Unsolicited Advice

'Tis the season for New Year's Resolutions. Roughly four thousand percent of them seem to involve food. The world is spamming my social media with ads telling me I could eat cheap, healthy, easy, tasty, organic, artisanal, yadda yadda yadda. Superfoods! Antioxidants! Environmentally and socially conscious! I'll look like a model and develop enough super powers to keep me alive for all eternity! I'll level with you all. I don't have much to say about the appearance-based propaganda. My entire opinion on the matter is that it is wrong to use anyone's physical appearance as an excuse to treat them as lesser humans, and if you do that you're being an asshole. It's just not something I wrestle with. I won't get into numbers or details, but I have looked more or less the same since I was fourteen, I am now forty, I am still paid money to show up to places and let various people stare at me. I'm not claiming to be perfect, just noting that the things I ...

So, everybody else enjoying Snownarok 2015? Jazmin and I were pretty well trapped in our apartment for about 36 hours. We met up Monday evening before the snow really got going and enacted our Joint Household Emergency Preparedness Plan, which consisted of plugging all of our favorite widgets in now, in case the power went out later, and then wandering around the Stop & Shop for half an hour, looking for foods we felt would pair well with a regional weather emergency. I'm pretty used to this, from my days as an undergrad. My alma mater is in a ski town that has a population of 50k when school is in session, dropping to 30k in the off season. Municipal services are a bit of a joke, and Arizona has little regard for human life. Hand to God, my favorite part of weather panics in Boston is that they shut down the T, which means the city is closed for business by default. 'We could technically still run the subway,' is the thinking, 'but if we do that, some idiot will ...

The kitchen staff yells at each other in Spanish. And will take orders in Tejano Spanglish. They serve tacos made with things like spiced, stewed cow tongue or pork intestine... ...which go by their Spanish names on the menu, so as not to scare the gringos who are there for grilled chicken. There is no cheddar cheese anywhere in the restaurant. Nor does shredded iceberg lettuce come standard on anything. The pico de gallo is made fresh in the kitchen. The tortillas are made with real shortening. You have to ask for vegetarian beans if you don't want them cooked in lard, and vegetarian rice if you don't want it cooked in chicken stock. They have horchata, for the same price as soda. They will deep fry any food on the menu if you ask nicely. The tortilla chips are so greasy they soak through the paper bag. I almost forgot about Cinco de Mayo this year. I don't really celebrate it, but it wasn't exactly easy to miss in Arizona. The ER staff hated the h...

I am really, really tired of hearing about "good" food and "bad" food. Really tired. Took a chunk out of one of my roommates for it a few weeks ago tired. STOP FUCKING DOING THIS. There are a lot of things that it is a bad idea to eat. Polonium-210. Deathcap mushrooms. Razor blades. Shoes. By definition, things that are not good to eat, even if they give you caloric energy, are not food . A slice of cake is not bad for you any more than an aspirin tablet is bad for you. Many slices of cake and many aspirin tablets may be bad for you, but neither of them is evil in and of itself. This is basic toxicology here -- "Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allen die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist," and so forth . Imbuing food with magical moral judgements on your character and the power to make you a good or bad person is stupid, harmful, and probably the reason people choose to express their neuroses in the form of eating disorders...