The Campbell soup controversy is both fascinating and amusing.
I had a can of Campbell’s tortilla soup last night, with a can of Mexican tomatoes, sliced potatoes, and a ton of hot savory spice added. It was delicious.
I’ve worked in food facilities. Y’all are out there eating all sorts of things you don’t want to know about. If they are 3D printing chicken or beef, that’s fine with me. If they throw a horse leg in there, I don’t care about that either if I don’t know. Doubly so if it’s treated so that I won’t get sick.
I survived my childhood. My dad forced me to eat things that were featured in the Temu edition of National Geographic. Other than some observable brain damage, I survived. These symptoms allow me to either be the Secretary of Health and Human Services or the President.
The amusing part of it all is that an executive got caught with his pants down, spouting what we already know. I’d rather be eating oysters right now than working in the Campbell marketing department. (And oysters are just repackaged mucus.)
In October 2020, I had a gong go off in my head. One consequence is that after 40-something years, possibly 50, I stopped biting my fingernails. The other result was that I lost a chunk of my body. On purpose, even though a sword chop at times is likely.
Recently, I realized that I had transitioned from nibbling my nails to biting them like a rabid hyena. Looking closely at the photo, you can see the ragged mess I’ve made of my fingers. This is an example of the subconscious and anxiety fighting its way through the layers we use to camouflage ourselves. I don’t know if I will get another gong about my nails. So, I might have to resort to old-fashioned and punitive behavior modification. I could go and drive a few dozen nails with a hammer. My dubious accuracy will result in painful fingertips. I’m not proud that I’ve returned to nail biting. Weirdly, though, I don’t keep it secret. My self-image is acceptance. I rarely get self-conscious. It’s definitely not because I look like George Clooney. My spirit animal is much closer to Danny DeVito. I’d rather post a picture of it than attempt to keep it secret foolishly. For anyone young reading this, no matter what you do, age is creeping up behind you. You wake up one morning and realize that you can’t sneeze without risk of injury and that parts of your face look like road maps.
The second part is the date behind my hand. On March 4th, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and revert to my infallible weight maintenance method. While I was only up to 175, I had recently attempted to motivate someone to start the difficult process of reaching their goal. I hit my March 31st goal yesterday. And I’ll be down 10 more soon enough to return to 160, where I belong. I can’t explain how I have so much confidence in one area of my life yet consistently fail in others. Once you realize the problem is you and in your head, the lever is consistency. I don’t count calories – and not only because I lose count after ten fingers. I eat a lot of unhealthy foods when I’m doing my thing. And I hate the word “unhealthy” in this context. During my recent excursion, I cooked my first filet mignon. No one vomited or passed away as a result, so my effort was at least minimally a success.
So many of us fall into the trap of reminding one another that it’s just a question of mindset. But so many things are complicated. Even though we sometimes act like we’ve been recently hit over the head repeatedly, the truth is that thinking and cognitive ability often lose the war to reality. We know, but we don’t act. Or, more likely, we rationalize. Push it off until later. We all know how that works out.
One of my brilliant ideas is to offer someone the right to smack me in the face if they see my fingers near my mouth. (I surmise people would gladly do it for free and often, so the additional carrot of money is a sure-fire option.) It’s ironic that one of my weight loss mantras is “Don’t put it in your mouth,” yet that won’t translate to me not biting my nails like I’m using an old-school typewriter.
In the I-dodged-another-one part of my life, I found out that my equilibrium issue was caused by an ear infection. They didn’t do a brain scan because the last time, it took them 42 minutes to find mine. As most of you will testify, I usually keep it unplugged anyway. I can’t leave it unplugged long, though. The last three times I tried to live without my brain, I received 16 promotion offers. (Something about being the ideal candidate.) Love, X .
I’ve irritated some people in my life. Especially those who are arrogant or irritating about the culinary world we experience subjectively. Pineapple on pizza. Ketchup on steak. How meat should be cooked. Whether painted-on eyebrows look strange. I grew up listening to my Mom say, “You don’t know what’s good.” She could eat some things that the vultures would shriek and fly away from. My Dad forced me to eat some nasty stuff; I can laugh about it now. But a part of me laughs and rejoices because I now know he was among the worst to fail to appreciate all the kinds of foods in the world.
There is no right and wrong regarding what you eat or what you like. It doesn’t work that way. And, of course, everyone knows this. For some, the idea of eating fish eggs or oysters, aka snotshells, is as repulsive as watching a 6-year-old pick his nose and then salt and pepper it.
Whether you like your steak bleeding or burned to a crisp, it lies with each person to decide what they like. I watch people argue and criticize what other people eat. The ones criticizing tend to eat some of the most outlandish and nasty stuff on the planet. My brother Mike liked to dip. He’d mock people’s food choices relentlessly. He didn’t take it kindly when I pointed out that it looked like he had let a raccoon poop inside his lip.
If you want to put chocolate pudding on prime rib, fire away.
If you like fresh jalapeños on vanilla ice cream, pile them on there.
And if you like head cheese or liver and onions, I will gladly watch you smile and burp appreciatively as you consume it. Don’t get me started on raw celery, aka The Devil’s Anus.
But if I’m eating burned popcorn or a steak so well done that the fire department is about to come in and you make snide remarks… you’re going to find head cheese or pineapple pizza under your pillow later that night.
Everything about what we like and dislike is subjective.
There are no rules.
We can’t even agree that ties are a stupid anachronism that should be discarded. Or that shrimp are the cockroaches of the sea. But we can mock someone eating fried bologna as we gleefully munch on foie gras as if our choice is superior to theirs.
If you like to eat literal cockroaches, you’re in luck. In my world, I’m going to be fascinated by anything that I consider unusual. But I’m also going to bite my tongue because I embrace the difference in taste that we all experience.
I’m judging you if you judge others for what they put in their mouth. You better check your pillow if I hear you doing it.
It is the lowest form of mockery to mock or attempt to humiliate someone for what they eat or how they enjoy eating it. This is doubly true if you do so in front of other people while they are doing it. I don’t tell you that your pants make you look like one of the mentioned symptoms in a WebMD article; the least you can do is bite your tongue.
“Hunger does not need a cookbook.” – X
“In matters culinary, there is no greater arrogance than objecting to what someone chooses to eat or how they season it, sauce it, or flavor it. I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t an idiot with their food, and the feeling is undoubtedly reciprocal.” – X
A couple of days ago, I made a batch of healthy soup and portioned it into four separate containers. Last night, I wanted a bowl of it for supper. Not because of the cold weather, although that provided additional justification.
Here’s where my life suddenly went wrong. Like sticking your tongue in a blender wrong.
A coworker bought Erika a mix of hot sauces for her birthday last month. I’m known to love sauces. I’ve been using them all in a constant pattern like I always do. They’ve all been interesting and distinct. Erika has them in a basket by the fridge. I just grab one, often without reading the label. I like surprises.
Last night, all these tendencies came to a head. Most surprises are great. Some, however, are like opening the toilet lid only to set off a glitter bomb filled with both glitter and sneezing powder.
If you’re familiar with Carolina Reapers, you know that they are massively hot. Among the hottest possible peppers. They are about ten times hotter than habañeros and are the source of many of those crazy videos on the internet wherein idiots consume a chip seasoned with them and then vomit through their eyeballs and sweat like a manager having their expense reports scrutinized.
I heated my soup a little in the microwave and then grabbed a random bottle from the basket, pouring about 1/3 of the bottle into the soup bowl. I sat down to eat.
This is where the fireworks started. With the first bite, I thought I had eaten a spoonful of liquid fire. My tongue went numb, which turns out was worse than immediately feeling pain. Painful heat would have clearly told me I had made the wrong move. I continued to eat spoonful after spoonful of the soup, unknowingly laden with the equivalent of Hawaiian lava. I felt my eyes dilate, and that’s when the numbness abated, and the heat began to sear me like a human barbeque.
Despite this, I decided to eat all the contents of the soup and leave aside the liquid. My reptilian brain thought this might help. The heat continued to grow. As I finished the solid part of the soup, I felt like a cartoon character whose hair suddenly lit up with fire. I went to the kitchen and dumped the liquid.
Luckily, there was old ice cream remaining in the freezer. I grabbed the remnant of it, took the ice cream bucket to the living room, and began to use it in an attempt to appease the fire gods celebrating in my mouth.
I sat and imagined that if the amount of Carolina Reaper I’d consumed hit me wrong, I might find myself duct-taped to the toilet this morning or suffer the additional indignity of having it forcefully come back up and out my nose. The incredible heat of the Carolina Reaper sauce was already making me feel like I was breathing inside a chamber filled with Vick’s VaporRub.
As much as I protested to Erika, I don’t think she realized how epically I had misjudged the heat of that hot sauce bottle. I did my best to control my breathing. Before going to bed, I quickly drank two full glasses of water from the sink. When I lay down, I was certain I would awaken in a few hours and hear the thunderous rumbling of my stomach as it attempted to process what can only be described as fiery insanity. And then I would need to impersonate Usain Bolt in a vain attempt to reach the bathroom before the carnage ensued.
When I woke up this morning, my stomach wasn’t protesting more than normal, but I did feel like I was floating from the dose of preventive water the night before. After sitting and drinking a cup of coffee at 1:30 a.m. I felt the rumble.
So far, I’ve not found myself writhing on the floor or being able to shoot fire out of my nostrils like a bad comic book hero. But I do feel like I’m breathing with a mouthful of Vick’s VaporRub.
But I am nervous.
I made the mistake of Googling the consequences of consuming any such quantity of Carolina Reaper.
I didn’t know it at the time last night, but I basically consumed more of this pepper in one sitting than most hot pepper-eating champions can. It’s because I was unaware of what I was about to consume; had I known, it would have never occurred to me to try it.
Keep your fingers crossed for me.
This could be one of those days where you see me sprinting across the parking lot with my pants down, hoping to sit in the cold water of the creek. Witnesses will probably see one of the rarest of sights: fire underwater.
Love, X .
P.S. The first thing I did was drink five glasses of water, one after the other before having a cup of coffee this morning. I’m an optimist, but after Googling this damned pepper, I think I might need an IV later.
When I moved a little over 2 years ago, I left behind the special oven I bought to make a wild assortment of vegetables. When I devoted myself to losing the equivalent of 12 gallons of weight, I ate bushels of vegetables, each cooked differently with spices.
Yesterday, Erika opened up the beast in me when she deliberately overcooked tomato slices in the oven. I could have devoured 16 tomatoes cooked that way.
This morning, I cleaned and overbaked a container of Japanese shishoto peppers. I seasoned them with garlic and ranch.
While most people do not like charred flavor, for me it is sublime. And it reminds me of when I was very young and acquired a taste for burned things. One of my favorite jokes is that I loved charred food, while my Mom enjoyed burning our houses down.
If my neighbors below me are awake, it tickles me to wonder what they think I might be cooking before the sun rises. Given the track record of this neighborhood, at least my cooking efforts are culinary rather than chemical.
I have a batch of two differently flavored sliced apples in the oven now. And sugar cane stalk.
The founder of Taco Bell originally had a hot dog stand. But his competition across the street was a Mexican restaurant, so he pivoted. The “Bell” part of the name derives from the original owner’s last name. It’s hard to believe that hard taco shells weren’t really a mass market thing until Bell and a couple of his contemporaries popularized them solely because they vastly sped up the preparation process for fast food. If you want to get married at a Taco Bell, you’re in luck. The flagship location offers a full-service wedding package. I can’t confirm that unlimited toilet paper is part of the package; I just assume that it’s true. I’m fascinated by all the stories behind the scenes of people and places we’re all familiar with. X
I skipped lunch today and left work. The second part of this post notwithstanding, I went to McDonald’s for french fries, often confused as barbituates due to the deliciousness of the salt and grease which coat them. As I pulled up to the pay window, a very young woman greeted me. Before I could utter a word, she said, “Oh, your earring AND glasses match your car. It’s a beautiful color!” Without pausing, I replied, “I pick a car to match each day’s earring choice.” She laughed and said, “That makes perfect sense.” I went to the park adjacent to it and watched the huge crows scampering about and cawcawing mindlessly. It reminded me of an impromptu management meeting because all the crows were squawking simultaneously. The weather was perfect for sitting in the car and munching. Oddly, NPR was playing a segment about eating disorders. When I finished, I walked back over to McDonald’s and bought a basket of fries. These weren’t for me; the murder of crows would be the recipient. I climbed on the rocks and began to toss the fries strategically near the black, winged harbingers. The birds joyously amplified their cawcawing and screeches as they began to snatch the fallen fries from the ground. Shockingly, none of them asked for a condiment packet of ketchup to accompany their snack. A woman in a nearby car watched and smiled. As I finished, she rolled down her window and motioned for me to approach her car. She handed me a bit of bun from her burger and the remaining fries from her lunch. “Let’s try something different,” I told her. I walked a few feet away from her car and piled her remnants in a small stack and walked back to my car. The five or six crows lunged over to the pile and began pecking madly and in unison at the food on the ground. It was another round of joyous cackling and squawks as they noisily devoured the unexpected second course. The woman in her car gave me the thumbs up for giving her a closer look at the crows as they dined on America’s favorite fast food.
I got teased this morning for playing my 70-minute Rocky montage. And that tickles me. Because I got up at 1:00 a.m. and decided I would do 5 minutes of push-ups every hour. I’ll leave you to speculate how many that’s turned out to be so far. This is a one-off day because I made a promise a long time ago not to overdo it. Playing Rocky music evokes muscle memory from when I was younger. I won’t always be able to do this. And I don’t expect to. But for today, it’s a nice reminder that I can. When you don’t do the things you can, It remains remarkably easy not to do them. And for the people rolling their eyes and thinking that I’m humble bragging, that’s okay too. Push-ups have evolved into an amazing anti-anxiety remedy for me. If my arms get too sore, it’s not like I’m going to need to reach up and brush my hair. It treasonously jumped ship decades ago. I don’t miss it.
If you’ve got kids, you already know how loud a murder of crows can be. And if you have a job, you’ll probably identify with the cacophony of overlapping voices allegedly communicating at high volume. The flavor of fries still coats my mouth as I write this. It was a dumb little excursion for me after work but oddly satisfying.
Something I wrote two years ago: “I don’t look for exoneration, though I want it. There is no one in this world who can be both aware of my actions and the reasons for them except for me. Since I don’t pardon myself, I expect no less from others.” -X
I’m nudging up on the two-year mark of my brother’s death, and the ensuring bell ring/vision in my head. I’m eyeless to some of the underlying nonsense going on in my head. I’m more convinced than ever that had everything not happened in the unlikely sequence it did that I would likely be dead. Weight loss was just one component of it. Two years out, my explanation is the same: I don’t get credit for it. Something broke, and the vision I’d seen of myself would be the end result. It made me rigidly hyper-focused.
I still tell people, “Don’t give me credit for doing it. I should never have let myself go to that extent. It’s like a meth addiction; no one should embark on such a journey. It’s good that I stopped overeating, but terrible I let it go so far.”
I fluctuate around the mid-160s for my weight. I feel lighter than air at 150-155 lbs. That weight requires devout adherence to a healthier diet.
The trick isn’t losing weight. It’s figuring out what works long-term. It’s relatively easy to commit to weight loss for a few months. It’s quite another to develop a different relationship with food. Food is the in-law that sleeps in your bedroom.
Food Satan is always on duty, attempting to pounce on you. When you’re tired. When you want that sublime sensation of buttery smoothness. Or salty starch. At 11 p.m. when you really should be horizontal and not sticking your head inside the fridge.
Delicious food is ubiquitous and calls our name from the other room wearing a negligee.
It pains me to see people struggle with their weight.
I’ve watched many people make a list of ‘the reasons’ they can’t lose weight, even if they desperately want to. It’s eye-opening and mostly rationalizations. Heck, isn’t almost everything we tell ourselves?
When I lost almost all my weight, I added no additional exercise. It was immediately apparent that I was consuming an awful lot more calories than I was burning. My life was already active because of my job. Because of that, I focused all my enthusiasm on eating differently while avoiding going hungry. Being hungry is a sign that you won’t be able to maintain any successes you might experience. Generally speaking, you must eat and eat often.
I’m at the two-year mark. I’m grateful for those two years, even as I’ve had other struggles.
Primarily online, I catch hell for the simplicity with which I explain the weight loss problem. There are exceptions for some people; most of us eat too many calories versus what we burn. There is no escaping the math of it. People berate me by making specious arguments about the complexities of healthy diets. It’s not complicated at all! Less sugar, less fat, fewer processed foods, more fruits and vegetables, smaller portions, and different choices. You don’t need to be 100% militant, but you do need to be 100% vigilant about your choices. Enjoy the allegedly ‘terrible’ foods from time to time, or otherwise, you’ll go bonkers. Especially if you sit and watch your friends and family eat an entire basket of buttery breadsticks or an entire large pizza.
I do enjoy the endless arguments online about the ‘best’ way, goofy supplements, energy drinks, and the myriad ways you can be made to part with your money. Whatever you choose, you must do it for the rest of your life. Find what works. It’s not a sprint. It’s a french fry-scented marathon.
I recently looked into the beer-and-sausage guy. He does a weird diet once a year, every year. He always loses weight because his caloric intake is less. His bloodwork also improves in tandem – no matter WHAT he is eating.
It’s not a comforting idea to know that we can probably only eat 1600-3000 calories daily. If your limit is 2500, a sugary soda contains about 150, which is 1/16th of your average limit. A 2 oz. Snickers bar is 280 calories, well over 10% of your intake limit.
The simplest way to say it: most overweight people eat too many calories.
I don’t blame them. Food is amazingly delicious and brings happiness.
Fresh french fries or pizza? Oh my god. You won’t find a bigger aficionado of some types of potato chips than me. Chips and salsa? Yes, please. Two baskets if you’ve got them.
It wasn’t hard for me to practice “Choose your hard” when I started.
My vision, or whatever it was, took control.
Afterward? Remembering that food choices now bring unwanted results or continued success depends on how strong the siren voice of negligee-clad food is.
As Fat Bastard eloquently quipped, “Get in my belly!”
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 