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Instagram and just why?

I don’t have an Instagram. My own proud bit of counterculture which I'll swear makes me interesting. I can go on and on about the provable science that says it’s actively making you unhappy, or how it’s a massive hit to your self-conscious, or how it’s making society more vapid and useless every day it persists (maybe I do care about this). Truth be told I just have no desire to deal with most of that bullshit. I don’t really care that you went to a party, or look good today or wanted to show off—which is most of it, let’s be honest. I have no desire to put in the effort to appear sociable while sitting alone behind the screen of my phone. The one that I just cannot fathom is the food pictures though. I don’t even have an Instagram, but from the limited time I put into Snapchat, there’s at least a few stories of just food.

it’s not like these are even good pictures or food or advertising either. People aren’t putting up a picture of a burger and then reviewing it, there’s almost never a caption saying ‘wow this burger from Whitney’s is good you should try it!’. It’s just the food.

The other perplexing issue is that food does not photograph well. There’s nothing more off-putting than a cheap takeout menu with just awful pictures of food on it. Advertising agencies spend millions just trying to make food look edible, let alone good. Nevertheless, prior to meals, the ritualistic picture taking occurs. To me, it begs the question of why? Who actually cares about what food you ate if you give us nothing more about it? Are we supposed to be jealous? Are you proclaiming to the world, “look, I too eat?” Do you want me to talk to you about the food maybe? But then why not ask me? I realize at the end of the day I’m asking dumb questions of a dumb activity and probably leading nowhere fast. To me, it says a lot more about the platform than anything else.

We aren’t interested in sharing as platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat so want us to. We are interested in peacocking. We don’t put up interesting moments of our lives on social media so that we can share it with our friends—all whatever hundred of them. We do it because it makes us look good, it makes us look interesting. We partake in this addiction not to really share anything but in the hope that it’ll make us better looking. People aren’t posting pictures of their food to create conversation, share good eats or build commonality. They’re doing it to brag, and if your bragging about eating, take a step back.      

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Cafeteria food, maybe rethinking life

As I have stated over and over, it’s literally the title, I’m more of an ‘eat to live’ kind of person. I’ve never been particularly jazzed on this whole eating thing. For me, it was always just something you kinda do. Obviously, I like food, and having a good meal is as good for me as it is for anybody else. It’s the normal day to day eating that just doesn’t get me going. Living in college and eating here has made me rethink this a little.

I realize it’s pretty easy to not get jazzed about food when the food you eat every day is generally good. When the baseline for what you’re eating every day is pretty good you kinda forget about it being an interesting part to your day. Now I’m in college and my daily options for food are generally…not the best. It’s not that college food is really bad it’s just that it holds a consistent standard of being subpar. It’s pretty rare that I walk out of the cafeteria thinking that was a good meal, it’s more that I’m just not hungry anymore. Take today as an example. I got up for a morning class and afterword was feeling like something for breakfast. I got some scrambled eggs with bacon, turkey, broccoli, and spinach. Sounds good right? And it actually was. I sat and enjoyed my meal thinking, wow that was a good meal and then it hit me. These scrambled eggs are only good because I’ve grown used to them being bad. Compared to normal scrambled eggs these are pretty subpar, but compared to the normal eggs here they aren’t bad.

This puts a couple holes in my philosophy on this though. Because if I really did adhere to the whole ‘eat to live’ thing I wouldn’t really care. These eggs are good enough, nutritious to an extent and not the worst thing. But I do care, I miss good food or at least standard food. Which means I can’t strictly adhere to this whole thing. Fine, from henceforth the title is now changed to, “Eat to live, mostly”.

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Starbucks and Corporatism

I saw an interesting photo the other day that got me thinking. It was a picture of woman organizing a small business day event, with a Starbucks cup in hand. As easy the irony is to see, I think it says something a little bit deeper about what it is that went wrong with corporatism. We can decry Starbucks all day long, or at least I can, but the truth is at this point they basically own coffee in the united states. Everybody and their mother, and my mother, is drinking it. Gone are the days of local coffee shops or really local anything. We have replaced butchers, fish markets, vegetable markets and dry goods markets for just supermarkets. We’ve replaced the local mechanic with an auto zone. The local burger place with a McDonalds. The list goes on. But, while this sounds sad, we forget that we did this to ourselves.

It’s not like Starbucks came into your town, bought the local place and then forced you to buy their coffee. That’s not what happened. Starbucks came and then everybody made the choice to go there instead of the local coffee shop. It’s not this is a bad choice either. Starbucks might make better coffee than the local place, might be cheaper, or just closer to your house. It’s not like this an evil decision but at the end of the day, it was a choice. Nobody forced Starbucks on you, you chose to go there. Nobody took your money, you gave it to them.

I hear constantly those decrying the corporation as some evil conglomerate that we’re powerless to stop. That their invasion of our homes was an inevitability of some malicious machine. But, they’re not and it wasn’t. That choice starts with every one of us. If you like small businesses, and what they do for your community, you’re gonna have to bite the bullet and pay a little more, drive a little further or maybe get a bad coffee every now and again. We have control over what we buy and what that says about us. But that’s up to you, not Starbucks.

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Coffee, the greatest drug ever in the worst form

Well, caffeine is really the greatest drug ever of all time but at this point coffee is really the preferred way of getting at it—Unless you’re one of those crazies who take actual caffeine pills, more on that later. On caffeine itself, humans consume about 300 tons of caffeine a day and that’s enough for everybody on the planet to have a cup of coffee and it’s fairly safe to assume most everybody that can do. It was also meant as an insecticide to ward off pesky bugs eating at coffee trees, their deaths were probably the most vivid things imaginable, tragic. Scaled up to us humans it’s a wonder drug, increasing memory and attention with few side effects. Back to the coffee itself minus its miracle properties.

I don’t like coffee all that much. It might be my lack of beanies or general hipster attitude but It’s always been kinda nasty to me. I’ve never gotten into the different blends or temperatures to brew it at or any of that stuff. Maybe I haven’t been exposed to the best coffee, but like ‘better’ wines it just seems to be a better variation of an already bad taste. So I don’t drink a lot of coffee. When I do it’s enjoyed bitterly only for its fantastic side effects. So if I want to get at coffee’s miracle side effects, without the taste of it why not expresso?

Expresso came across to me as the shots of the coffee world. All about getting to the desired ends with as fast of a means as possible, without caring about how it tastes. But, just like shots in a lot of ways, expresso went the way of the pretentious. It has to be fancy now. It comes in dainty little mugs which are more of a joke on mugs then actually mugs. They have these weird different types and flavors with fancy Italian names that are absolutely meaningless to me. I’m not gonna go in a coffee shop, try all these silly words out until I get one I like and then go back to the same coffee shop because apparently only they can do it right. Nope, I’m not doing that. If I have to walk into a random coffee shop and say a bunch of fake words to a guy who doesn’t care to get what I want, that’s not happening. If I’m Italy, yeah I’ll do that, but I’m not in Italy. I’m at a Dunkin on I-90 and I just want to not fall asleep by the time I get to grandmas’. So, I don’t drink espresso.  

Alright, what about straight caffeine? If I don’t like coffee and espresso is just too much work let’s go straight to the source right? No, let’s not do that. I’d rather deal with a poor tasting coffee then go down that rabbit hole. You may like caffeine pills, and that’s fine, but that's a weird path I am not starting on. Don’t really know where it starts, don’t care to know where it ends.

So I’m left with maybe the most unglamorous option of them all, the frappe. The frappe, or frappuccino, isn’t coffee. The frappe is sugary milk with a coffee bent. The frappe is closer to liquid caffeinated ice cream than it is to coffee. But I love it. It’s the yuppiest of any coffee, so typically associated with the stereotype of a valley girl that they’re practically inseparable. To make matters worse, the Starbuck’s ones happen to be my favorite. I’m not proud of it, but man does it taste good and gives an ample amount of that sweet sweet caffeine.  

Goddamn, I hate coffee but I love what it does and I need it. Right now I’ll drink my coffee frappe, and hate myself all the more for it. At least my homework is done.    

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Drinking and why I wasn’t screwed in college

While we’re on a rebellious streak, let's talk about drinking in college, specifically drinking in the united states at colleges and universities. In the wake of recent fraternity hazing tragedies like Tim Piazza of Penn State, Maxwell Gruver of LSU, Andrew Coffey of FSU and many countless others it’s becoming clear that America has a problem with drinking.

Not a drinking problem per say, topic for another time, but we have a problem with how we treat and hold alcohol itself. Drinking in America isn’t just an action it’s become a taboo. Underage kids drink, I don’t even have to prove this to you because we all know it’s happening. Yet we pretend like we don’t know this. We pretend that these rules are stopping kids from drinking or making them safer somehow.

They’re not and we know they’re not. Instead of treating drinking as a common social action we’ve perverted it. By the stroke of an arbitrary number we’ve decided for these people it’s okay and for these it’s not while completely ignoring that those excluded from the party will just do it anyway and do it in a way that’s unsafe. Binge drinking is the most dangerous way to consume alcohol and is the lead cause of alcohol fatalities. It’s also the logical conclusion of banning alcohol from those trying to use it. Of course, if you have an illegal product you’re gonna use it, and a lot of it, in a fast manner in order to not be caught with it. Because of this, underage drinking has taken on a life of its own.

Drinking when you’re not supposed to is not just drinking anymore, it’s become taking part in an illegal action and getting a buzz off both. When you’re playing with mild poison, adding an element of rebellion and then teenagers, no shit you’re gonna have a problem. It’s also no wonder that by the end of the college when you can do it legally, many cut back significantly and are often far safer.

Why was I not screwed? Because drinking was ordinary to me. My dad has been offering me a beer at family gatherings or dinners at home since I was maybe 13 or 14. I remember originally saying no, being the goody two shoes I am. Thinking I wasn’t supposed to have that, it was illegal meaning it was bad and I couldn’t do that. But slowly I warmed up to it. I’d take a beer here and there, at a big family gathering or sometimes just dinner. Soon a beer on the porch with my dad or relatives was time-honored tradition.

At the time I didn’t think much of it. Obviously, my dad wasn’t okay with me running around to house parties or anything like that. I didn’t have the ‘cool parents’ that seem to accompany some kind of deadbeat. But my dad did normalize alcohol to me. I got acclimated to drinking not hurriedly in some obscured place in constant fear of being caught, but in my house with the awkward company of my family. And I thank my dad for it all time because it’s imparted familiarity in the place of insecurity. I do drink in college. Please, it is still college. But my approach has been altered for the better, and I have my dad to thank for that.  

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4/20 and why the munches are so damn cool

It’s April 20, the day stoners across the nation rejoice for some reason or another. The exact history of ‘420’ is shrouded in some sort of cloudy mysticism but apparently comes from a California police code for smoking in the ‘70s. Since then 420 has become almost a joke on itself, a parody of weed culture for sure but also a celebrated event.

Being in college and having friends with, we’ll say, connections I figured why not. We smoked some weed, ate a lot and hung out on a Friday afternoon. Oh nooo come the cries of some excessive prudes, how dare they?  Ignoring that the states who have legalized it are doing fine and that the states who haven’t are full of deviants, like myself, who will continue to do it anyway— almost entirely unharmed. The politics on the drug are excessive at best and idiotic at worst but not worth the discussion in this medium.

What we are here for is the classic stoner calling, munchies. You wanna eat a lot of food when you get high. I’m sure there is a complex biochemical reasoning for this but at the end of the day, it holds true for almost everybody. You get high, you eat a lot of food. The prepared stoner will be equipped with an array of snacks at his or her disposal, but for me the quintessential is chips.

The thing about chips which is so great has to do with why the munchies are so cool. Eating while high doesn’t remove your expectations of how food is supposed to taste or feel, but it does change the outcome in an entertaining way. To live the stereotype, take a Dorito (cool ranch, of course). You have every expectation of how it should taste, the crunch, chew and overall feeling of eating a chip. But when you do it, something changes. It’s still a chip, it still tastes like a chip and crunches like a chip but it also doesn’t. There’s a subtle difference in some aspect of it each time. Maybe the texture just feels a little different, the taste a little more pronounced, maybe a little less. The chip isn’t changing, we’re not that high, but our perception of the chip is.

This is why the munchies are cool, it defies exception not through subversion of events but by changing our own perception. We aren’t pleasantly surprised because something outside of us has changed, it’s solely because our perception of the same event has changed. This creates a realization that overall this can be the case. That our perception, not reality, is deciding how we view the world. So, an overthought of pretty common feeling? Probably, but not one entirely devoid of an interesting point.

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Soy-lent and the ‘meal in a cup’ revolution

So, as somebody who is not big on this whole eating regularly thing you’d think products like Soylent, Queal and Ample would be attractive to me, but they aren’t. For some context Soylent, and products like it, are what’s been deemed ‘meal in a cup’ or ‘meal in a bottle’ products. These products are designed and marketed like the sound, supposedly providing all the nutrients of a meal but in a bottle that you would drink quickly when you don’t want to have a sit-down meal.

The problem with this is two-fold. The ones that taste decent, aren’t actually all that nutritional and the ones that are nutritional taste, at best, like liquid chalk. Boosts are a good example of the first part. While they taste like a savory rich chocolate milk they’re only an additive to an existing meal. Which is kinda a buzzkill. The other end of the spectrum is Soylent. Which while close enough to a complete meal in terms of nutrition is how I imagine the texture and taste of liquid concrete would be.

Neither of these include the harsh reality that if you do turn to his alternative for your meals a consistent poop is a thing you’re going to have to kiss, or preferably not, goodbye.

To parrot the wise words of then American Idol host Randy Jackson, “Yeah, that's gonna be a no from me, dawg.”  

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The simple equation that made me underweight

I was depressed my senior year of high school. I was in an awful declining relationship, my grandfather’s passing had wreaked my father and family, countless other small miseries had just made me feel awful. While I could (and have) written about this, the details don’t matter all that much. Just that, there were so many things, big and small, that weighed on me.

Seems like a lot on someone's plate right? Well, quite the opposite. I stopped eating almost altogether. I would skip breakfast because I didn’t want to get up, I would skip lunch because I didn’t want to see people and then I would nibble on dinner to satisfy mostly my parents and only somewhat myself.

I didn’t notice it at first. I was rarely hungry. Having always been a somewhat pudgy kid, (my “dad bod” had been a common joke among friends) I had always just ignored the way I looked. Having dropped out of any exercise I had no real connection to how my body was feeling or looked. I began to lose weight. A lot of weight, I weighed about 150 pounds prior to losing my appetite and quickly dropped to 130 pounds, dipping down to 125 pounds at some points.

My parents were the first to say something and quickly provided me with almost anything I would want to eat. Which was silly, I didn’t want to eat anything. To make up for this we got these ‘Boost’ drinks which were basically a nutrition rich chocolate milk which thankfully I loved.

As I worked out from under my depression my appetite, and weight, returned. I am now a normal weight and exercising regularly has made me confident in my body. What I learned from this was complicated, but in terms of food and weight was simple.

If you aren’t eating as much as your body is using, you will lose weight. If you’re eating more than your body is using, you will gain weight.

And learning this first hand, and dramatically, made me realize there are no shortcuts to this equation. All of these diet programs are advertising shortcuts. “Get thin fast”, “lose weight easy” etc are all bogus. There is nothing that can make you lose or gain weight that will make this process easy or fast. It took me months to lose as much weight as I did and even longer to purposefully gain it back. The equation is simple, it just takes a lot of work to make happen.

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Food built the world

We are a food culture. In the strict, literal sense that is. While many so-called ‘foodies’ would like to think society revolves around food this is only partially the case. While it is true that society revolves around food, it’s more true that society revolves around resources, and this is especially true in the modern world. Look at this more precisely as a culture born of food then the reverse. We organize ourselves in a manner in which to obtain resources and provide order to retain those resources. (At least in theory, let’s not get down into the weeds here.)

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had culture, but it would pale in comparison to what we describe in the modern world. More concerned with simply finding enough to eat, these primitive cultures had leaders, basic language, and probably some form of mythology or creed. It’s more appropriate to compare these early(ish) humans with animals that organize themselves similarly, think lion prides or even monkey troops. So what changed?

We got smart. The ability to produce and store food long term in a predictable manner changed everything. No longer were we always bound to finding food. Now there were people who made food, and people who would protect the food, and people to manages the food. This is the first society, and no longer were we just bound to the simple animal like hierarchies of our past. We invented systems to figure out how to deal with each other, both literally and figuratively. These questions begin to broach into topics of simple economics. Who gets what? How do we make it? How do we ensure we can keep it? Etc Etc. These questions also prompted others, questions of the ethics on top of the economics. What do we value? How do we act? Who do we trust, and how do we ensure we can?

These types of questions built society, and it seems like a far distant past but it’s not. Today’s cultural landscape may seem endlessly complicated. The question of how to read a text seems entirely devoid of the original organic questions that would eventually lead to it. But it’s not, and that seems hard to grasp without feeling almost petty.

It’s important to remember these truths for a variety of reasons, but the most important I feel is the remembrance of the simplicity of our collective upbringing. We get lost in the minutia of today’s world and we forget that this is all held together by the basic fact that we can eat. That we have developed to a point in which, for the majority of people reading this, surviving is a given, thriving is the question.

It’s important to acknowledge this because it provides context. Not to shame into thinking that our problems are trivial but to remember that their not foundational, they’re additive. We all share in a collective impossibility that is today’s modern world, where you can read this on a piece of metal we taught to think, because of a simple reality. We all need to eat. At the most basic level, this is what connects us.

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Why ‘eat to live?’

If you’re not a plant, you have to eat to live. This truism sounds almost too basic to even bother entertaining, but while our photosynthesizing biological cousins can simply exist in a sunny place to survive, we cannot.

What does this mean for everything else, from the smallest microorganism all the way up to you dear reader? We have to eat. As unpleasant as it sounds, we have to go through the laborious, tedious, and often expensive ordeal of finding food, preparing this food and then eating this food. And to me, that sounds awful. I, like many others, am not a food person. I enjoy food, (who doesn’t?) but if I could live in a world where I simply didn’t have to spend time eating, I would prefer it.

Unfortunately, I can’t do that. As stated above, I am not a plant and thus forever trapped in the endless cycle of eating, and then getting hungry, and then eating again (ugh). Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Famous Philosopher Albert Camus once declared that we must imagine Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder up a mountain as happy. Why? Because he will be doing it forever. As I find myself in a similar, arguably less exhausting, predicament, I’m going to have to find a way to enjoy this too. That is the premise of, “eat to live”. A classic spin on the phrase “do you live to eat, or eat to live”, in which I will be challenging myself to find all of the reasons to love food because after all, I have to eat it.