good eating
I may be extra bitchy because today was my first day off of coffee. Yes, I’m a bourgeoius connoisseur specialty product consumer, but $25/lb?!? I’m not insane.
I am a white person in an industrialized nation in an academic/intellectual position. This means that I am one of the last people who society is going to allow hunger to affect. This allows me to shallowly fret about the quality of food when most are worried enough about the quantity. This dyad is a problem, and I will return to it after the following bit of food-porn.
Today I had a really successful, improvised dinner. The guy brought ginger, a little garlic, some green beans that would go bad within the hour. I fully believe him when he said it fell of a truck and his price was very reasonable. He wasn’t looking around nervously; it was a neck twitch. Fine.
I made a sauce from the ginger and garlic and a dried chile. The vegetables got chopped up with a few others I’d saved, and got stirfried with some tofu (though I think they may have sold me NuFu—-the taste is alright but there’s a graininess to it). Rice from last night and a freshly laid egg from the greencoop on the roof. Nothing fancy, but I was happy with it. I feel like the ingredients were well-used, and that’s important when good ones are so rare.
Here’s the thing though: I feel it’s important to balance activities giving short-term pleasures with those giving long-term satisfaction. I was not genuinely happy while my youth playing EverQuest, skipping class to play Magic, eating Taco Bell, and smoking clove cigarettes. My mom was not genuinely happy until she balanced her long-term prudence with moving across the country for nearly no reason, buying a house based on the comfort of her dog, and contemplating raising goats.
So similarly, I think that it is important to maintain some sense of art in food. But if I can live with myself doing so, I need to make sure I know where it is coming from, and that no one is being hurt to feed me.
Shit. That means I have to fire the guy.
