Exposure I

Once upon a time, I catered for a living.

It wasn't the classy, dinner party kind of catering.

So much fucking class.

It was "catering" on an institutional scale for institutional crowds and by God, we used every last bit of institutional equipment we had available to us to do it.

We had walk-in refrigerators the size of studio apartments and walk-in freezers you had to go through the refrigerator to get to. They were dark, terrifying and occasionally accumulated an alarming amount of ice on the door opening mechanism. A single bulb lit the space and tried its damnedest to fight the brutal cold but could only cast a sick, yellow pallor on the frozen boxes.

There was a rack full of dirty winter coats to wear and if you were going to be in there for more than a minute or two, you were wishing you had taken the chance and grabbed a communal coat.

What I'm saying is, it was pretty fucking cold. Deep freeze, 0 degree constant temperature kind of cold. I would guess that when people die from exposure, those kind of temperatures are the last thing they feel.

The deep freezer, incidentally, was where we kept the muffins. The muffins are what we laid out, by the dozens, for our morning catering gigs. You can't put frozen muffins on a plate, of course. They have to thaw first. Fourteen pounds at a time, we'd thaw those boxes out in the (also walk-in) refrigerator.

Thawed and served.

Actually, that's how Otis Spunkmeyer (of cookie fame) continues to market their thaw and serve muffins to the foodservice industry. These tasty looking treats are not only the "#1 brand of individually wrapped muffins in foodservice", but they also have the "quality appearance consumers love". The implication of the first statement of course is that there may be a number one provider of non-individually wrapped muffins (?) and the latter statement implies that Otis Spunkmeyer knows exactly what you, the consumer, love.

The muffins are passable. They're perfectly consistent and if you take them out of the walk-in soon enough they're nice and room temperature-y by the time all the conventioneers have turned to them in a desperate bid to clear their hangover-fogged heads.

If you're a restaurateur or in the foodservice industry, none of this is surprising. And you probably don't really care. But then you've probably also stopped reading already. I point this out for every person who ever walked into a ballroom at the Hilton or the Metro Convention Center and thought, "Damn. That is a tasty looking batch of muffins." Next time, think twice.

They aren't fresh baked. They're not very tasty and the biggest thing they have going for them is thaw and serve convenience. Skip the muffins. And if you opt for the bear-claw instead and find it's a little cold in the middle? Now you know why.

I will always lie to you.

Parts two and three to follow.

The Scientific Method

I thought I had it figured out.

I gave the world of food porn a cursory glance and said, "Yeah. I got this all figured out."

In my head I had devised a food porn machine. You just check the box next to "make better" and set the glisten slider to 95% and there you have it. Pictures for the most discerning palate.

Operating on this false, bold assumption I posed the question to no one in particular: Can all food be porn'd? Can any food item be photographed to within an inch of its life and slapped on the cover of Bon Apétit? 

My head said yes -- but my gut said yes. 

I grabbed my digital picture machine and pointed it at the evening meal.

Nachos

This should be easy. Let's start with some golden sunlight streaming in on delicious ingredients.

Okay yeah, cheese. That looks pretty good.

Tortilla chips.
Good texture on these.

So far nachos pass the test. Things are looking good and graphic so let's keep building our plate of nachos.

Ground beef.
Kind of gross.

Alright well the ground beef is unappealing - but it's got the hallmark contrast, glisten and bokeh of any glossy food-magazine centerfold.

At this point things are looking a little shaky but I think our nachos are still doing fine. Let's throw some beans on this and call it a day.

Let me help.
"Plop."

That's... really unfortunate. There's plenty of texture but it's all the wrong kind. If this picture could talk it would say, "I came directly out of a can."

Then it would croak "Killlll meeeeee" like one of the cocooned colonists from Aliens.

Conclusion

Based on the evidence presented I would conclude that no, not all food can be porn'd.

At least, not yet.

Op/Ed: Emesis As A Cure For Crappy Stories

No one likes listening to your (our, collective) drinking stories. It's not because drinking isn't great and interesting -- it is.

It's because no matter how well you tell your story, or how in awe you sound of the amount of alcohol you kept down; you will never convey exactly how fully and sublimely drunk you got. When you tell a tale of drunken excess, you're the only one who really gets it. Usually, that's because no one else gets how awesome it was to feel the cool of the linoleum pressed against your face as you spun away to unconsciousness.

You could hire a poet for the sole purpose of getting drunk and passing out and then writing a poem about it, and still no one would fully appreciate the kaleidoscopic delight of being so fucking wasted the other night. You can be Andrew W.K., write a kickass party song called "Party 'Til You Puke," and still only manage to convey like 80% of how great a time you had.

For the adventurous drinker, it's a hard row to hoe. How can you express, in no uncertain terms, how much of a good time you had when you remembered you had a fifth of Kentucky Deluxe and half a two-liter of flat RC Cola?

Next time, let someone know you're having a good time the night before by throwing up.

Throw it all up, plus most of your late night Wendy's run and the shot of Canadian Club you took when you were really too drunk to be doing shots.

Was the drinking story you just finished telling a funny story? Probably not. But I bet it ran long.

Is puking hilarious? Puking is always hilarious -- and to the spectator -- never runs long.

Does your listener not "get" it? Are they failing to experience the whirling, screaming sense of being that you felt that night, getting totally faced? If they saw you puke, they would experience total engagement of all five senses.

If you count disgust as a sense, they would experience total engagement of all six senses.

Did you spend ten or fifteen minutes detailing exactly what you drank, in what order and why that special combination made for such a wonderful, mostly forgotten evening? That's boring, and a waste of time.

You can accomplish the same thing by producing a visual timeline of your consumption, in reverse, all over the listener's shoes. In seconds!

Did you specialize in something colorful like blue Curaçao, Midori or Jell-O shots?

Don't tell me - show me!

Stop wasting time telling people boring stories, blow the dust off that Cutty Sark and start creating audiovisual sensory adventures.

I can't remember any but the most recent drinking story I've heard and I can't remember any I myself have told, but I remember nearly all the times I replaced that story with dry-heaves and amazing technicolor vomit the night before.

Bonus Points

Points awarded to me, for not including a shit-ton of pictures of people throwing up at parties. Lord knows there's plenty of them out there.

Flowery Prose

My ideal job would involve working side-by-side with robots, possibly on some kind of battle-robot assembly line. Robots, from what I understand, do not employ subtlety or nuance and can only communicate in pure truth and logic. That kind of work environment would result in a job where misunderstandings and discomfort arising from such misunderstandings are kept to a minimum.

If a robot says that his job is killing him, he's probably being crushed to death by a giant cog when he says it.

Likewise if a robot announces that he could just kill you right now, you're probably about to have your windpipe crushed by cold, metallic claws.

Currently, I do not work with robots.

Without any robots to work with I find myself talking to people - often on a daily basis. I've come to terms with that.

As a result of working with and sometimes talking to people I understand that they use figures of speech. Figures of speech make words fun and let people create all kinds of clever turns of phrase. They can talk about golden parachutes and low hanging fruit and getting down in the weeds and no one has to leave the crushing claustrophobia of their cubicle to picture being on some kind of airborne fruit-gathering parachute safari.

Having said that, sometimes I think people forget how this whole thing works.

If someone's totally swamped, I can imagine them being mired in a swamp of paperwork and e-mail (in my imagination the e-mail has also been printed out [which is incidentally a waste of paper]) and as a result of being mired in this swamp, they're quite busy. It makes sense. If you weren't familiar with business metaphors you would still understand the concept of being swamped.

Unfortunately when you start playing hard and fast with your metaphors, people get hurt. When someone apologizes for sending a document back with two dozen inconsequential edits, they may explain it away because they're so anal. As in, anal retentive. This disturbs me because I usually only hear the word "anal" in very specific, non work-related contexts.

Depending on what you do for a living you may hear it exclusively in work-related contexts.

What they mean is "I'm often very picky about things" but instead of saying that they're picky, they're going out of their way to make an allusion to Freud's concept of the anal stage of child development. That is, they're displaying traits associated with control of the bowels. Like being really fucking picky about punctuation,

I take umbrage with this because rather than just saying that they're picky, or saying that they have minor OCD (probably also not true) they have to trot out that word. And since "Anal retentive" is too long, they shorten it. And then they totally lose my attention because I'm thinking of something else besides comma-splices and, run-on sentences.

Of course, there's an even less appropriate office metaphor that sees use.

When someone walks out of a meeting and says "Man, that meeting was a total cluster," they're speaking metaphorically. They're saying that the meeting was such a mess and so convoluted, it was very similar (metaphorically) to a clusterfuck.


They have to be making figurative comparisons because otherwise they're saying that the meeting was an actual clusterfuck. I'm trying not to internet this too hard so I have to imagine that means the meeting was like an orgy, but very poorly organized. This is difficult for me to believe because if an orgy, no matter how poorly organized, was going on anywhere in the office (or in the alley behind the office) I would have certainly heard of it.

Consequently if they really had come from an actual clusterfuck it would be appropriate for me to say,  "That explains why you're so sore."

Or, "That sounds terrible. Where is this clusterfuck, again?"

Am I being picky? Is there any other word that could serve as a high-impact metaphor for a sloppy meeting? How about, "It was a shambles!" A shambles is a total mess - but it also used to be an open-air slaughterhouse! Now you don't have to sex up the workplace in a wholly inappropriate manner but you can still make your point.

What if you said the meeting was bedlam? That means it was a crazy meeting but it's also:


"a popular name for the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, which served as a lunatic asylum from circa 1400 [...]"


That sounds like a great metaphor for a terrible meeting! Good for you! 


Would you perhaps say instead that meeting was pandemonium? That's great too, and you get extra points for making an allusion to Paradise Lost. If you weren't aware of the allusion, you lose no points for creeping me out! 


My favorite way to describe a bad meeting?


"A mess."


Maybe all the meetings I go to all happen after the clusterfuck.


All I'm saying is that if I told someone that my next meeting was going to be a total DP, they'd probably look at me funny. 


Then they'd google it and I'd get fired. 

Word To Your Mother

I'm just sayin'.

Click for mom-vision

Your mom probably isn't great with Word.

Food (Porn)

There's never been a better time to be a foodie than this very second. All manner of stupid shit is available to the discerning gourmand - if you want to serve your roasted heirloom tomato amuse-bouche on a hot slab of pink Himalayan salt, you can do that.

Lucky for you, it's expensive!

More good news - people love writing about food almost as much as they love buying accoutrements to press their roasted cauliflower and brined pork belly bánh mì. Or whatever.

The power and popularity of food writing is exemplified in the Michelin Guide. I have to assume that this thing started where AAA car club ratings are now, but because it's French it became much more important.

No one is surprised that the Michelin Man likes food.

As an aside, there are only three Michelin stars a restaurant can earn. Losing one is a pretty big deal; ask Bernard Loiseau. He confided in a colleague that, after working 17 years to gain three stars, he would kill himself if he lost one. He then did so, amid rumours of his restaurant losing its third star.

So what I'm saying is food writing holds power over life itself.  

You've strayed a bit...

Back to food porn! Anyway with all of these people writing about food, some of them even use pictures to go along with the words they write. This strategy has worked well for magazines for years.

Sometimes the strategy works with hardly any words at all.

Given the strong pedigree of the "words + pictures" format it wasn't very long before an enterprising citizen journalist (or thousands of bloggers) combined the two in their own food writing efforts. Those with good cameras hit on the concept of "food porn". It's kind of popular. Just ask these guys. 

Or these guys or this group of 500,000 pictures over here on Flickr.

Didn't click on those 'cause you're at work? First of all it's too late - they already saw the Juggs cover. Second of all, here's what you missed:

Goat cheese ice cream with fresh cherries and who fucking cares.
Except yeah, I'd eat that.

In fact nearly all food porn (so-called) looks like this. It's all beautifully shot and the background is beautifully blurred and the food is beautifully staged. The lighting is spot on and every dish looks like a centerfold from an alternative universe where food eats people and their subscription to Penthouse is filled with hot food-on-food action. I don't feel like reading what Wikipedia has to say about food porn - although rest assured that an article exists - but it's basically a nice, edgy hyperbole for fancy food photography. 

Amateur food porn is often poorly lit, blown out by on-camera flash and not arousing appealing. 

This is making me uncomfortable...

Stick around, champ, because it's about to get worse! 

I found something. Actual food porn. It hits on the worst parts of both worlds and it's intensely unsettling. And I found it on QVC! Your grandma could be watching it right this second and it's the worst thing I've ever seen. 

If you used the money from your National Endowment for the Arts grant to make an awful sculpture of post-coital genitalia from hot, glistening meats and melting cheeses you'd approximate (closely) what I'm talking about here. 

Perhaps... we should let the pictures do the talking?

QVC, you go right to hell.

Here's the full video. The video is very, very bad. The roast has a certain pliability to it - the way it moves when manipulated forcefully is reminiscent of... something. And then the juices! God, the juices! See how they flow forth when brushed ever so lightly. Watching this roast get rough-handled is probably illegal in Oklahoma, Alabama and Utah. 

Consider too: while the knife is bad, many prying fingers would have been much, much worse.

"So what?" you ask. "Doesn't remind me of anything at all!" 

Get off your pulpit, churchy, and get ready to stick it in some more meat! 

Wham!

Watch the video. As with any... movie, you have to sit through some boring talking before you get to the action. Please do though, it's so much more challenging that way. This one... I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to describe what's happening here. The cheese is sliding out from between these cleft slices of ham and...

No. Don't look at it sideways, either. I'm stopping. My stomach hurts. I feel dizzy. This whole thing is all wrong. I wanted to cleanse my eye-palate with a nice boring picture of maize but then all I could think about was cramming it into that chicken while the roast sits back and watches. Let me try again. 

Bask in the total banality of the provolone cheese slice.

I could look at those cheese slices forever. They're bland and usual and there's nothing pornographic or unsettling about them. 

Goddamnit no! Cheese slices, why have you forsaken me!?

Alright well I guess I'll just wrap this up and...

FUCK.

Meat-faced horror courtesy of http://funkypunkyandplump.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-dinner-guest.html.

The Moon Says... (II)



It's the middle of the day and I can see through trees.
Put your pants on and go buy some guns!