It doesn’t make sense but I like to read about food and cooking (especially since sports no longer exist). The senselessness comes in because I don’t enjoy eating, that is, I don’t go on food adventures.

Some people will eat anything. Fuck that.

Did you know that if you load any entree with shit from the garden it costs more? Fungus, groundcover, anything green and sprouting, anything a bunny would wiggle its nose about. The more ingredients, the higher the price. Take a hamburger with cheese at a sitdown restaurant, $6.50. Now take that same burger and put a salad on top of it, call out the exotic ingredients there on the menu and get bonus points if the green things sound like they came from a foreign country and, voila!, the cheeseburger now costs $13.75.

When you pick up the food section of the local paper, every photo of every dish shows mounds of vegetated crap harvested from the side of the road. Hey look it’s a donut, oh, wait a minute, the caption says its injected with celery paste and vegetable broth because, it claims, it gives the defenseless donut a savory kick.

Food should never be injected. Injections should always be reserved for medical procedures. And food isn’t art or a hobby or an experiment. For fuck’s sake, stop this nonsense of “combining textures” and “blending flavors.” Looking for the next flavor sensation isn’t important and food guy should stop pretending it is. Taking traditional food and mashing it up with something grown organically or something that only grows in Antarctica isn’t saving the world.

Here’s how normal people “blend flavors,” take a spoonful of ice cream and put it in your mouth, then take some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and put them in your mouth, take a bite of a ham sandwich and a mouthful of fruit punch and then chew it all up and swallow! The human mouth is a natural blender just waiting for you to combine disgusting flavors of your own. We don’t need preblended foods and we for sure don’t need new nuanced flavors – we have all the fuckin’ flavors we need thank you!

The food section had a feature on tacos. It had ninety photos and I could not recognize a single one as a taco. It was like all of the tacos had on a Halloween costume – all of them dressed up like chopped up vegetables. One had fig salsa, another had layers of kelp, there were diced peppers from every country that speaks Spanish, many had colorful paste that had to have come from a baby food jar. Everyone – every single picture – every disguised taco, was covered in a chewed-up vegetable medley that was then spat onto the taco. It was the graphic death of perfectly good Mexican food.

Restaurant chefs surely get paid by the ingredients, so the typical menu at even the most basic restaurant is like a fold-out travel map. Here’s a tip creative cooking dude: if there are types of vegetables or mold or fungus on your taco, burger or sandwich that can’t be pronounced or sounded out, well then, you’ve over-engineered the whole fuckin’ thing.

I’ll end with some recipes. Tacos: meat, the packet of seasoning that says Taco Seasoning, taco shell/tortilla and cheese … combine and eat. Burger: meat, BBQ sauce, Tabasco, Kraft American Singles, bacon, bun … combine and eat. Sandwich: meat, cheese, bread, Ruffles … combine and eat. Get the idea? Tell your local chef to keep his extra flavors and textures to himself.

Eat safely. Eat simply.

Photo on VisualHunt