Archive for 2015

Yes! Guests in the Fallout Shelter! I know, you think I’m such a loner-misanthrope-curmudgeon, and I sort of am, but it gets lonely down here. Now that the twins, Lexi and Hampton (remember them? I barely do) are off at Soviet-style reeducation camp (again…) and Jack is all messed up from his trip to Bonnaroo (millennials…oy) I needed some company.

So today, on the show, we have The Sarcastic Nutritionists! Josh and Gretchen, the masterminds behind that snark-tastic name, and the bloggers and “Etsy with a sense of humor” creators of their namesake products come down the ladder to the shelter to talk what else? ‪‎Foodiness‬™. Oh and nutrition, whatever that really means anymore, and my new theory that kids who are diagnosed with ADHD are really just dehydrated.

Join the fun, maybe we’ll have a snark-off, or a sarcasm throwdown… I’ll win. Of course.

So, a few days after my return from the International Sweets and Snacks Show, in Chicago, an email pops up in my inbox with the header: “Get ready for real food ingredients!” Wow, I thought, lay it on me, I’m ready for real food ingredients, especially after the sugar shitstorm I’d just immersed myself in!!

This email was from one of the many food companies and ingredient suppliers and industry email lists that I’ve wound up on over the years, because when you register for a trade show, you suddenly start getting emails from all kinds of industry suppliers and companies. This email was from a company that makes chicken products. Not like nuggets and patties, or chicken jerky or even IQF parts, no. They make stuff like powdered chicken stock base, and freeze-dried chicken fat for enriching your institutional hospital-type cooking and hotel and airline food.

The “real food” ingredient they were promoting? Chicken Protein Powder. Get ready indeed! Dehydrated, powdered, chicken meat dust. For use as an additive to processed food products, to increase the protein level in them, because everybody has apparently gone insane about getting enough protein, even though most Americans get more than double the protein they need on a average day. But the food industry has latched on to our belief that we need hundreds of grams of protein, and has added it to all sorts of enhanced Foodiness products like cereals and drinks, and even bottled water.

Is chicken powder a real food ingredient? Chicken is real food, if you dry it into chicken jerky I guess it’s still real food, but is chicken powder dust real food? I don’t know. Something is not right, there’s a distasteful quality about it. It’s creepy. Too far removed from the actual animal. Too much of a disregarding of the fact that the chicken was a living breathing, featherered bird, before it was dehydrated and powdered and put into a vaccum sealed pouch. Too much like soylent green.

It’s chicken!! It’s chicken!! Chicken protein powder is chicken! Or am just (as usual) I overreacting to this? Do I need to just let go, and let dust?

It’s so nice down here today, in the ‪Foodiness™ fallout shelter. We’re having quite the stretch of chilly, wet weather in Brooklyn this week, which I’m perversely kind of enjoying, considering what’s to come (NYC hell season), but down here today, it’s cozy and dry.

However, in anticipation of another brutishly soul-sucking NYC summer, I had Handyman-Husband-Adam install a beer draft line system in the shelter, so we could drink frosty mugs full of crisp, bitter IPA’s all summer long, and avoid the glare of the midday sun and the noise and crowds of the Brooklyn pub scene. We’re getting too old for that, you see.

So to celebrate the installation of the tap lines, I’ve invited a couple of doppelganger misanthropes with whom I’ve become virtually-friendly with lately, the Beer Curmudgeons, Sayre Piotrkowski and Collin McDonnell! I was a guest on their podcast a while back (Episode 6, fyi) and today they return the favor. Sayre is an old friend of the Foodiness Fallout Shelter’s resident nutrition goddess, Kristin Wartman! She made the hookup for us, and now we’re like one, big, curmudgeonly-grumpypants family. Good thing we have beer.