Now that I’m teaching at a much smaller school, I like to call it a one-room schoolhouse, Like Laura Ingalls attended back on the prairie (I haven’t mentioned Laura in a good while, I’m sure their old family homesteads across the Midwest are now buried under Wal-Marts or are fields of GMO Monsanto soybeans and corn) Anyway, now that I have smaller classes and therefore a bigger pulpit, I can preach the gospel of Food vs Foodiness™ and eating real as much as I want. I also have no administrators lurking around, potentially censoring me. (that never really happened, they just wanted asses in seats, as long as the chairs were filled and the tuition checks paid, I could have told my students that eggs came from horses and chickens were designed by jesus to feed on marshmallow peeps and they’d have been fine with it). So now, the people who come to take classes with me get a good heapin’ helping of not just Food v Foodiness, but also just plain ol’ “eating real” preaching. And that’s fine, because that’s why they’re there, and they’re all really receptive and I feel like I’m doing the lord’s work. The lord being me, of course.
But sometimes we also do private parties at our little school, and so you get a mix of people who’ve merely been invited by a host, and aren’t there by their own choice or volition. And this happened to me last week, when we had a very nice family come to have a group class as their annual family party/holiday outing.
There were a family group of 9; a dad, a mom a grandma and then a bunch of adult kids and cousins. They weren’t city folk. Suburban, from New Jersey, but nice. The dad had set it all up, and he was excited about it, the rest of them seemed a little confused as to why they were there, what they were supposed to be doing, etc. The kids kept looking at their phones, of course. But I did my best to make it fun and comfortable, I can be quite hospitable you know, I’m not the monster I make myself out to be sometimes. So we were cooking, all was going well, they were drinking their wine. This crew showed up with 3 giant bottles of Barefoot brand pink zinfandel. Like we were at a sorority party or something. You know those giant bottles that are like $8.99? those. Ok, so first of all, I’m not really a wine snob, I drink cheap wine too, but like $12 Tempranillos from Spain, not a gallon jug of Barefoot brand pink wine. Like a teenager. There’s a difference. I’m merely pointing out that it doesn’t get more industrialized, commercialized and Matrixy-Foodiness, than a brand-name pink wine. I mean you may as well just be drinking Mountain Dew at that point.
Well, I’m sure you can imagine how well it all went after that, but you’ll just have to tune in to this episode to hear the truth. Let me just tease you with one little tidbit from the evening, it had to do with Cotton Candy Lattes. Enough said. Carry on.