friendly products into a virtual market.

Of course, this game won’t work if you’re actually hungry. Its appeal is purely psychological. The idea is to master food much like you would master the Super Mario Galaxy or something. Food that is bad for you will become a fantasy land that you have to conquer. And children can learn healthy eating habits by creating their own virtual meals, being judged on fiber and vitamin content as well as visual intrigue. And if parents don’t feel like making dinner, they can just plug their kids into the X-Box or whatever and give everybody a meal-in-a-pill. Which reminds me of my favorite Facebook update from actor slash Facebook wordsmith* Alec Beard: “Alec Beard is wondering: if they do make a meal-in-a-pill, will you be able to take it on an empty stomach?”

*The new actor slash model?

It’s wacky food day at One Star Watt

Wacky food #1: Spaghetti tacos (via a guy I met at a party)
Wacky food #2: Vodka gummy bears (via Neatorama)

Slaughterhouse Highway

The road from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Columbus, Georgia, should be renamed Slaughterhouse Highway. Every other vehicle on Route 29 South is a truck carrying livestock to their imminent deaths. Yesterday I saw blonde chickens with breasts pumped so full of water they could hardly stand upright in their cramped metal cages. I saw cattle stomping nervously in trailers with their big brown eyes peering at me through air holes. “Save us,” they said. “Hijack this truck and drive us to Mexico.”

“I’ll never eat meat again,” I thought. “I love you guys.”

Then we stopped at Applebee’s for dinner and I accidentally ate a big pile of microwaved chicken. I am such an asshole.

Foods currently in season in Portugal

1. Oranges

2. Nectarines

3. Sea snails

A few links about critters and the people who love them

Animals!

1. They’re bisexual, especially in captivity.

2. They’ve enjoyed a short history of radical human advocacy.

3. They would prefer it if you didn’t touch them there.

4. But if you do touch them there, at least make flan afterwards.

Satisfying sound of the day

A fresh bagel, hurled by a bagel-boy, hitting the side of a car filled with college chicks. Thwap!

The perils of drinking until you set the noodles on fire

The last time I made the freshman “cooking while drunk” error was five years ago when I lit spaghetti on fire after an evening of karaoke in Northern Virginia. But last night I really wanted macaroni, and macaroni wanted me. But I only got as far as boiling a pot of water before the house started smelling like burning. So I guess I burned some water. Incidentally, you can’t throw a pot of water on something burning when the water itself is burning, because you’ll just add fuel to the fire. And that, Julia Childs, is how you make Eau Flambe.