Food: A Love Story

Listening to the filler-filled Voice Finale, waiting for them to finally announce the winner... and decided I'd take this time to blog some fun quotes from Jim Gaffigan's book, which I finished earlier today!

I like Jim's comedy, and this title and cover pic made me laugh before ever opening the book, so deciding to buy it didn't take long. Maybe it's sad that I read a book about food from cover to cover, but I definitely laughed a lot and identified with it - #thestruggleisreal - so I'd say worth it! :) 

*I'll go ahead and acknowledge the irony up front that I'm writing this right after my Motivational Monday post and that I read this book right before I'm starting Reshaping it All by Candace Cameron Bure! lol Whatever, I'm full of randomness sometimes. The next book review will be inspiring - but this one will make you laugh! =)

Okay, now for the quotes (all funnier if you can imagine him saying it):

(Cover Flap) 
"Have you ever finished a meal that tasted horrible but not noticed until the last bite? ...Does the presence of green vegetables make you angry? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are pretty pathetic, but you are not alone... Food: A Love Story is an in-depth, thoroughly uninformed look at everything from health food to things that people actually enjoy eating."

Intro:

What are my qualifications to write this book? None, really. So why should you read it? Here’s why: I’m a little fat. …I wouldn’t trust them skinnies with food advice. When a thin person announces, “Here’s a great taco place,” I kind of shut down a little. How do they know it’s so great? From smelling the tacos? Overweight people have chosen food over ap­pearance. When a fat person talks about a great place to get a burger, I lean in. They know. …What other credentials do you need, really? Stop being a snob. Read the book already.

On always being full:

When I don’t want to eat something, I assume I’m sick and most likely dying. When the instructions on medication say, “Never take on an empty stomach,” I think, Not a concern of mine. I’m sure your mother told you not to go swimming until an hour after eating. This is a virtual impossibility for me. Technically, I should never go swimming.
 
On pre-dinner prayer:

My wife likes to pause before the meals with our kids and say grace. While I think this is a great opportunity for our children to learn to appreciate the gifts that God has given them, I view grace as kind of the “On your mark, get set…” and the “Amen” as the “Go!” I am pretty sure that’s the way God intended it.

On witnessing a stranger drinking a cup of gravy:

I love the rare moments when I’m truly surprised by American eating… Now, in full disclosure, I love gravy. Who doesn’t, really? But even in my most private moments with gravy, I’ve never contemplated taking a swig.

On seafood:

There is a reason why Red Lobster and the exterminators have the same image on their signs. Shellfish are bugs… there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between a lobster and a giant scorpion.

I don’t even understand how mankind started eating oysters. How hungry would you have to be to make that leap?

Man 1: Hey, I found a rock with a snot in it. I was thinking of eating it.

Man 2: Um, okay. Go ahead.

Man 1: (slurps up the oyster)

Man 2: What does it taste like?

Man 1: Pneumonia.

Now the octopus delights people as high-end cuisine. Eaten, of course, after carefully boiling the octopus properly to rid it of slime, smell, and residual ink. Yum!

On Healthy Eating:

I hate when I try to order a salad and my mouth says, “I’ll have a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.” It’s like I have autocorrect in my mouth.

I go through different stages of healthy eating. First, it’s the “I’m only eating salads” phase. Then I’ll get to the “I’ve eaten salads for half a day straight – I should treat myself to a hamburger” phase. Finally, I get to the last phase, which I’m in right now, the “I don’t give a phase.” If you are like me, when you enter this last phase, you begin to justify things. Then all your food choices quickly become an endless stream of irrational rationalizations. “Well, I’ll allow myself to eat that because I had a salad a month ago. Well, I’ve earned that because I took out the garbage. Well, I’m starting my starvation diet tomorrow, so I really should have five hamburgers.”

Organic is probably the biggest scam of the century. For those of you unfamiliar with it, organic is a grocery term for “more expensive.” There are people who eat only organic food, and then there are people who don’t have tons of money to waste.

Supposedly, there are good fats and bad fats. I like to think of myself as a good fat. It helps my self-esteem when I look in the mirror.

Can we just settle down with the farmers’ market enthusiasm? Instead of going to a grocery store and getting everything I need, I can stand outside and buy some dirty vegetables on the street from absolute strangers who supposedly live on a farm…

It’s hard to eat healthy. It’s too expensive: Should I have this salad for twelve bucks or these five hamburgers for a dime?

On Fruit:

(Chapter titled “Nobody Really Likes Fruit” followed by “Even Fewer People Like Vegetables. lol)

Even when people seem excited to see fruit, they are really just relieved it’s not vegetables.

Once a friend excitedly asked me, “Why don’t we go apple picking?” Because I’d rather die. You have to pay to pick apples? “Okay, how  much do I owe you to work for you for free? Don’t rip me off. I’m no dummy.”

If honeydew melons disappeared from the planet, would anyone even notice?

At some point during the turn of the last century, it became acceptable for people to send cut fruit arranged like flowers. I’d like this to stop.

On Vegetables:
Think back to the last time you ate a vegetable. Did you WANT to eat the vegetable? Congrats on that healthy choice, but don’t confuse a healthy choice with a desire to eat a vegetable. I mean, I don’t want to be fat, but I want vegetables less.
 
Parents dishonestly announce how good vegetables are in front of young children, hoping that because of the young­sters’ absence of life experience and sheer stupidity, they will be tricked into liking them.

It’s staggering, the exertion that is put into making vegetables appealing. At their best, vegetables are the sidekicks. The opening band you didn’t come to see at the concert. The asparagus next to the steak. The expectation is that the entrée is so good you won’t notice that you are eating mutant blades of grass.

Probably what makes cooked bell peppers so special is that they can ruin the taste of any dish they are in. Green, red, yellow, or orange peppers—you can change the color, but when I see one, I prepare for dis­appointment. 

On vegetable trays:

Occasionally, raw, naked, unenhanced vegetables are shame­lessly presented as if they are actually desirable. A tray of veg­etables at a party almost makes me sad. The only thing that raw vegetables have ever been good for is the careers of hummus and ranch dressing… “Who is throwing this party? A nutritionist? Peter Rabbit? Is this a party or a Weight Watchers meeting?” You know they are just there for decora­tion. Who doesn’t want to look at pretty colors while scarf­ing down pigs in a blanket.

On eating salad:

To me, salad eaters never seemed happy. It’s a well-known fact that it’s impossible to have a good time when a salad is placed in front of you. Why would someone voluntarily eat lettuce? Possibly the most impressive thing about a salad is that you can eat tons and tons of it and never be satisfied. After I’ve eaten a salad, I always feel like I’ve earned something, like a meal, or at least maybe I’ve raised money to fight cancer. “I will finish this salad if you sponsor me for five dollars a leaf.” A salad for me takes so much effort. That’s why on the rare occasion I’ve had a salad as an entrée, I feel less like I’ve made a healthy choice and more that I’m being punished. Without a heavy dose of salad dressing, I feel like I’m eating a bag of yard work.

I have eaten salads. Whenever I get a steak, I always order a salad, thinking that will somehow balance it out. “Twenty pounds of meat, two leaves of lettuce. That should cover it.”

A salad bar just doesn’t make sense to me. There is virtually no difference between the germ levels of a salad bar and a kiddie pool. And why would someone want to make his or her own salad? To make matters more confusing, the salad bar usually only has small plates. “All-you-can-eat salad…off this drink coaster.”

My favorite type of salad has to be the taco salad… taco salad makes no effort to live up to the healthy perception of a salad. An edible, deep-fried bowl to hold a “salad” that is mostly cheese and meat.

Random funny-and-true one-liners:

Granola is considered healthy, and we know this mostly because it tastes like gravel.

Chopsticks are fun, but I’d rather eat than play Operation.

Nostalgia is the only thing keeping Peeps in circulation.

To me, ducks are a little too adorable to eat.

A cheeseburger a day keeps the feelings away.

Some people make fun of White Castle, and these people are called everyone.

In Wisconsin, they have deep-fried cheese curds, which taste like French fries and heaven had a baby.

The food served on Super Bowl Sunday is all handheld and makes the Thanksgiving meal look like a health shake.

I think we can all agree turkey bacon was a valiant but failed experiment. Some believe 70 percent of all disappointment we feel in life is from turkey bacon.

While many of us associate hot dogs only with happy times, there are the party poopers who get all caught up in the facts. Hot dogs are like strippers, really. Nobody wants to know the backstory.

I’ve come to the conclusion that hot dogs could be made up of just about anything and I’d still eat them. Well, anything but kale. I have some boundaries.

I don’t follow the logic sometimes presented to me: “Hey, you love food, so you must enjoy cooking.” I also enjoy sleeping, but that doesn’t mean I like making a bed.

I love going to the grocery store. For me it’s like going to an art museum of food I’ve eaten. Ah, the work of Frito-Lay... What a lovely exhibit.

On cheese:

When I’m lying in bed thinking about cheese, which is usually every night, I’m typically thinking about Cheddar cheese. When I say Cheddar, I’m talking about sharp Cheddar. I don’t understand why “mild” Cheddar even exists. It’s like the nonalcoholic beer of Cheddar.

On eating outside:

I know people love an outdoor barbecue, but to me it just means “Let’s make the food more accessible to insects.” I mean, I enjoy the wind blowing a plate of potato salad onto my shirt as much as the next guy… but eating, cooking, or even being outdoors just feels counterintuitive to me. There’s just too much standing.

On fast food:

I truly enjoy the societal outrage directed at McDonald’s: “McDonald’s food has no nutritional value! There are no vitamins!” I always imagine McDonald’s’ confused reaction to be “Um, excuse me? We sell burgers and fries. We never said we were a farmers’ market. Heck, our spokesman is a pedophile clown from the ‘70s. What do you want from us, America?”

Wendy’s Frosties, like the White Witch in Narnia, are dangerous. They are too thick to be a shake and served in a cup so that we can deny we are eating six scoops of melted ice cream.

It seems Taco Bell will do just about anything to get people into their restaurant, or more specifically, their room with a microwave in it. None of the food is cooked at Taco Bell. It’s reheated and assembled on-site. Taco Bell is fundamentally one step up from an office break room. For a while, there was a commercial actually promoting the “Taco Bell Diet,” which I’m pretty sure was constructed on the belief that once you eat Taco Bell, you won’t want to eat again. If you are going to Taco Bell for your diet, you have a bigger problem than your weight.

Arby’s is like the cousin of the other fast-food places, but it’s that weird cousin you never see, and when you do, you always think, Oh yeah, you exist.

When Sbarro recently announced that it was filing for sbankruptcy, I was sbad. I wasn’t sburprised, given that Sbarro is a pizza chain that doesn’t deliver pizza. That doesn’t seem sbmart.

On ketchup:

There really isn’t any condiment competition for ketchup. Mustard, the closest competition, is the Mets to ketchup’s Yankees. Mustard has its fans, but there really is no comparison.

What is with the single-serve size of those ketchup packets? I’m not saying I need a gallon of ketchup, but maybe enough for more than one fry. Tearing open twenty packets with my teeth, I end up looking like a heroin addict. Most often, fast-food places give you two or three packets, and if you go back up to ask for more, they make you feel like you are trying to score drugs.

Sometimes the packets will have printed on them “Not for resale.” I didn’t know this was an issue… were people looking at ketchup packets and thinking, eBay, here I come. Ca-ching! If you are in a position where you have to sell ketchup packets, I don’t know if anything written on the packet is going to hold you back.

On cake:

Cake is how life is celebrated. Birthdays, weddings, and retirements are honored with cake… Cake is a social food. It must be eaten with someone else or in a group. There is something profoundly sad about eating cake while you are all alone. Believe me, I do it all the time.

A helpful visual aid:

Chapter title: Breakfast: A Reason to Get Out of Bed

Every table in IHOP is equipped with its own caddy filled with an assortment of syrups. Each of the syrup containers is personally licked by a similar assortment of five-year-olds.

If you’ve never had the chance to visit a Waffle House, simply imagine a gas station bathroom that serves waffles. That sums up the atmosphere pretty well.

A heartfelt closing:

My advice to you, dear reader, is to eat well and eat frequently. Our time here is pretty short. It’s filled with disappointments and drama, and food can make it better… it’s important that you enjoy your life. That’s why a decent cheeseburger is always a good decision… I hope your worst eating experiences are behind you. May you enjoy only great meals, mostly with family and close friends. I hope your coffee is strong, your cheese is sharp, and your guacamole is chunky. 

Back cover: