Archive for 2015

Live from the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter, it’s the 2nd or 3rd annual (I can’t remember) Golden Uncrustables awards show! Starring….your host, me! With Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet, and Jack Inslee on the Twitter feed!
Before we get started, let’s just re-introduce all of our 87 million global listeners and viewers to the Golden Uncrustable, and give a little historical information about the awards.

The Golden Uncrustable is an award for Foodiness™ atrocities committed, Foodiness audaciousness and just plain old Foodiness™ bullshit. It is named in honor of the “Uncrustable” a frozen, pre-made, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich, sold by Smuckers. The Uncrustable represents EVERYTHING to me that’s wrong in food in America today.

First: It’s premade, and frozen, and it’s made from garbage industrial white bread or garbage fakey industrial so-called whole wheat bread, both crustless, because we have to pander to children’s fussiness to such a degree that we’ve forgotten that just 2 or 3 generations ago their great-grandparents would have been fighting each other in the streets or the camps or the shtetl for those bread crusts, but no, our delicate fussy eaters need them removed and today’s parents are just trained dogservants to their overindulged chubby offspring.

Secondly, it’s premade, and frozen, and uses the shittiest peanut butter, like Jif or Peter Pan, which contain corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and again, today’s useless parents can’t even manage the strength or dexterity to open a jar and spread their own Peanut Butter for their device-tethered tots? Or teach the kids to do it themselves? I guess they can’t, it’s hard to open a jar and spread PB when you’re so busy playing Minecraft. And anyway, they’d get it all over the screen.

And third, it’s premade, and frozen, and the jelly is of the corn syrup and grape juice concentrate kind, basically a mainline sugar IV hookup for your little addict. The bread is basically all sugar, the PB is filled with added sugar, and the jelly is pure sugar. Why can’t Johnny read? Because he’s in a diabetic coma, that’s why.
They should sell Uncrustables with a free toy syringe in every box! So you can train your little pre-diabetics for what’s to come shortly down the line. Of course, the diabetes-industrial complex loves stuff like the Uncrustable, they are simply propagators of the Foodiness™ solution to the Foodiness™ problem, and they’ve got groups like the ADA right up there behind them…but that’s another show.
So listen live, at 1:00 to this year’s Foodiness Golden Uncrustable awards show, or later tonight, or anytime ever on Itunes and Stitcher! Now please step on the carpet, turn, and smile!

I was thinking about apple-head dolls the other day. It IS apple season, after all, so don’t you think of apple-head dolls every year? No? Really? Look on Pinterest, I bet there’s a hundred pages of them.

So what’s an apple-head doll? Well back in colonial and early American and Laura Ingalls’s time, little girls would take a spare apple, peel it, carve a face into it, and then hang it in a warm, dry place, like an attic, for a month or so until it dehydrated and shriveled and shrunk up (and hopefully didn’t go all moldy). When it was fully dried up, it would uncannily resemble a wrinkly old person’s face, usually a woman’s face, as the men tended to drop dead in the fields at 50 but the women back then lived to be at least 60 and would be apple-doll-faced wrinkly and shriveled up by then because sunscreen.

Then they’d take these apple heads, and stick them on a body of two sticks lashed together, like jesus on the cross, and then if they were really crafty, upholster the sticks with rags to form a body shape and then if they were REALLY crafty, or just bored out of their gourds, since radio wouldn’t be invented for another 75 years, they’d sew little dresses for the dolls too. And then they’d have hours and hours of long, cold, wintertime fun, playing with the 19th century version of Barbie, unless the rats got to her and ate her face off. Life was a little more…. “raw” back then, wouldn’t you agree?

So myself, being a big fan of all things colonial and early American and laura ingalls, due to living in a colonial era town and participating in Bicentennial festivities where we all dressed up and reenacted crafts and activities from the era, like rolling big hoops with sticks and playing with dried fruit, made many an apple-headed doll in my youth. I just liked the way the apples dried up and turned into faces, all shrively and crinkled. You could really exaggerate the features by carving them deeply and then as they dried the chin and nose would really pop and droop, like a witch’s face. Being only 8 or 9, I had the smugness of a smooth-faced child, and never gave a thought to the fact that I too, one day, would start to see my once-flawlessly unwrinkled face, start to give way and resemble an old Cortland, left for dead in the attic.

But it’s happening. My rosy apple cheeks of youth are starting to fade and I see lines forming across my forehead and little crinkles around my eyes, and I know my appleheaded days are upon me. It’s ok, I can deal with it. I look pretty good for my age, mostly because I never had kids, which ages you worse than smoking two packs of camels a day, but now that I’m acting and am a “lifestyle” model (yeah, really, I know…) I’m getting more calls to audition for menopause drug ads and a lot fewer calls for I don’t know…cool apps? But I really don’t want to linger on the subject. We all get old. We all age, you can accept it or look like Meg Ryan and then you die anyway, so…The end.

Oh and also, Foodiness™ does cause wrinkles, we’ll discuss that too, on today’s show.

Now I’m no teenager, I’m pushing 50, but I went to my share of arena shows, I saw the Clash, and the Ramones at small, acoustically challenged rock clubs and listened to a Walkman and then an Ipod for years and still do when I run, and not to sound like an old geezer, but WTF is up with the volume these days? Are we collectively losing our hearing, so we collectively turn up the volume on everything? SO LOUD. Restaurants? Forget it, I won’t go in if it’s too loud in there. I have a decibel meter app on my phone, and it’s always in the red zone. And if you’re playing candy crush on your phone on the subway, do you need to keep sound effects turned on? Could everybody, please, just SHUT UP?

But since this is a show about food, and Foodiness™, let’s talk about food noise.

Sounds from real, actual food, are fine. Crunchy, juicy apples, or spooning up creamy, real yogurt, licking runny, ripe cheese right off a plate (what, you don’t do that?) tearing into a crusty loaf of bread, those are all fine. It’s the sounds of Foodiness, that drive me nuts, because those sounds are highly engineered, and carefully calibrated, to deliver the snappiest snap, the crispiest crunch, the slurpiest slug, and that makes me crazy. Because in the same way that all those engineered, manufactured foods are highly calibrated to appeal to our top thresholds for salt, fat and sugar, making us unable to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of real, diverse, actual food, the engineers also calibrate the SOUNDS of Foodiness. Making the Pringles crunch just so, based on hundreds of hours of consumer test panels and market research. Making the viscosity of the yogurt in a tube just right, so that when lil’ Fletcher sucks it down in the minivan while he’s glued to his Ipad, it won’t drip onto the faux leather seats and stink up the place, and it’s thick enough that he thinks it’s more like pudding, than actual yogurt.

The engineered sounds of Foodiness™ are the noise pollution of our food environment. They drown out the sounds of our actual food. A droning microwave humming and then “ping”! delivering a piping hot, but previously frozen burrito cancels out the sizzle of a skirt steak on a grill, the slap-slapping of a hand making a tortilla. The breaking airlock seal on an opening can of soup, with a pull tab these days because a can opener is too much technology for the Wall-E crowd, is a steamroller of sound compared to a slow, simmering, dreamlike bubbling of a day-long braise or broth. How can we learn to appreciate and embrace the real, when the cacophony of the Foodiness™ is all around us, drowning it out? Maybe we need anti-Foodiness sound retraining seminars, down here in the shelter… We sit in silence, and eat the quietest foods we can find. Bananas, mushrooms, pudding…sshhh. We’re eating.