“Delish” is one of those branding words that identify you instantly as one of those people who is so uncool that they actually tried to sell band candy instead of eating it all in their room and then stealing the money from a modern woman’s wallet while she was sous-viding a pressed and sliced turkey in the same pot with broccoli drenched in a cheese gastrique.
Punishment: Sell band candy after you get fitted with braces. The old kind.
Savory
Holy shit. It just means salty. It just means salty and not sweet. It’s just something you’d eat for lunch and not breakfast. That’s all. Same difference between French toast and a grilled cheese sandwich. Savory = lunch. Mystery solved.
Punishment: Kick the next person who says it.
Gelée
What happens when the ocean eats dairy and its intestines shed their coating. Or, boiled and rendered horse hooves. Delish.
Punishment: A Jell-O hoof shot.
Bonus Round: Foodie
If you have ever used the word as a self-identifier in a sentence, have a T-shirt with it printed on it, or wrote it down without a smirk on your face or squirming in your chair, I’m sure you outsold everyone else in band during candy season. And guess what? We all eat food. We all like it. We all enjoy “the experience”; some of us just have more interesting things to brag about.
It’s like breathing: it’s everybody’s game, but you don’t see “Breathies” writing blogs about the exclusive oxygen someone flew in from France, or recounting how they inhaled some air that lichen can live in. Get a hobby. Develop a skill that takes more talent than just chewing and swallowing. Because you are really irritating.
And we all hate you.
HIERARCHY OF FOODIES
Every army has a pecking order, and the Amuse Douchers are no different. To rise in foodie rank, you have to be bold, you have to be fearless, and you have to . . . basically not have any other interests, hobbies, or loved ones who check in on a regular basis. We all suffer for our art, but with people like you around, we end up suffering for your art.
Here are the worst offenders, based solely on my experience with foodies who crush the boundaries of good taste—and they do it while they’re popping capers with their teeth and talking about the versatility of sriracha. In order from highest to lowest, I present you with:
The Hierarchy of Foodies
We all chew, but they do it better than you.
The Lecturer
The guy who thinks he’s Pliny the Elder and takes it upon himself to educate everyone at the table about the layers and nuances of each dish. Sometimes, when jealous, he will even stand up and wander over to your side to verify the accuracy of your assessment of the dish you ordered, are trying to eat, and will pay for. He will correct you when he senses you have erred, saying, “No, I’m afraid your palate is experiencing a user error. That was an atom-size particle of cumin I detected, not coriander.” This guy also works in marketing at Wells Fargo, and after drinking a little, he tries to emulate the puddle of spit that gathers on the bottom of James Oseland’s droopy bottom lip. He, at times, will hold up his hand during dinner, whip out his Moleskine notebook, and take notes while going for the big mouthfeel.
The Up-and-Comer
He has a list in his head (and probably hidden somewhere deep within his hard drive) of how many chefs know him by sight: “Chris Bianco waved back at me tonight. Did you hear what I just said?” “I know Matt from Matt’s Big Breakfast. Used to be a bartender. Cool guy. Once, we talked about rosemary. Now he uses it in his breakfast potatoes. But I am cool with that.” “In his studio apartment there is a collection of volcanic sea salt in a variety of earth-tone colors. One of them has the word ‘clay’ in the name. They are not to eat. They are simply to be admired. Looking only, please.” The guy would draw from his sagging 401(k) if the right truffle came along. Just for the story, just for the legend.
MFA Fat Girl with Pink Hair
I am convinced there are at least seventeen copies of this same drone in a square mile radius of every city center, possibly dispatched from the Queen MFA Fat Girl with Pink Hair to cover more ground efficiently. She’s at every opening. She’s at every “Taste of,” “Culinary Festival,” “Ben and Jerry’s Free Scoop Day,” and “Chef’s Night” event. She’s also at museum openings, where you will find her by the tower of cake balls. She once considered applying for the Cordon Bleu, but decided she couldn’t be on her feet for that long each day. Her marriage is on the rocks because her code writer of a husband has celiac disease and won’t bend to the pressure. It’s sad. But food’s not. She’ll write you a short story about it. She is also oblivious that the “edgy” expiration date for pink hair was in 1993.
Modern, Cutting-Edge Parents
You know, those parents who refuse to leave the baby at home and brag that their offspring’s fist “chewables” were roasted beets and chevre. “Oh. Parsley loves arugula. Loves. Has since she was nine months old!” Babies don’t belong anywhere in which the place setting includes two forks, and not just because they will throw the first one on the floor. You had a baby; now stay home with it. It’s not cute; you’re not progressive; it would have been better had you brought your dog instead of your baby. Because people like dogs. People don’t like Baby Foodies. All you’re really doing is showing us that two selfish assholes devoted their lives to raising another selfish asshole. As if we really needed more.
“Now, What I Would Have Done . . .”
Who likes to dissect the menu and alert all dining companions to its flaws and what he would have done differently—this, after a semester in culinary school, although his current job is cooking up burgers and fries for a place called Quackers. He TiVoed all episodes of Top Chef and refuses to delete them, “just in case.” His favorite game is Guess What Shit I Just Put in Your Mouth, blindfolded; he likes it because he once guessed “offal” (the organs of an animal, such as the brains, spine, and stomach) right and a drunk girl clapped for him. His biggest nemesis is mayonnaise from a jar, and he once had a hissy fit in the condiment aisle at Whole Foods because passersby “just weren’t getting how easy aioli is to make with a simple immersion blender.”
The Food Slut
The recent enthusiastic college grad, now in PR, who is present at every new restaurant the night it opens, drinks the water, takes a bite, and then goes home and vomits it all up. The Veteran Food Slut just keeps the morsel of food tucked between an enamel-less molar and her hollow cheek, like a squirrel that can’t wait to grab a napkin and find a dark corner. She weighs as much as a diabetic newborn, has been in party pictures in free magazines almost four times, and as an undergrad, she once dated a waiter at a place where someone was nominated for a regional James Beard Award, though she denied it in a press release (because he didn’t win).
Wine Slusher
Thank heavens you are here to save me from a humiliating decision that will haunt me for years to come. I drank the wrong wine with the right food last night. I know, I know, it was on par with Sophie picking which one of her children would live, but sit down and take your spittoon with you. I know enough to drink fruit punch with McDonald’s and go with limeade with Chick-fil-A, so I’m good. Besides, I’d rather pluck chin hairs than listen to you say “Do you get that? Are you getting that? The undertones are so primitive, so dirty, it’s like drinking earth” one more time. Just go home and make your own wine labels. It’s Three Buck Chuck under there, because if it was something better, you’d never cover it up, plus you haven’t figured out how to make your own corks yet. I’m sure that will be covered on the “Fraudulent Vinter” in an upcoming blog entry.
Facebook Foodies
Their Facebook pages are entirely devoted to nothing but food pictures and detailed descriptions of what they have eaten for each of their three meals a day, and sometimes snacks if they happen upon a midday food fair or they’ve brought in banana-mallow cupcakes with lemon basil frosting for a coworker’s birthday—not because they lik
e the coworker; they actually hate the coworker, but are seizing the opportunity to impress everyone at the bodily injury claims department that when they talk about tweaking convention in the art of pastry, they know what they’re talking about.
Hint to FF: Have you ever heard of editing? If you simply show, say, every tenth picture with a person in it aside from yourself, so many sins will be forgiven. Truly. But really, the honest truth is that people care as much about your morel mushroom, saffron, and farmer cheese omelet as they do about, well, you.
And I admit: I got blue eggs once from the farmer’s market and took a picture of them. I did. But one of them had some weird poxlike calcium deposit on it, so there’s your hook. File under “Oddities.” I’ve taken pictures of my pot pies, too, but only because I estimated them to rise in excess of 1,200 calories apiece. And that’s magnificent.
Also note: Posting pictures of half-eaten food is akin to displaying crime scene photos of a mutilated corpse. It stuns the appetite into an hours-long hibernation. Especially olive pits, even if the pit bowl is something ancient you pulled from the ground in rural Italy. Just so you know, everyone wants to defriend you, but keeps you either out of irritation or because they work with you.
The Journey Man
Seriously. If you go to Cambodia to discover the cuisine, all I really want to know about your trip is what kind of parasite you got, what part of your body it came out of, and what the chances are of me getting it in the United States. Because I am not going to Cambodia. I don’t care about the herbs, the oils, the wafting scents, although I have to admit I am frightfully interested in the food poisoning you got every single time you went back to the same food stall that had no refrigeration method and the “fish fresh from the river” that you ate three times. PS: I wasn’t in the Peace Corps, but even I know there are no fresh rivers in Cambodia, and if you want to eat fish that someone caught in the people’s toilet, I hope your parents know someone at the embassy. Frankly, I wouldn’t eat anything in a country that is still finding corpses in public places unless I had an autoclave with me and plenty of batteries. But, you know. There are certain states whose sewer systems are suspect, too. Mississippi. Alabama. Michigan. Arizona.
The Yelper
Yes, I know you have thirty people following your “reviews,” including a guy from Spain, and you’ve even been the first to Yelp about three of them, but—and I’m sorry to say it—once you leave a review of 7-Eleven, you lose all credibility with me. The thrust and power of the soda fountain may be critical information to the same people who are upset that the store on Seventh Street carries Cool Ranch Doritos and not Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, but hopefully, they’ll remember to take their meds tomorrow.
The only things you really need to say on Yelp are if you found a hair in the food, if you saw a rat in the dining area, if you witnessed the cook touch his private place and handle your taco, or if you know a guy who knows the guy who once worked as the plumber who cleaned the grease trap and relayed that the kitchen was so disgusting that he “would never even drink a soda in a can from that place.” If you know any of that intel, awesome. If not, I hate to say that your review of the state fair is probably not going to land you a gig at Food & Wine.
As for Your Shitty Food Blog . . .
I know your mom and girlfriend say it’s cool, but your mom still feels guilty about drinking heavily before she knew for sure that she was pregnant, and your girlfriend makes dresses from used sheets she buys at Goodwill . . . so, well, there you go. To make it official, you got the name and URL of Your Shitty Food Blog printed on a T-shirt from Zazzle, but are still waiting for a fan to buy one. Not yet, not yet.
I know I am the Destroyer of Dreams, but if there’s one thing that people could possibly care less about than your pictures of what you ate today, it’s your waxing and waning in accompanying long-winded copy in a bite-by-bite, first-person creative nonfiction narrative. Slap yourself for every time you say the word “seductive,” pinch yourself for every time you use the verb “slather,” and kindly ram a fork into your belly whenever the nonword “commingled” comes out of your mouth. The presence of the word “defiant” is about enough to make villagers tear you limb from limb like Montgomery Clift in Suddenly, Last Summer, and I, for one, would provide an alibi for each and every one of them.
AM I A BOOK SNOB?
DEATH CAB FOR COOTIES
It looked like an ordinary yellow cab.
When it pulled up to the curb of the hotel in Cincinnati, no one fled from the backseat murmuring, “I’d get the next one if I were you,” or shook his head at me like a pitcher shaking off a catcher. There were no warning signs, no caution tape stretched across the backseat, no body bag in the trunk beside my suitcase. But as soon as I settled into my seat and the bellhop closed the car door, I knew I was in for a very long ride.
There was a distinct scent inside the cab, one that made me choke back a dry heave. It reeked of bad thoughts, lingering regrets, and possibly a touch of human decomposition. It reminded me of the predominant reason I never went back to Girl Scouts camp. Cinnamon toast is awesome, but when you show a little girl the hole the pack leader’s husband’s just dug ten feet from camp and say “Form a polite line and do not stare,” you have just provided a ten-year-old with a lifetime’s worth of recurring night-terror material.
Because that incident occurred when my frontal cortex was still quite malleable, I now sit up in bed in the thickest of darkness at least once a week, panting like a fat dog on a beach, sweating like I had just raced Jen Lancaster for the last Twinkie on Earth (another recurring dream—she wins) and waking my husband up in the process.
“You had the dream?” he always asks, to which I nod.
“Train station or the Twinkie fight?”
“Train,” I say as I nod again, but I still can’t catch my breath.
“Just the toilet sitting out in the open?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I reply in a whisper, still seeing it as freshly as if I were still there. “No door. No walls. Just a potty.”
“And the Chinese lady who stands over you and yells, ‘You take too long!’?”
I nod my head again. “She’s so mean,” I whimper, as my face collapses into that of a cranky toddler’s.
“I know,” my husband says soothingly. “I know.”
I turn and barely say to him, “I just don’t want to wipe,” looking for understanding. “I just don’t want to wipe.”
And now, because I still think there are some soft spots in parts of my brain, I was sure the smelly cab was going to translate into something far more paralyzing than an angry Chinese lady with a full bladder. It smelled like an open sewer—the odor was foul and aged, and the stench infested every crack and surface of the taxi, wrapping me in a gagging embrace.
It was too late to orchestrate an exit; I was on my way to the airport, my suitcase was in the trunk, and the driver, a husky man in his thirties, had already merged onto a highway. So I covered my mouth with my hand, pinched my nostrils as closed as I could bear, and tried to focus on anything besides the putrid stink sinking into every pore I had that wasn’t already blocked with body cream from the T.J.Maxx clearance shelf. I cracked my window to let as much of the funk out, but the glass edged down an inch and then stopped, trapping me in the taxi tomb with its fetor.
The odor staunchly refused to move.
What could possibly smell so bad? I thought to myself as I surveyed the scenery, watching Ohio turn into Kentucky while I prayed for the airport exit to appear. What could be causing this foul odor? It is Kentucky, I reminded myself; maybe someone left a farm animal in the trunk a month ago after he got dropped off at his whiskey still? Could someone have shoved a diaper in between the seat cushions? Oh my God, am I sitting in someone else’s muck? My friend Andrea sat in homeless pee once on a bus in Denver. It made a great story, but no one really wants that in their repertoire. I quickly examined the seat and saw no kind of residue beneath me. Nothing. I was safe.
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My mind raced, trying to solve the mystery. Surely, it can’t just be the smell of the cab. I’ve even lost a milk shake in my car before during July in Arizona and it didn’t smell this bad. Is it flatulence? It can’t be, I reasoned, fully wanting to believe I was breathing in eau de diaper rather than eau de cabdriver exhaust. He would have had to hit six different countries in the last eight hours, including dropping by India to snatch up some curry off a questionable street cart and then drinking water from Mexico, in order to cause this level of intestinal distress. Anthony Bourdain has never eaten anything that could have resulted in this, even meals he watched die. I was at a loss.
Meanwhile, the smell was not abating; in fact, it was becoming thicker with every passing moment. Soon, I’d have no choice but to kick the window out or risk making my own contribution to this stinkhole. What the hell is going on in Cincinnati that no one has reported this criminal scent to the authorities? I wanted to yell. This was definitely a life-sentence-without-parole brand of smell, there was no doubt about that. Premeditated, indeed.
Just as I looked out the window and wished I could stick my head out of it like my dog, I saw a sign for the airport. I had two miles to go. I can make it, I reassured myself, I will make it! I can hold my breath for two miles! If he goes sixty miles per hour and runs every red light, that’s only two more minutes!
The Potty Mouth at the Table Page 10