#like for example he's vegetarian so he goes with people to eat dinner and stuff a lot but he sits there without eating anything

[birdmenmanga]

when he said "is there still anyone left in the world who you'll allow yourself to be spoiled by" that was insane

[ibtk]

Book Review: THE SEVENTH MANSION by Maryse Meijer

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review though Edelweiss. Trigger warning for sexual assault, homophobia, violence against animals, and disturbing sexual content.)

-- 4.5 stars --

There is this person I love. And he’s not even a person.

After Xie's parents split and an environmental disaster sends his already precarious mental health spiraling, Xie and his father Erik relocate from California to an unnamed town in the rural south, in search of the proverbial fresh start.

At first, Xie is your garden-variety teenage outcast: melancholy. goth. vegan. an outsider. friendless. forgettable. Yet he's quickly "adopted" by the only other vegans in the school - girlfriends Jo and Leni, who together make up the entirety of FKK.

The group's animal rights activism slowly evolves from leafleting to direct action: the trio breaks into a local mink farm, freeing as many of its captives as they can. Xie is nabbed during the getaway, and suddenly he goes from "nobody" to "that freak who vandalized the Moore farm". Instead of silence and indifference, Xie is met by hostile sneers, gossip, and relentless bullying. He takes a leave of absence from high school, instead getting one-on-one tutoring at the local library. His parents are forced to pay restitution, and Xie's placed on probation.

Xie's only respite is nature: his burgeoning vegetable garden; the small but pristine forest behind his house; and, eventually, the mysterious light, nestled among the branches, that leads him to a tiny church - and his beloved. St. Pancratius, who was martyred in 304 A.D. and whose remains are on covert display in a one-room church in the middle of nowhere.

He traces the image with his finger. The story the same in every version: A boy on a road, refusing to lift his sword against the lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.

Still, all of this comes with a cost: loving nature, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means saying goodbye to it one day. Relationships can be messy, even when they're with clean bones. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own shit that we're oblivious to what our loved ones are going through. Maybe your tutor shows up to work one day piss drunk and tells you about her abortion. Or your friends drag you to a backwoods meeting of environmental activists, where one of them sexually assaults you. Or you show up to a mass protest that is even more massive than you anticipated, and find you're unable to protect yourself, let alone the 55 billion+ land animals slaughtered for food every year in the US alone (animalclock.org).

The problem is too big, even when it's one of the smaller ones. The problem is impossible.

While disturbing, Xie's theft of a skeleton is not the worst crime he'll commit in his teen years. As FKK becomes involved with a local animal rights group, and Xie's sanctuary is threatened, he careens toward an inevitable (????) collision with the outside world, which neither understands him - nor cares to. (Fuck capitalism.)

THE SEVENTH MANSION is one weird-ass book; I mean, the main character has sex with a skeleton (!). This is certainly the wildest aspect of the story, but it's not alone. For example, take the narrative structure, which has a kind of stream-of-(Xie's)-consciousness vibe. Many of the sentences are fractured, even forced, as though we're pulling them from the depth's of Xie's tortured soul. His thoughts. Are broken. Up. Like this. Conversely, there are no chapters, and so many of the paragraphs are just huge, unbroken blocks of text - almost as though Meijer is framing Xie in opposition to the larger world around him.*

I suspect that THE SEVENTH MANSION is one of those love it or hate it dealios. Personally, I loved it, even as some parts proved excruciatingly unbearable to read.

I don't know whether Meijer is vegan, but she gets so much right; sometimes it felt like she was rooting around inside my head. I went vegetarian my freshman year of college (1996, not to date myself) and vegan about 9 years later. Reading Xie was like having a mirror held up to my own depressive, anxious, vegan psyche. One thing carnists probably don't realize about walking around this world as a vegan is: it takes a ton of mental work, of suppression and dissociation, just to get through the day.

Animal suffering is omnipresent, and largely accepted. From Carl's Jr. commercials to classroom trips to the zoo; leather car seats to team lunches at non-vegan restaurants, where you'll be forced to watch your coworkers and friends devour the corpse of a once-living creature - someone's mother, brother, or child - we are constantly forced to bear witness to the oppression of animals. Worse, to pretend as though it's of no consequence: just to get along, or because doing otherwise would quickly devour your time, your prospects, your relationships. To say that it's depressing is an understatement.

Whether Xie is living through the oil spill that finally made his world "snap," or gazing into the eyes of caged mink, I was right there with him, trying not to cry. Not to break. There's so much suffering in the world; if you try to take it all in, to truly understand its scope, it will swallow you whole.

Speaking of the oil spill, which was the impetus for Xie to go vegan - Meijer's description of this moment in Xie's life brought back so many memories. When I decided to stop eating meat, I was working at a local grocery store. Every now and again, they had an employee appreciation dinner (in lieu of a raise, natch), which basically consisted of all you can eat burgers and hot dogs in the break room. Everyone would stuff their faces, taking in as many free calories as possible. Not because they were hungry, but to get as much of a leg up on our cheap ass employer as possible. The sheer gluttony and waste of it all is what finally did it for me. No one needed to eat seven hamburgers in one night; we did because we could, because not doing so would be to lose out. The working class eating the chattel, and no one eating the rich.

Point being, that's a singular moment in my life that I'll never forget. It stands out in stark relief, right alongside the deaths of my husband and furkids (six dogs and one cat down and counting). If I close my eyes, I can almost transport myself back there, white starched shirt, demo table, 7PM Friday fatigue, and all.

The last time he ate meat he was twelve years old, after the spill: Xie was Alex then. Even miles from the beach, they could smell something off; at first they thought it was the sandwiches, ham pressed hot in the pockets of Erik’s windbreaker, but the closer they got to the beach the stronger the smell became, noxious, chemical. They parked at their usual spot, yellow tape blocking access to the beach beyond. A black ribbon flat against the horizon; that was the water. No trace of blue. On the rocks below the lot a half dozen pelicans huddled together. Coated from beak to foot in oil. Don’t touch them, his father said. Someone will come wash it off. But there was no one. The black sea lapping the sand. Those bewildered eyes. He watched as one of the birds collapsed, its head twisted sideways against its folded neck. His father pulled him away. The fire on the water burned for two weeks; the beach remained black for a year. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales, gulls, crabs, otters, fish, birds rolled up by the waves in the tens of thousands. Oil on meat on sand. No stopping it. Xie got headaches, bloody noses; he was always tired, couldn’t sleep. His mother standing in the doorway, Stop playing games, you’re fine. But his father was never angry. Scared of what he saw. Xie in the dark. Unable to make it from one room to another. The people who used to go to the beach just went somewhere else. Life as usual. Slumped in the backseat as his father fed gas into the truck he suddenly couldn’t stand it. Stopped standing it. He opened the back door, started walking. Alex, his father called, but he was not Alex anymore. He poured out all the milk in the house and fed the meat to the dogs next door and rode his bike everywhere.

So yeah, our circumstances may be different, but Xie's conversion sure hit me in the feels.

Meijer also does an excellent job capturing the heartbreak and urgency of Millennials and Gen Z. As tormented as I might have been in high school, at least I had the luxury of not thinking too much about climate change - at least until Al Gore came along. Xie and his peers, on the other hand, will bear the brunt of their predecessors' unchecked greed. Nowhere is this divide more eloquently laid bare than in Jo's post-march argument with Erik (who is likely around my age):

Didn’t you see how he just folded up out there? He can’t protect himself, he won’t. You don’t know what he was like, before we came here, okay, you didn’t watch him, lying in bed day after day, ready to cut his goddamn throat because of all this shit, this constant litany of doomsday statistics, he just takes it in and he can’t—he doesn’t know what to do with it, and you want to keep shoving it in his face, when it’s—it’s enough! Staring at Jo, who stares back. Look, whatever you’re afraid of, whatever he’s afraid of, it’s already happening, okay? And he knows it, he’s living it, and he wants to do something about it. If there was some other option, some fantasyland where everything is going to be fine as long as we bury our heads in the sand, then believe me, I’d take it. But there’s not. Not for me and not for Leni and not for Xie and if you think you can protect him by denying that then you’re just—wrong. I’m sorry. She holds Erik’s gaze; he nods, the first to look away.

My gods, that scene just cuts me to the bone. As bleak as things are now, I cannot imagine going through all this - climate change, COVID-19, a Trump presidency, Democratic ineptitude/complicity, *gesturing wildly* - as an adolescent. Their elders cut them down before they even started crawling.  

On a lighter note, Xie's scenes with his clueless mom and her equally clueless new husband (Jerry!) brought a(n admittedly wry) smile to my face. If I had a penny for every times this scene has played out in my life, I'd have enough cash monies to start my own animal sanctuary.

Don’t you want some vegetables, Xie? Jerry asks. I don’t eat animal products, Xie murmurs, and Jerry, confused, staring at the green beans, How is this— Butter, Xie interrupts. Butter is from milk, which is from cows, which are animals. Jerry blinks. Gosh, I didn’t even think of that. Sorry. Xie shrugs.

There's so much to obsess about here: I love Jo and Leni together, and their opposing circumstances just make the relationship so much more complex - and potentially fraught. Erik and tutor Karen (I wonder if the name choice was intentional?) are interesting supporting characters, and their relationships with Xie are so beautiful and nuanced; they both support him the best they know how.

Xie's interactions with his phantom lover are a little more confusing and difficult for me to comprehend. Perhaps P. represents Xie's inability to connect with the human world around him, or at least not as well as the more abstract, ephemeral natural world. Possibly P. is Xie's ideal human: one who would rather die than raise a finger against an animal (or one who cannot disappoint you by voicing their own opinions). Or maybe it's simpler than that, and Xie's hallucinations are just that: hallucinations. In any case, it made an already odd book absolutely bizarre, but in a good way, so I can't complain.

* This could just be because I was reading an early copy in need of further editing - but, seeing as how some formatting was already present, I think it was intentional. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3672191091

[easyfoodnetwork]

Fast-Food Buffets Are a Thing of the Past. Some Doubt They Ever Even Existed.

A McDonald’s breakfast buffet. An all-you-can-eat Taco Bell. This isn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but a real yet short-lived phenomenon.

When we think of buffets, we tend to think of their 1980s and early ’90s heyday, when commercial jingles for Sizzler might have been confused with our national anthem. We think of Homer Simpson getting dragged out of the Frying Dutchman, “a beast more stomach than man.” I think of my parents going on buffet benders resembling something out of Hunter S. Thompson’s life, determined to get their money’s worth with two picky kids.

What we don’t typically think about, however, is the fast-food buffet, a blip so small on America’s food radar that it’s hard to prove it even existed. But it did. People swear that all-you-can-eat buffets could be found at Taco Bell, KFC, and even under the golden arches of McDonald’s.

That it could have existed isn’t surprising. The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake. It was the physical manifestation of the American id: endless biscuits, popcorn chicken, vats of nacho cheese and sketchy pudding — so much sketchy pudding. Why, then, have so many of us failed to remember it? How did it become a footnote, relegated to the backwoods of myths and legends? There are whispers of McDonald’s locations that have breakfast buffets. Was there, in fact, a Taco Bell buffet, or is it a figment of our collective imaginations? Yes, someone tells me — an all-you-can-eat Taco Bell existed in her dorm cafeteria. Another person suggests maybe we were just remembering the nachos section of the Wendy’s Superbar.

The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake.

The fast-food buffet lives in a strange sort of ether. You can’t get to it through the traditional path of remembering. Was there actually a Pizza Hut buffet in your hometown? Search your subconscious, sifting past the red cups that make the soda taste better, past the spiffy new CD jukebox, which has Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind and Paul McCartney’s All the Best under the neon lamps. Search deeper, and you might find your father going up for a third plate and something remaining of the “dessert pizzas” lodged in your subconscious. This is where the fast-food buffet exists.

The history of the buffet in America is a story of ingenuity and evolution. Sure, it originated in Europe, where it was a classy affair with artfully arranged salted fish, eggs, breads, and butter. The Swedish dazzled us with their smorgasbords at the 1939 World Fair. We can then trace the evolution of the buffet through Las Vegas, where the one-dollar Buckaroo Buffet kept gamblers in the casino. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese immigrant families found loopholes in racist immigration laws by establishing restaurants. They brought Chinese cooking catered to American tastes in endless plates of beef chow fun and egg rolls. By the 1980s, buffets ruled the landscape like family dynasties, with sister chains the Ponderosa and the Bonanza spreading the gospel of sneeze guards and steaks, sundae stations and salad bars along the interstates. From Shoney’s to Sizzler, from sea to shining sea, the buffet was a feast fit for kings, or a family of four.

And of course, fast-food restaurants wanted in on the action. As fast-food historian and author of Drive-Thru Dreams Adam Chandler put it, “every fast food place flirted with buffets at some point or another. McDonald’s absolutely did, as did most of the pizza chains with dine-in service. KFC still has a few stray buffets, as well as an illicit one called Claudia Sanders Dinner House, which was opened by Colonel Sanders’ wife after he was forbidden from opening a competing fried chicken business after selling the company. Wendy’s Super Bar was short-lived, but the salad bar lived on for decades.”

How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce.

In a 1988 commercial for the Superbar, Dave Thomas says, “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I like it when families eat together.” A Wendy’s executive described the new business model as “taking us out of the fast-food business.” Everyone agrees the Wendy’s Supernar was glorious. And gross, everyone also agrees. How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce.

“I kind of want to live in a ’90s Wendy’s,” Amy Barnes, a Tennessee-based writer, tells me in between preparing for virtual learning with her teenagers. The Superbar sat in the lobby, with stations lined up like train carts. First, there was the Garden Spot, which “no one cared about,” a traditional salad bar with a tub of chocolate pudding at its helm, “which always had streams of salad dressing and shredded cheese floating on top.” Next up was the Pasta Pasta section, with “noodles, alfredo and tomato sauce…[as well as] garlic bread made from the repurposed hamburger buns with butter and garlic smeared on them.” Obviously, the crown jewel of the Superbar was the Mexican Fiesta, with its “vats of ground beef, nacho cheese, sour cream.” The Fiesta shared custody of additional toppings with the salad bar. It was $2.99 for the dining experience.

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet.

The marriage of Wendy’s and the Superbar lasted about a decade before it was phased out in all locations by 1998. Like a jilted ex-lover, the official Wendy’s Story on the website makes zero mention of Superbar, despite the countless blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts devoted to remembering it. At least they kept the salad bar together until the mid-2000s for the sake of the children.

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet. Googling the existence of such a thing only returns results of people questioning the existence of this McMuffin Mecca on subforums and Reddit. Somebody knows somebody who passed one once on the highway. A stray Yelp review of the Kiss My Grits food truck in Seattle offers a lead: “I have to say, I recall the first time I ever saw grits, they were at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet in Alexandria, Virginia, and they looked as unappetizing as could be.” However, the lead is dead on arrival. Further googling of the McDonald’s buffet with terrible grits in Alexandria turns up nothing.

I ask friends on Facebook. I ask Twitter. I get a lone response. Eden Robins messages me “It was in Decatur, IL,” as though she’s describing the site where aliens abducted her. “I’m a little relieved that I didn’t imagine the breakfast buffet since no one ever knows what the fuck I’m talking about when I bring it up.”

“We had traveled down there for a high school drama competition,” she goes on to say. “And one morning before the competition, we ate at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet. I had never seen anything like it before or since.”

I ask what was in the buffet, although I know the details alone will not sustain me. I want video to pore over so I can pause at specific frames, like a fast-food version of the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot footage. Robins says they served “scrambled eggs and pancakes and those hash brown tiles. I was a vegetarian at the time so no sausage or bacon, but those were there, too.”

McDonald’s isn’t the only chain with a buffet whose existence is hazy. Yum Brands, the overlord of fast-food holy trinity Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, is said to have had buffets at all three restaurants. I confirm nothing, however, when I reach out to the corporate authorities. On the KFC side, a spokesperson offers to look into “some historical information,” but doesn’t get back to me. My contact at Taco Bell tells me, “I’ll look into it. Certainly, nothing in existence today. I’ve never heard of it. Looks like there are a couple threads on Reddit.”

Reddit, of course, speculates a possible Mandela Effect — the phenomenon of a group of unrelated people remembering a different event than what actually occurred — in the existence of Taco Bell buffets. But I have a firmer lead in Payel Patel, a doctor who studied at Johns Hopkins, who tells me there was a Taco Bell Express in her dorm that was included in an all-you-can-eat meal plan option, though it only lasted one fleeting year. “You could order anything, like 15 nachos and 11 bean burritos,” she says, “and they would make it and give it to you, and you walked off without paying a cent.” A Johns Hopkins student newsletter published in 2001 corroborates the existence of the utopian all-you-can-eat Taco Bell, saying, “you can also gorge yourself on some good old Taco Bell tacos and burritos. Don’t forget, it’s all-you-can-eat. Just don’t eat too much; you don’t want to overload the John.”

There are some concrete examples of fast-food buffets that still exist today. When a Krystal Buffet opened in Alabama in 2019, it was met with “excitement and disbelief,” according to the press release. Former New Orleans resident Wilson Koewing told me of a Popeye’s buffet that locals “speak of as if it is a myth.” When I dig deeper, I come across a local paper, NOLA Weekend, which covers “New Orleans Food, things to do, culture, and lifestyle.” It touts the Popeye’s buffet like a carnival barker, as though it is simply too incredible to believe: “The Only Popeye’s Buffet in the World! It’s right next door in Lafayette! Yes, that’s right: a Popeyes buffet. HERE.”

Somehow, the KFC buffet is the most enduring of the fast-food buffets still in existence. And yet everyone I speak with feels compelled to walk me through the paths and roads leading to such an oasis, as if, again, it were the stuff of legends. There are landmarks and there are mirages, and the mirages need maps most of all.

To get to the KFC buffet in Key Largo, Tiffany Aleman must first take us through “a small island town with one traffic light and one major highway that runs through it. There are the seafood buffets and bait shops, which give way to newfangled Starbucks.”

The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.

New Jerseyan D.F. Jester leads us past the local seafood place “that looks like the midnight buffet on a cruise ship has been transported 50 miles inland and plunked inside the dining area of a 1980s Ramada outside of Newark.”

Descriptions of the food are about what I would expect of a KFC buffet. Laura Camerer remembers the food in her college town in Morehead, Kentucky, as “all fried solid as rocks sitting under heat lamps, kind of gray and gristly.” Jester adds, “for all intents and purposes, this is a KFC. It looks like one, but sadder, more clinical. The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.”

Then Jessie Lovett Allen messages me. “There is [a] KFC in my hometown, and it is magical without a hint of sketch.” I must know more. First, she takes me down the winding path: “the closest larger city is Kearney, which is 100 miles away and only has 35K people, and Kearney is where you’ll find the closest Target, Panera, or Taco Bell. But to the North, South, or West, you have to drive hundreds of miles before you find a larger city. I tell you all of this because the extreme isolation is what gives our restaurants, even fast-food ones, an outsized psychological importance to daily life.”

The KFC Jessie mentions is in North Platte, Nebraska, and has nearly five stars on Yelp, an accomplishment worthy of a monument for any fast-food restaurant. On the non-corporate Facebook page for KFC North Platte, one of the hundreds of followers of the page comments, “BEST KFC IN THE COUNTRY.”

Allen describes the place as though she is recounting a corner of heaven. “They have fried apple pies that seem to come through a wormhole from a 1987 McDonalds. Pudding: Hot. Good. Layered cold pudding desserts. This one rotates. It might be chocolate, banana, cookies and cream. It has a graham cracker base, pudding, and whipped topping. Standard Cold Salad bar: Lettuce, salad veggies, macaroni salads, JELL-O salads. Other meats: chicken fried steak patties. Fried chicken gizzards. White Gravy, Chicken Noodle Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Cornbread, Corn on the Cob, Chicken Pot Pie Casserole. AND most all the standard stuff on the normal KFC menu, which is nice because you can pick out a variety of chicken types or just have a few tablespoons of a side dish.”

In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed.

Then she adds that the buffet “is also available TO GO, but there are rules. You get a large Styrofoam clamshell, a small Styrofoam clamshell, and a cup. You have to be able to close the Styrofoam. You are instructed that only beverages can go in cups, and when I asked about this, an employee tells me that customers have tried to shove chicken into the drink cups in the past.”

In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed. The chains folded. The senior citizens keeping Ponderosa in business have died. My own parents reversed course after their buffet bender, trading in sundae stations for cans of SlimFast. Fast-food buffets retreated into an ethereal space. McDonald’s grew up with adult sandwiches like the Arch Deluxe. Wendy’s went on a wild rebound with the Baconator. Pizza Hut ripped out its jukeboxes, changed its logo, went off to the fast-food wars, and ain’t been the same since. Taco Bell is undergoing some kind of midlife crisis, hemorrhaging its entire menu of potatoes, among other beloved items. At least the KFC in North Platte has done good, though the novel coronavirus could change things.

In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder, hovering over sneeze guards, sharing soup ladles to scoop an odd assortment of pudding, three grapes, a heap of rotini pasta, and a drumstick onto a plate. Maybe we can reach this place again. But to find it, we must follow the landmarks, searching our memory as the map.

MM Carrigan is a Baltimore-area writer and weirdo who enjoys staring directly into the sun. Their work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and PopMatters. They are the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly. Tweets @thesurfingpizza.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/33e4Z8k https://ift.tt/30jEUmf

A McDonald’s breakfast buffet. An all-you-can-eat Taco Bell. This isn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but a real yet short-lived phenomenon.

When we think of buffets, we tend to think of their 1980s and early ’90s heyday, when commercial jingles for Sizzler might have been confused with our national anthem. We think of Homer Simpson getting dragged out of the Frying Dutchman, “a beast more stomach than man.” I think of my parents going on buffet benders resembling something out of Hunter S. Thompson’s life, determined to get their money’s worth with two picky kids.

What we don’t typically think about, however, is the fast-food buffet, a blip so small on America’s food radar that it’s hard to prove it even existed. But it did. People swear that all-you-can-eat buffets could be found at Taco Bell, KFC, and even under the golden arches of McDonald’s.

That it could have existed isn’t surprising. The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake. It was the physical manifestation of the American id: endless biscuits, popcorn chicken, vats of nacho cheese and sketchy pudding — so much sketchy pudding. Why, then, have so many of us failed to remember it? How did it become a footnote, relegated to the backwoods of myths and legends? There are whispers of McDonald’s locations that have breakfast buffets. Was there, in fact, a Taco Bell buffet, or is it a figment of our collective imaginations? Yes, someone tells me — an all-you-can-eat Taco Bell existed in her dorm cafeteria. Another person suggests maybe we were just remembering the nachos section of the Wendy’s Superbar.

The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake.

The fast-food buffet lives in a strange sort of ether. You can’t get to it through the traditional path of remembering. Was there actually a Pizza Hut buffet in your hometown? Search your subconscious, sifting past the red cups that make the soda taste better, past the spiffy new CD jukebox, which has Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind and Paul McCartney’s All the Best under the neon lamps. Search deeper, and you might find your father going up for a third plate and something remaining of the “dessert pizzas” lodged in your subconscious. This is where the fast-food buffet exists.

The history of the buffet in America is a story of ingenuity and evolution. Sure, it originated in Europe, where it was a classy affair with artfully arranged salted fish, eggs, breads, and butter. The Swedish dazzled us with their smorgasbords at the 1939 World Fair. We can then trace the evolution of the buffet through Las Vegas, where the one-dollar Buckaroo Buffet kept gamblers in the casino. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese immigrant families found loopholes in racist immigration laws by establishing restaurants. They brought Chinese cooking catered to American tastes in endless plates of beef chow fun and egg rolls. By the 1980s, buffets ruled the landscape like family dynasties, with sister chains the Ponderosa and the Bonanza spreading the gospel of sneeze guards and steaks, sundae stations and salad bars along the interstates. From Shoney’s to Sizzler, from sea to shining sea, the buffet was a feast fit for kings, or a family of four.

And of course, fast-food restaurants wanted in on the action. As fast-food historian and author of Drive-Thru Dreams Adam Chandler put it, “every fast food place flirted with buffets at some point or another. McDonald’s absolutely did, as did most of the pizza chains with dine-in service. KFC still has a few stray buffets, as well as an illicit one called Claudia Sanders Dinner House, which was opened by Colonel Sanders’ wife after he was forbidden from opening a competing fried chicken business after selling the company. Wendy’s Super Bar was short-lived, but the salad bar lived on for decades.”

How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce.

In a 1988 commercial for the Superbar, Dave Thomas says, “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I like it when families eat together.” A Wendy’s executive described the new business model as “taking us out of the fast-food business.” Everyone agrees the Wendy’s Supernar was glorious. And gross, everyone also agrees. How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce.

“I kind of want to live in a ’90s Wendy’s,” Amy Barnes, a Tennessee-based writer, tells me in between preparing for virtual learning with her teenagers. The Superbar sat in the lobby, with stations lined up like train carts. First, there was the Garden Spot, which “no one cared about,” a traditional salad bar with a tub of chocolate pudding at its helm, “which always had streams of salad dressing and shredded cheese floating on top.” Next up was the Pasta Pasta section, with “noodles, alfredo and tomato sauce…[as well as] garlic bread made from the repurposed hamburger buns with butter and garlic smeared on them.” Obviously, the crown jewel of the Superbar was the Mexican Fiesta, with its “vats of ground beef, nacho cheese, sour cream.” The Fiesta shared custody of additional toppings with the salad bar. It was $2.99 for the dining experience.

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet.

The marriage of Wendy’s and the Superbar lasted about a decade before it was phased out in all locations by 1998. Like a jilted ex-lover, the official Wendy’s Story on the website makes zero mention of Superbar, despite the countless blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts devoted to remembering it. At least they kept the salad bar together until the mid-2000s for the sake of the children.

Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet. Googling the existence of such a thing only returns results of people questioning the existence of this McMuffin Mecca on subforums and Reddit. Somebody knows somebody who passed one once on the highway. A stray Yelp review of the Kiss My Grits food truck in Seattle offers a lead: “I have to say, I recall the first time I ever saw grits, they were at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet in Alexandria, Virginia, and they looked as unappetizing as could be.” However, the lead is dead on arrival. Further googling of the McDonald’s buffet with terrible grits in Alexandria turns up nothing.

I ask friends on Facebook. I ask Twitter. I get a lone response. Eden Robins messages me “It was in Decatur, IL,” as though she’s describing the site where aliens abducted her. “I’m a little relieved that I didn’t imagine the breakfast buffet since no one ever knows what the fuck I’m talking about when I bring it up.”

“We had traveled down there for a high school drama competition,” she goes on to say. “And one morning before the competition, we ate at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet. I had never seen anything like it before or since.”

I ask what was in the buffet, although I know the details alone will not sustain me. I want video to pore over so I can pause at specific frames, like a fast-food version of the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot footage. Robins says they served “scrambled eggs and pancakes and those hash brown tiles. I was a vegetarian at the time so no sausage or bacon, but those were there, too.”

McDonald’s isn’t the only chain with a buffet whose existence is hazy. Yum Brands, the overlord of fast-food holy trinity Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, is said to have had buffets at all three restaurants. I confirm nothing, however, when I reach out to the corporate authorities. On the KFC side, a spokesperson offers to look into “some historical information,” but doesn’t get back to me. My contact at Taco Bell tells me, “I’ll look into it. Certainly, nothing in existence today. I’ve never heard of it. Looks like there are a couple threads on Reddit.”

Reddit, of course, speculates a possible Mandela Effect — the phenomenon of a group of unrelated people remembering a different event than what actually occurred — in the existence of Taco Bell buffets. But I have a firmer lead in Payel Patel, a doctor who studied at Johns Hopkins, who tells me there was a Taco Bell Express in her dorm that was included in an all-you-can-eat meal plan option, though it only lasted one fleeting year. “You could order anything, like 15 nachos and 11 bean burritos,” she says, “and they would make it and give it to you, and you walked off without paying a cent.” A Johns Hopkins student newsletter published in 2001 corroborates the existence of the utopian all-you-can-eat Taco Bell, saying, “you can also gorge yourself on some good old Taco Bell tacos and burritos. Don’t forget, it’s all-you-can-eat. Just don’t eat too much; you don’t want to overload the John.”

There are some concrete examples of fast-food buffets that still exist today. When a Krystal Buffet opened in Alabama in 2019, it was met with “excitement and disbelief,” according to the press release. Former New Orleans resident Wilson Koewing told me of a Popeye’s buffet that locals “speak of as if it is a myth.” When I dig deeper, I come across a local paper, NOLA Weekend, which covers “New Orleans Food, things to do, culture, and lifestyle.” It touts the Popeye’s buffet like a carnival barker, as though it is simply too incredible to believe: “The Only Popeye’s Buffet in the World! It’s right next door in Lafayette! Yes, that’s right: a Popeyes buffet. HERE.”

Somehow, the KFC buffet is the most enduring of the fast-food buffets still in existence. And yet everyone I speak with feels compelled to walk me through the paths and roads leading to such an oasis, as if, again, it were the stuff of legends. There are landmarks and there are mirages, and the mirages need maps most of all.

To get to the KFC buffet in Key Largo, Tiffany Aleman must first take us through “a small island town with one traffic light and one major highway that runs through it. There are the seafood buffets and bait shops, which give way to newfangled Starbucks.”

The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.

New Jerseyan D.F. Jester leads us past the local seafood place “that looks like the midnight buffet on a cruise ship has been transported 50 miles inland and plunked inside the dining area of a 1980s Ramada outside of Newark.”

Descriptions of the food are about what I would expect of a KFC buffet. Laura Camerer remembers the food in her college town in Morehead, Kentucky, as “all fried solid as rocks sitting under heat lamps, kind of gray and gristly.” Jester adds, “for all intents and purposes, this is a KFC. It looks like one, but sadder, more clinical. The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.”

Then Jessie Lovett Allen messages me. “There is [a] KFC in my hometown, and it is magical without a hint of sketch.” I must know more. First, she takes me down the winding path: “the closest larger city is Kearney, which is 100 miles away and only has 35K people, and Kearney is where you’ll find the closest Target, Panera, or Taco Bell. But to the North, South, or West, you have to drive hundreds of miles before you find a larger city. I tell you all of this because the extreme isolation is what gives our restaurants, even fast-food ones, an outsized psychological importance to daily life.”

The KFC Jessie mentions is in North Platte, Nebraska, and has nearly five stars on Yelp, an accomplishment worthy of a monument for any fast-food restaurant. On the non-corporate Facebook page for KFC North Platte, one of the hundreds of followers of the page comments, “BEST KFC IN THE COUNTRY.”

Allen describes the place as though she is recounting a corner of heaven. “They have fried apple pies that seem to come through a wormhole from a 1987 McDonalds. Pudding: Hot. Good. Layered cold pudding desserts. This one rotates. It might be chocolate, banana, cookies and cream. It has a graham cracker base, pudding, and whipped topping. Standard Cold Salad bar: Lettuce, salad veggies, macaroni salads, JELL-O salads. Other meats: chicken fried steak patties. Fried chicken gizzards. White Gravy, Chicken Noodle Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Cornbread, Corn on the Cob, Chicken Pot Pie Casserole. AND most all the standard stuff on the normal KFC menu, which is nice because you can pick out a variety of chicken types or just have a few tablespoons of a side dish.”

In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed.

Then she adds that the buffet “is also available TO GO, but there are rules. You get a large Styrofoam clamshell, a small Styrofoam clamshell, and a cup. You have to be able to close the Styrofoam. You are instructed that only beverages can go in cups, and when I asked about this, an employee tells me that customers have tried to shove chicken into the drink cups in the past.”

In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed. The chains folded. The senior citizens keeping Ponderosa in business have died. My own parents reversed course after their buffet bender, trading in sundae stations for cans of SlimFast. Fast-food buffets retreated into an ethereal space. McDonald’s grew up with adult sandwiches like the Arch Deluxe. Wendy’s went on a wild rebound with the Baconator. Pizza Hut ripped out its jukeboxes, changed its logo, went off to the fast-food wars, and ain’t been the same since. Taco Bell is undergoing some kind of midlife crisis, hemorrhaging its entire menu of potatoes, among other beloved items. At least the KFC in North Platte has done good, though the novel coronavirus could change things.

In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder, hovering over sneeze guards, sharing soup ladles to scoop an odd assortment of pudding, three grapes, a heap of rotini pasta, and a drumstick onto a plate. Maybe we can reach this place again. But to find it, we must follow the landmarks, searching our memory as the map.

MM Carrigan is a Baltimore-area writer and weirdo who enjoys staring directly into the sun. Their work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and PopMatters. They are the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly. Tweets @thesurfingpizza.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/33e4Z8k via Blogger https://ift.tt/36lO2KT

[type-a-nomad]

weekend feb 25

February 25 Sunday

Alright so this weekend has been crazy lazy.  Before I get into my lethargy and the justification for it, I want to address some of the information I forget to include in my general posts.  

One thing I keep forgetting to write down: THEY DONT USE TAPE HERE. My friend Sydney just came over and saw me writing and asked if I had written this down because she pointed this out last week and I totally freaked out.  Because THEY DONT.  It sounds small, but imagine if all of the tape in your life vanished.  WEIRD.  Super fûcking weird.  Instead of tape, they use this sticky white ticky-tac stuff to stick things to the walls.  Tape is better.   Another thing I forgot to write down: I extended and am now staying here until April 14th.  Yay! I came to this decision because the work here is meaningful, and the quality of life is high because I’m by the beach, the people are generally good, it’s a different culture that challenges me, and I am meeting new people almost every day because it’s a hostel so everyone comes and leaves at different times. ANOTHER THING. I talked to Shannon about what the crazy lady screamed at us on Thursday.  It turns out it wasn't all crazy.  The crazy woman mentioned people dying.  When I followed up, she was right.  I did not get a year for when this happened, but probably within the last five years, Shannon said that eight volunteers were walking in the street in the evening.  A drunk driver hit all of them.  Shannon was the first on the scene and one of the volunteers died in her arms.  Two others were in comas for several weeks, and all the others were injured but survived.  I did not press her further on the subject because, obviously, this is beyond a delicate topic.  I can’t imagine the kind of emotional experience that was for Shannon.  Also, she’s an amazing woman.   Shannon is only 28 and basically runs the volunteer program.  She has three adopted kids who she adopted WHEN SHE WAS 24.  Their mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict and I am not sure how Shannon was initially connected with them, but I think she met them all through the volunteer program and eventually interceded.  She is very connected to some of the families of the kids in the program, which I think is a great thing because we meet some resistance from the families sometimes and more communication helps.  It is easy to say that it’s crazy for families to be against their children being tutored, given attention, taught to swim, taken out to play organized sports, and taught to surf.  However, there’s more to the situation.  When you keep in mind the poverty these kids live in and the relatively luxurious lives the volunteers have just because we have couches, a fridge, running water, etc. I completely see why there would be resentment from somebody of that background playing with your kid after school.  Also, I’m sure there is some feeling of resistance against the idea of your kid being a charity case that rich white people use to feel like they're doing good things.  Some of the parents outright tell their kids they aren't allowed to go after school and play with us, that they want them to clean the house and babysit their siblings while their parents finish work.  These kids still come and sometimes they will mention “My mom told me I can’t be here, if she finds out….” and you can just tell that if the parents find out their child came to the program, they might face physical punishment.  That’s how much this program means to the kids.  And that’s how much somebody else offering privileges to your child that you cannot provide them upsets parents.   As for my weekend.  My weekend starts on Friday.  On Friday, it was only kind warm and I went out with Thora to the cafe we found and really like called Melissa’s.  After, I went with her to get her tattoo touched-up, which looked painful.  Then, I went surfing for about 3 hours. My ribs have been sore all weekend since.  I caught a lot of waves, but still haven't ridden any in.  I got the tiniest board and am not practiced enough to handle it.  Hopefully next time I’ll get a long board that isn't as hard to balance. That night, there was a Braai which was nice.  Coll made fantastic butternut squash with spanish and feta.  I almost always eat vegetarian here.  I went out with Thora after we had a bottle of wine with dinner and we checked out a cool bar I’ll probably go back to.   It’s called the boardhouse and it’s very beachy and very South African. Thora is trying to talk me into going vegan and I’m very morally conflicted.  I’ve been thinking a lot about global warming and how hard it is to not feel frustrated and stuck.  I want to just change everything.  I wish I had a billion dollars to buy the amazon rainforest, deploy a fleet of boats to clean the ocean, develop a way of fishing that doesn't destroy entire ecosystems, promote permaculture and make the entire mid-west quit mono cropping, change the meat industry and find more meat alternatives so people stop eating so many cows that pollute horribly, also invent electric airplanes.  I don’t know where to start.  Maybe I need to become God or something and just shake the world with my hands until everything goes back down and fixes itself, like a snow globe.  The permafrost is melting and I’m just sitting here in South Africa, so frustrated I want to scream.  On top of that I am ironically angry at people who just say they can’t do anything and its just too bad.  Like pick up a shovel and plant trees, go vegan, be a better human.  I should definitely lead by example.  I have a lot of ideas and need to start executing more.  I am eighteen and actually realizing my morals in my lifestyle is something that age isn't really an excuse for.  I know how to change things, I just want to change everything and just myself does not feel like enough.  My head is so full.  So is my heart.  

Saturday, Thora was out with this guy named Ramis that she met at a festival.  Ironically, she went to that festival the weekend she got here with that guy who stole money from her.  We decided a good tactic to get over it was to distract herself and just have fun on her vacation, and this guy was nice and interested in being friends/ knew that she was there with somebody else.  Anyways, she was out with him at this really popular food market they have in Cape Town called the Old Biscuit Mill.  I could have done things, but it was cold and rainy and I didn't feel like it.  I ended up spending most of my day laying down and just talking, reading and thinking.  The talking part was first.  I got to call my wonderful boyfriend Mitchell and we talked from 8am-2pm.  You can do the math on that one.  After sitting in bed for that long, the back of my head hurt and I took that as a sign of a level of laziness that I probably shouldn't encourage in myself.  When he went to bed, I got up and ate some pickles and talked to Coll.  Then, I went on a little walk by myself just around a few blocks to stretch my lazy legs.  I got back and made toast with hummus and feta, carrots and hummus, and then Coll was an angel and gave me this amazing pretzel bun that she had bought at a nice market on her way into work.  She loves them and got a few.  She made tomato soup for dinner that night so we got to sample it while eating the obnoxiously large soft pretzels.  YUM.  I took two of these activated charcoal pills that my friend Whitney takes every morning and says they suck toxins out of your body.  Then, I sat in the hammock and read my book.  I am currently reading “A Little History of the World”, which is absolutely fabulous.  It just summarizes everything I’ve learned in history in the past 5 years of my life.  Totally fantastically unpretentious, interesting, and to the point.  10/10, highly recommend, 5 stars on Yelp!, all that.  I can’t say I’ve ever read a book as old as it and feel like I’m talking to somebody right now. I felt kinda weird all day Saturday, but I assumed that it was because I didn't really eat while I was on the phone with Mitchell so I didn't eat until way later in the day.  We had dinner, soup and bread, at 6 ish and after I went almost straight to bed because my tummy was nauseous.  I thought I could just sleep it off.  How I was wrong.  I sat in bed for around 2 hours.  The nausea was so bad that I couldn't sleep and after the first hour I started to think I might puke but fought hard against it.  Firstly, I hate throwing up.  Secondly, the toilets are all the way across the property, and I didn't want to walk all the way over there, puke, and then go back to bed.  Turns out, that’s exactly what happened and it was even worse because I had fought against it.  I ended up running out of my bed, holding my mouth and willing myself not to puke until I got to the bathroom, walking barefoot, past all the other partying residents of my hostel, to the bathroom.  Right before I closed the door to the bathroom, I started projectile vomiting.  All over the floor, doors, wall, toilet, everything.  I spent the next 10 minutes puking and the next hour sitting in my own vomit cleaning it up.  My clothes, face, and hair were entirely covered in puke. It was a lovely experience.  I walked backed to bed covered in vomit and shame.  Then I showered and changed and drank water.  Big mistake.  I got up again and vomited all my water out into the kitchen sink and then went back to bed.   Sunday has been weird because I have been recovering from puking all day.  I dragged Thora to the mini mart to buy ramen and soup-powder to try and trick my body into eating something.  I also got vitamin water and a lemon popsicle.  I sat in bed for most of the day, made some ramen.  Had a really nice and long conversation with one of the interns here named Matt.  He is from Norway and is here with his fiancé Kaia.  We talked about psychology and mental health and the consequences of the stigma surrounding it.  He was feeling sick too so we bonded over our misery.  Today, Thora left and a new girl from New Castle, England moved in.  Her name is Dani and she plays american football.  She’s a linebacker.  She’s very VERY English.  She says “innit”, and “proper” instead of “really” or “super”, and her accent is sometimes so strong it’s hard to understand.  I think she’s nice enough but I don’t think we are going to be that close.  She isn't interested school or news or politics, which isn't the actual problem it’s more of a symptom of how our minds are different.  I need to make some friends but don’t have the energy at the moment.  I want another really cool person to just kinda pop up, like Thora.  Or maybe I won’t.  Being alone is really not that bad of a thing, I just need to stop compensating for it by using technology.  Self-improvement is an ongoing battle.  My ramen was good but I am out of food and just ate my last stuff: half a jar of pickles.  Not sure what I am going to do for dinner, probably just eat my lemon popsicle and some ginger biscuits I also got at the market.  I also hear you can make scrambled eggs in the microwave.  The stove here doesn't work so I made my powdered soup with the water-boiling tea pot thing and can only make my eggs with the microwave.  I’ve seen it done, I just don’t know how I feel about it.  I’ll probably just go to bed.  I was invited to go out to Italian food with Linda, Whitney, and Coll, but I’m not sure if I feel up to all of that.  I’m really tired *yawns*.  I just wish I had some hot pesto pasta already made and my own bed.  Tomorrow I’m going on a wine tour with Thora which will be fun.  She’s staying in Muisenberg for a week and then going back home to Sydney.  It will also probably be good to change out of the PJs I’ve been wearing for about 24 hours now, including to the mini-mart this morning.  

Peace, Q

[canaryatlaw]

alright well, today was WILD. mostly in a good way, lol. I originally had my alarm set for 9:30 am with the intention of meeting Jess for brunch at 10. She was taking the day off from work because tickets for the KPop band’s she’s like the most into (aka Monsta X (MX) they’ll be talked about a lot today) concert was going on sale today and given our past experience trying to buy tickets for similar concerts (read: bad) we knew we were gonna have to try really hard for these, so we had a whole plan laid out. But when my alarm went off I had a message from Jess saying she got a note to be waiting for a package till like 10:30, so I went back to sleep until like 10 at which point I got up and got dressed to head out. We were gonna go to the vegetarian place but when I walked out to the street the intersection going to main street was like, completely blocked off, sidewalks and all, so I’d have to have gone one block west and then south and the east to actually get to main street, and instead of doing that we said fuck it we’d just go to the usual place that was like two blocks west of the intersection, so we met there instead and had brunch. Once we finished we returned to my apartment, the two goals for the day were to get caught up on tv shows we were behind on (Supergirl and Arrow in this case) and get tickets. So we started with Supergirl and watched the last 4 episodes of that, I’d seen the last two but not the two before that and Jess hadn’t seen any of them so we just watched them all through. We started getting geared up for the ticket purchasing, I think I explained this before but I don’t expect everyone to read every post so I’ll explain it again, basically ten minutes before the tickets are set to go on sale you can join a “pre-queue” and when it turns to the time everyone in the pre-queue is randomly placed in line, with anybody joining the queue after that goes to the end. The default position tends to be “2,000+ in front of you” which can differ widely because the venues for the smaller bands are like 3,000 seats whereas the big groups like BTS were playing in the fucking football stadium with like 50,000 seats, so 2,000 in front has a very different context depending on the size of the place. But you get advanced in line wherever you were placed it’ll start moving up and eventually get you to under 2,000 and then let you in, at which point you have to pick your tickets and pay for them, but there are a bunch of other people in there at the same time trying to pick tickets, so it can be kinda difficult to find ones that someone else didn’t just grab. so to give ourselves the best chances of getting this we had created multiple accounts so we could have the queue up in multiple windows in hope that it would give us a better chance of getting one placed further up in the queue. The tickets went on sale at 4 pm local time of the concert, and we were gonna try for New York tickets at 3 pm our time (because my parents live there and it’s always an easy excuse for a trip) with potentially looking at Atlanta at the same time, and then when it hit 4 for us we’d try for Chicago. So this whole time Jess is a giant ball of nerves and just generally freaking out, because yes she wants tickets, but she really wants the VIP tickets that let you actually meet the band and you can do this thing called “hi-touch” which is basically high fiving them from what I understand, but of course there are very few of those tickets and it was all up to the randomized queue. so I’m sitting there with my two laptops open and two windows open on each where Jess has ones on her laptop and her phone. It turns 3 pm and all of the windows refresh.....all of them are 2,000+. damn. the New York theatre has a capacity of 5,600 (I just looked that up, but that’s about what I thought at the time) so it’s no football stadium but the Chicago venue was only like 4,400 (again, just looked that up) so we potentially had a better shot in NY but there would probably also be more people trying for tickets. So we’re sitting there hoping for our things to advance, and one of my windows, the one attached to my main account starts moving forward slowly but surely (or quicker than any of the others at least) and around 3:20 we get inside, at which point we were able to grab like second tier tickets, which were good, but of course didn’t include the hi-touch Jess really wanted so we’d grab the tickets for now (we could always resell them later, they’re going for a ton on stubhub right now) and see what happens in Chicago. The one browser we had up for Atlanta had just been a total bust so we ignored that one. so the hour advances and it gets closer to 4 and everyone is so anxious!!! but we got this, I know we do, and when it hits 4, to our amazement, my main account (again!) instead of showing up with 2,000+ showed “1″ for a second before immediately letting us into the tickets!! I was in beast mode at this point and just let my super fast reflexes do all the work and click in the right places as fast as I could and a few seconds later we had confirmed tickets that were- get this- not only ultimate VIP with the hi-touch and a bunch of other shit, but were actually IN THE FIRST FUCKING ROW, AND THEY WERE LITERALLY SEATS 1 AND 2. WE GOT THE FIRST TICKETS IN THE ENTIRE DAMN PLACE. And like we looked at the map of the venue and the front row has like two or three off to each side and then like 8 or so right in the center right in front of the stage and since we were 1 and 2 at first we thought we had one of the side ones....but nope, we were in that middle section (I’ll post the screenshot Jess took of them after this to give you a better idea if you’re having trouble picturing this). But yeah, basically we got the best damn tickets in the entire fucking theatre, and we were both pretty much just having meltdowns at this point (I mean, mostly Jess, but I was kinda freaking out too because this was nuts). And I was just like man, I knew we could do this, we put up with some much bullshit and failure with the other concerts that was so frustrating, but when it really counted with the favorite band in our city, we get the best seats IN THE FUCKING HOUSE. Because that’s how I roll, when I set my mind to something I get shit done, I don’t always know how but somehow it always gets done, and I knew we could do this and we did. So needless to say it was a very exciting afternoon, lol. We had been playing like episodes 3 and 4 of The Umbrella Academy during this mostly just as background noise because Jess hadn’t seen all of that yet but we weren’t paying much attention given everything that had just happened. So yeah, we freaked out for a bit, and then cemented our plans for the rest of the night (because if Chicago was a total failure we were gonna wait 2 hours and try for the LA show) and I then baked the angel food cake I wanted to make for my birthday because I always have angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries for my birthday (given that I’ve rarely actually celebrated with my family on my actual birthday it’s usually not on the actual date, but as long as it happens) because it’s my favorite and what we always had when I was little and reminds me of my grandma and grandpa and just happy memories that weren’t corrupted by other bullshit. So I baked the cake and when it was done I figured out how to stick it upside down on a bottle (you have to cool it like that or it won’t come out of the pan, they’re complicated like that) we headed out for dinner, we were originally probably gonna order in but given all that had happened we wanted to celebrate a bit and we knew there was a Korean place a few blocks down that we hadn’t tried yet so we figured now would be the perfect time. So we get there and we’re trying to decipher the menu to the best of our ability lol but ended up asking our waiter for his thoughts with our given dietary restrictions and he was great and very helpful, everything was super delicious and very much enjoyed, and he was just really cool and awesome so I tipped him extra (and by that I mean like 30% because 25% is my default, so, we know how I feel about tipping waiters). so it was a very enjoyable meal, I took some home with me because I didn’t want to stuff myself too much and not be able to eat cake later, we’ll have to see if I end up eating my leftovers though because my acid reflux has been kinda bad tonight so I’m not sure if that’d be a good idea (it’s strange though because none of it was a typical trigger for me). We watched the second to last episode of Arrow and then I checked to see if the cake was fully cooled, then set it up with the whipped cream and strawberries and we ate cake (I made Jess eat a little but she doesn’t really like cake so I just let her eat the strawberries). so that was highly enjoyable as it always is for me. We then watched the most recent episode of Arrow, I had the benefit this time around of having listened to the “Quiver: The Green Arrow Podcast” review of the episode since I watched it the first time so I understood things a little better, they’re not always great at actually explaining concepts and fleshing them out in a way that makes a little comic book knowledge go very far in understanding where the show writers actually want to take you (and they just aren’t). For example, in the comics, the Ninth Circle (aka “the bad guys”) is actually like a supervillain bank that funds such evil operations, and that makes a hella lot more sense than the non-descriptions we’ve had of it up to this point. But anyway. Once we finished that it was like 9 pm so Jess headed home and I watched tonight’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that I had forgotten about lol then just watched the news into Jimmy Kimmel  (it was an old episode though) before showering and starting to get ready for bed and now I am here. so yeah, big day to say the least. pretty wild I’d say, and I’m gonna be so thrown that today was only Friday and not Saturday lol and that we have Saturday as a whole other day tomorrow. The plan is to go up north to the Cheesecake Factory, we decided against seeing a movie because there really wasn’t anything we wanted to see (I’d have been fine seeing Captain Marvel again but Jess has already seen it twice and doesn’t really want to do it again which is valid). So we’ll just do Cheesecake Factory and shop, should be fun. It is 1 am now though and I should probably be getting to sleep if I want to get up and do things tomorrow (which I do) so I will call it a night here. Goodnight friends. Happy weekend.

[bbytyger-blog]

Stream of consciousness

This is one of those days in which I feel like shit. It’s not like one of those days in which you have this willpower and you want to do everything you dream to do. I feel like there is something wrong with my routine because yeah at the beginnin it actually works but when I go on andI don’t really focus on it because you act like you have to do it without thinking about it and that’s actually the right kind of way you should do it because you when you have to build a habit you just do it whatever it is but it does not work for me I don’t know why because after a while I’ve been doing it I feel like there’s no sense even if I think to acomplish my goals I can’t actually keep going and it is so overwhelming I can’t feel well today because I binged eating so I ate all of this junk food and like just binged on whatever I could eat so I just would like to find a way to just stick on a habit and keep going keep keep it up well it is quite hard just because I’m not independent I can’t cook my meals and because I you live with my parents when you live with your parents it’s so hard to eat what you what would you like to eat because obviously they cook for all the family and they are not going to like make you happier yes well this is the case of my parents so the only thing I would like to be is being independent I would like to be independent and cook my own meals ao I would finally find a kind of stability with myself so I can eat whatever I want I can skip meals whatever I want and I can nourish myself I can learn by it you can learn how to cook for yourself you can learn how to make like portions this is a big deal because when you live with your parents they’re going to give you the portion that suits them but it actually doesn’t mean that this is going to suit you and also if you live with your parents you’re going to do the shopping for you so they probably are not going to buy what you want. I am like fond of vegetables I would like to eat the healthiest as possible I will I would like to feel healthy and feel comfortable with myself with my family doesn’t buy the right food for me the food I would like to try to eat how silly it is going to be hard to find a balance in your life. Second of all I would like to stick into a workout routine that actually works because I am working out for myself at the moment and actually don’t know if I am doing it right or not cause I am following a like a six day work out which consists of one day arm workout on Monday Tuesday cardio work out Wednesday abs work out Thursday is leg work out Friday is rest Saturday cardio and Sunday total body this is my workout plan for the week and I’ve been doing this work out for about six weeks and he’s like the seventh seventh I guess but I stopped yesterday because when I went home as I finished my exams I binged on anything and today as well I have done the same thing actually it was pretty much worse than yesterday and it happens when you actually don’t think about what would you like to become and what would you like to accomplish in your life if every day if we thought about our dreams and what is important for us every day it would be much easier to like keep on going with our purposes and with our goals and stuff so what actually happens is that the next day just because the day before I ate so much junk food and binged or anything I could find it much more overwhelming the next day I feel like crap and I’m going to do it the same thing and another day and another one and so on and it is just so overwhelming actually I am not doing so bad because I’ve been working on for six weeks till now and I did my best I think I improved I feel stronger my sister actually Saadi that I lost some weight as well and my program is awesome because my workout program is is like amazing because I feel it works. The problem is that I actually cannot feel comfortable in my own skin cause I can’t feel pretty and I look at some models’ images on Instagram and I see beautiful places where they are they eat lots of healthy food they work out constantly they share positive thoughts they are actually perfect people living the perfect life I know that’s not true because everyone has their problems and stuff but when they share their life on these social media it is true so when they post the photo of what they ate and they are in this place they feel happy they are comfortable with themselves and this kind of overwhelms me because when I’m looking at all these models and always perfect lives I look around myself as well and I notice that I live in an unknown place away from the world I guess this is so bad when I think of my family as well this does not help me like it would never help me just because my family is pretty much a complete mess the worst mess ever there is like my mother that doesn’t care or anything she just leaves and goes wherever she wants and she leaves us and doesn’t care about us she comes back home wherever she wants so we can eat at certain times for example I would like to have dinner early in the evening just because I want the food to be digested so are you are going to go to bed light which never happens because she always comes back home at like 9 PM so late otherwise I will come back home from school for lunch I would find something I definitely don’t want to eat but I eat it anyway because I’m hungry and angry as well I’m angry with my mother I’m angry because of my sisters with my family because it does not allow me to live my life as I would like. The mechanisms that increases my compulsive behavior over food so when I start binge eating at lunch I would think that it just ruined my day so I would be allowed to binge eating all day long until you go to bed and this is the worst thing ever so the next day I would feel like crap and even if I would try to avoid these compulsive behavior when I’m hungry and angry I would turn out to be completely out of control it requires a strong willpower to fight all the shit I would think about it I would have unhealthy thoughts that would lead me to a worse me when I think but I’m not improving I would turn out to be completely without energies but when I find the right energy to emerge from this shit and to work out and to find some time for myself to pamper myself can to love my body to have positive thoughts I’m going to feel a lot better but unfortunately it only happens a few days a week on average which does not help me because most of the times I would be binge eating on bad stuff so I would have the most unhealthy thoughts and I would think about me restricting my calories intake and working out as much as I can to lose as much weight as I can in a brief period of time but also when I work out and I feel a bit out of energy I worry about my nutrients and I think that maybe I am not eating well because at lunch I did not eat well I would constantly worry for everything obviously when you eat badly and yes this is how I feel right now I feel so guilty I feel fat I feel that my skin is unhealthy and I need to nourish it the right way I feel like my hair is not nourished as day should I feel like my teeth are not healthy and this worries me so much I feel like there is cellulite all over my legs and the list would go on. Despite all of these rotten stuff I just keep going thinking that I can improve and I can do it one day I just have to find some balance I just have to change completely the air I breathe and my surroundings because they actually poison me my family is poisoning me and I can’t wait to go away can’t wait to live with another family I can’t wait to change completely the way I live. I’ve just bought a book which is called the bikini body 28 day healthy eating and lifestyle guide two-hundred recipes weekly menus for weight workout plan and it is by Kayla Itsines Who is an Australian personal trainer who wants to help women to find a way to be comfortable with themselves and to be strong and healthy this looks like an amazing program to lose weight but growing muscles and confidence as well and I can’t wait to receive it I bought some recipes books as well which are called the green kitchen and they are about vegetarian recipes vegan recipes and there’s another book to make a smoothie for every day and also a book which teaches you how to make up a salad in a mason jar which I thought would be amazing and I hope it would help me so much with my motivation hopefully I would go away from there soon this is a stream of consciousness you know? I can’t feel pretty disease that huge deal I have a weird nose I have a crooked nose I have crooked teeth I have crooked legs I’m not symmetric and this is so unbearable for me I am fat I have a short core and I don’t have a balanced body and I have messed hair and short nails a bad skin ugly eyebrows bad eyelashes I am a mess and this is a big deal because I always look at those flawless models like Alexis Ren she’s one of those who are true and take care of their body and her simplicity she is definitely perfect she is the perfect girl and she deserves everything cause she’s beautiful and she’s kind she looks kind she looks happy and fit and healthy she’s perfect she’s just perfect and I’m not I am just the typical ugly girl who can’t deal with anything who can’t deal with her ugliness because I also have a bad position I’m not taking advantage of my body and of the power of my body I have an ugly voice as well I am ugly and this doesn’t help me at all. I just feel so unhealthy so unbalanced so ugly so fat so dumb so stupid and there are yet people who love me. And I just don’t know why why they love me I’m so ugly and I am so stupid I literally can’t wait to finish my exams to finally work out and be healthy as I want to be as I’ve always wanted to be I want to heal my body I want to feel like strong and healthy I want my mind to feel strong and healthy as well I want to find happiness in my life I want to find freedom in my life I just don’t want to feel in chains again and again and again because it is so poisoning so for me I’ve just thought I needed to explain my problems and talk about my problems loudly with my voice not only with my hands it’s really weird I had to speak to myself clearly to find out the real problem I talked a lot I guess if I don’t express myself I would turn out to be more overwhelmed because I can’t stand myself and I can’t stand the way I speak I can’t stand my voice I can’t stand myself I just feel like I actually have to go through on the program really would help me to get a healthy mind healthy body and a healthier me I just feel like I have to heal myself totally like every part of me should be healed because I feel so poisoned and I think that health is the more important thing in my life health happiness confidence and power being in nature feeling good working out exercising improving growing learning friends freedom reality balance positivity love love self love first of all I should free my mind I can’t hear my body I don’t have a healthy mind I’m crazy my life my mind is just ill solitude doesn’t help me because I think that I need to compare myself to others and to share opinions about my own ideas on about my problems so I think I really need friends and help.

What I’m actually going to do is to stick into a new routine I’m trying to do my best with my growth and improving and self consciousness maybe I just have so many things flying in my had clouding my mind those clouds are probably the things that make my mind crazy it is impossible to think about becoming like another person because you are unique the way you are and you are never going to be like another different person it is not healthy to be like another girl like a model it is impossible I just want to find the perfect perfect me the perfect shade of me I want to be powerful I want to be confident I want to be light I want to be empowered I want to be healthy I want to live I want to be sporty I want to be athletic I want to have an amazing body and healthy hair and healthy skin healthy mind to be free I want to go away from here and yeah that’s pretty much it.

[thedalishelves]

Hey! I saw that you were vegan and I have a bit of a problem that maybe you could help with (or not, it's cool either way). I have wanted to change my diet to be a vegan for the longest time, but my parents just deadass don't respect it? I'm young, so I live with my parents and I eat what they cook and etc, and when I expressed the desire to be vegan, or at least vegetarian, they ignored me. Sometimes I have to go days w/o eating bc they cook meat n such. Any tips or is this unfixable for now?

first of all that’s really cool that u wanna go vegan and thank you for asking me!! i dealt with this too! i first went vegetarian when i was 13 and my parents convinced me to just give up red meat. after about two months i excused myself from the dinner table one night and just sobbed in the bathtub for like 20 minutes because i felt so bad about eating a chicken. after that they realized how Extra i am about this and reluctantly let me do my thing (with some persuading from me: tips will follow)

also this is gonna be long sorry omg this is what happens when ppl ask me about being vegan jfdkshafks i’m putting it under a cut just bc it would literally take up people’s entire dash

so i’d recommend going vegetarian first for sure. it’s what i always recommend anyway. slowly phasing out animal products will help SO MUCH with adjusting and cravings. i was vegetarian for 4 years before i went vegan! but for you specifically it’ll expand the amount of stuff you can eat that your parents make. meat is the staple in a lots of families’ meals, but i’m guessing they’ll often make a little side dish or something? eat a lot of that!! 60% of what i ate was the green beans and rice my mom always made for a side dish

ask to help your parents with cooking! try to separate your food whenever possible. so like if they’re making spaghetti with meat sauce (gross ik my dad always used to make it), just say you’d prefer it without the sauce and grab a little bowl before it’s mixed in with the meat. (i used to add butter to it.) basically just any dish that could be vegetarian: take a little serving before the meat is added. i did this all the time and it gave me a lot of good meals (another example in case this is vague: i’d scoop a bit of salad into my bowl before my mom added bacon to it)

also i found it really helpful to ask for VERY cheap vegetarian/vegan foods. i’d always ask my dad to buy beans and lentils and because they’re like 50 cents a can or whatever, he couldn’t reasonably say no. (these are so versatile, even if you don’t know how to cook. making a bean salad is so easy and i used to eat them all the time! also AMAZING source of protein and iron and so much other good stuff)

there are also quite a few sneaky “accidental” vegan foods that you can request from the grocery store that won’t make your parents think: ‘ugh she’s a vegan now.’ some examples: oreos, most cake mixes (there’s lots of recipes online where u just add water and/or soda!!), loads of different chips, many cereals (if u eat them dry), instant ramen (even the ones that say beef and chicken). i know that’s a lot of junk food, but there’s also some healthier(ish) prepackaged meals: this list is good (even though peta is a garbage company i reluctantly admit they have good resources sometimes) (it’s american centric tho but there’s loads of these lists online!). since i’m guessing you don’t go grocery shopping so you aren’t able to look at the labels, you can look it up online and ask your parents to buy it (and you can do this in an indirect way if they’re not cool with it, like ‘hey can u buy the sweet spicy chili doritoes instead of the other flavour next time i like it better’ that kinda thing)

so those are some tips on how to get some food! you should also ask for multivitamins since if you’re basically going to be picking and choosing what your parents put in front of you then you might miss out on crucial vitamins that is otherwise easy for vegans to get if they’re picking their own food.

obviously the ideal thing here would be to get your parents to be on your side!! i have no idea what your relationship with your parents is like so this might not be applicable at all, but in case it is i’ll give you some tips that worked for me.

the best thing that worked for me in the beginning was that i promised i’d cook my own food. as a wee 13 year old, my mom still made my lunch but i asked her for just a plain cheese sandwich and she was okay with that. for dinner, she’d still make the same old side dishes that i could eat, but if she was making chicken, i’d fry up my own tofu or put a couple veggie dogs in the microwave. i don’t think she’d have let me be vegetarian if she had to cook my stuff separate for me. (also, by the time i was vegan i was so used to cooking my own food i just made all my own meals and had gotten good at it by that point!)

at first i just explained to my parents that it was unbearable for me to eat animals. like i literally could not put it into my mouth unless they essentially force fed me. (once again, i was super extra) as my anecdote at the beginning explained, they saw how serious i was lmao. however, my mom did not understand me being vegan until very very recently!!! over the years i’ve casually mentioned various facts about the meat and dairy industry that have opened her mind a bit. and she’s even stopped eating pigs now!! i always find it helpful to say that i do it for multiple reasons: for animals, for the environment, and my health. that usually gets through to people because they realize i’m not just doing some dumb trend or whatever. if at all possible, show them a documentary?? i’m guessing they’d be like ‘hell no’ but just in case (and for your benefit too!) my favourite is cowspiracy (on netflix). it has changed SO MANY meat eaters’ minds!! (the documentary maker was a meat eater too!)

but i realize how engrained this is in certain cultures. my dad is italian and by this point (after 10 years) he realizes that being vegan is a sustainable diet (which he didn’t believe before) but i think he’d rather die than give up meat. and my other side is polish which means their diet is basically carbs and meat and carbs with meat. none of my extended family understand what the hell i’m on about. it’s very frustrating but if you stick with your resolve to not eat meat then they’ll eventually realize you’re serious and maybe make one dish for you at christmas instead of just giving you a piece of bread

if they REALLY are against you going vegetarian, then i obviously absolutely cannot recommend that you starve. you can always go vegetarian/vegan when you move out, and that wouldn’t be your fault at all!! a compromise might be to go pescatarian or even just cut out red meat. (though if you’re anything like me this might not end well haha. it’s worth trying though as a last resort)

i know it’s such a tough situation!!! my sister is vegan too and literally EVERY DAY we text each other about how ignorant and disrespectful our family members are about this. it’s something pretty much every vegan goes through i think, because there are some WACK ideas about eating animals and those who choose not to.

so tl;dr: if you can, try to tell your parents honestly how you feel and try to give them facts. offer to cook your own meals. ask to help your parents cook so you can try to make the food vegetarian. request foods from the grocery store that are a) cheap and/or b) accidentally vegan.

i really hope this helped!!! i was so scared and overwhelmed when i first when vegetarian and had no idea what the fuck i was doing and it makes everything so much worse when your family is unsupportive. i truly wish u the best and please come to me with any follow up questions!!!

[easyfoodnetwork]

A McDonald’s breakfast buffet. An all-you-can-eat Taco Bell. This isn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but a real yet short-lived phenomenon. When we think of buffets, we tend to think of their 1980s and early ’90s heyday, when commercial jingles for Sizzler might have been confused with our national anthem. We think of Homer Simpson getting dragged out of the Frying Dutchman, “a beast more stomach than man.” I think of my parents going on buffet benders resembling something out of Hunter S. Thompson’s life, determined to get their money’s worth with two picky kids. What we don’t typically think about, however, is the fast-food buffet, a blip so small on America’s food radar that it’s hard to prove it even existed. But it did. People swear that all-you-can-eat buffets could be found at Taco Bell, KFC, and even under the golden arches of McDonald’s. That it could have existed isn’t surprising. The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake. It was the physical manifestation of the American id: endless biscuits, popcorn chicken, vats of nacho cheese and sketchy pudding — so much sketchy pudding. Why, then, have so many of us failed to remember it? How did it become a footnote, relegated to the backwoods of myths and legends? There are whispers of McDonald’s locations that have breakfast buffets. Was there, in fact, a Taco Bell buffet, or is it a figment of our collective imaginations? Yes, someone tells me — an all-you-can-eat Taco Bell existed in her dorm cafeteria. Another person suggests maybe we were just remembering the nachos section of the Wendy’s Superbar. The fast-food buffet was inevitable, the culmination of an arms race in maximizing caloric intake. The fast-food buffet lives in a strange sort of ether. You can’t get to it through the traditional path of remembering. Was there actually a Pizza Hut buffet in your hometown? Search your subconscious, sifting past the red cups that make the soda taste better, past the spiffy new CD jukebox, which has Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind and Paul McCartney’s All the Best under the neon lamps. Search deeper, and you might find your father going up for a third plate and something remaining of the “dessert pizzas” lodged in your subconscious. This is where the fast-food buffet exists. The history of the buffet in America is a story of ingenuity and evolution. Sure, it originated in Europe, where it was a classy affair with artfully arranged salted fish, eggs, breads, and butter. The Swedish dazzled us with their smorgasbords at the 1939 World Fair. We can then trace the evolution of the buffet through Las Vegas, where the one-dollar Buckaroo Buffet kept gamblers in the casino. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese immigrant families found loopholes in racist immigration laws by establishing restaurants. They brought Chinese cooking catered to American tastes in endless plates of beef chow fun and egg rolls. By the 1980s, buffets ruled the landscape like family dynasties, with sister chains the Ponderosa and the Bonanza spreading the gospel of sneeze guards and steaks, sundae stations and salad bars along the interstates. From Shoney’s to Sizzler, from sea to shining sea, the buffet was a feast fit for kings, or a family of four. And of course, fast-food restaurants wanted in on the action. As fast-food historian and author of Drive-Thru Dreams Adam Chandler put it, “every fast food place flirted with buffets at some point or another. McDonald’s absolutely did, as did most of the pizza chains with dine-in service. KFC still has a few stray buffets, as well as an illicit one called Claudia Sanders Dinner House, which was opened by Colonel Sanders’ wife after he was forbidden from opening a competing fried chicken business after selling the company. Wendy’s Super Bar was short-lived, but the salad bar lived on for decades.” How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce. In a 1988 commercial for the Superbar, Dave Thomas says, “I’m an old-fashioned guy. I like it when families eat together.” A Wendy’s executive described the new business model as “taking us out of the fast-food business.” Everyone agrees the Wendy’s Supernar was glorious. And gross, everyone also agrees. How something can be both gross and glorious is a particular duality of fast food, like the duality of man or something, only with nacho cheese and pasta sauce. “I kind of want to live in a ’90s Wendy’s,” Amy Barnes, a Tennessee-based writer, tells me in between preparing for virtual learning with her teenagers. The Superbar sat in the lobby, with stations lined up like train carts. First, there was the Garden Spot, which “no one cared about,” a traditional salad bar with a tub of chocolate pudding at its helm, “which always had streams of salad dressing and shredded cheese floating on top.” Next up was the Pasta Pasta section, with “noodles, alfredo and tomato sauce…[as well as] garlic bread made from the repurposed hamburger buns with butter and garlic smeared on them.” Obviously, the crown jewel of the Superbar was the Mexican Fiesta, with its “vats of ground beef, nacho cheese, sour cream.” The Fiesta shared custody of additional toppings with the salad bar. It was $2.99 for the dining experience. Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet. The marriage of Wendy’s and the Superbar lasted about a decade before it was phased out in all locations by 1998. Like a jilted ex-lover, the official Wendy’s Story on the website makes zero mention of Superbar, despite the countless blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts devoted to remembering it. At least they kept the salad bar together until the mid-2000s for the sake of the children. Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The McDonald’s Breakfast Buffet. Googling the existence of such a thing only returns results of people questioning the existence of this McMuffin Mecca on subforums and Reddit. Somebody knows somebody who passed one once on the highway. A stray Yelp review of the Kiss My Grits food truck in Seattle offers a lead: “I have to say, I recall the first time I ever saw grits, they were at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet in Alexandria, Virginia, and they looked as unappetizing as could be.” However, the lead is dead on arrival. Further googling of the McDonald’s buffet with terrible grits in Alexandria turns up nothing. I ask friends on Facebook. I ask Twitter. I get a lone response. Eden Robins messages me “It was in Decatur, IL,” as though she’s describing the site where aliens abducted her. “I’m a little relieved that I didn’t imagine the breakfast buffet since no one ever knows what the fuck I’m talking about when I bring it up.” “We had traveled down there for a high school drama competition,” she goes on to say. “And one morning before the competition, we ate at a McDonald’s breakfast buffet. I had never seen anything like it before or since.” I ask what was in the buffet, although I know the details alone will not sustain me. I want video to pore over so I can pause at specific frames, like a fast-food version of the Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot footage. Robins says they served “scrambled eggs and pancakes and those hash brown tiles. I was a vegetarian at the time so no sausage or bacon, but those were there, too.” McDonald’s isn’t the only chain with a buffet whose existence is hazy. Yum Brands, the overlord of fast-food holy trinity Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, is said to have had buffets at all three restaurants. I confirm nothing, however, when I reach out to the corporate authorities. On the KFC side, a spokesperson offers to look into “some historical information,” but doesn’t get back to me. My contact at Taco Bell tells me, “I’ll look into it. Certainly, nothing in existence today. I’ve never heard of it. Looks like there are a couple threads on Reddit.” Reddit, of course, speculates a possible Mandela Effect — the phenomenon of a group of unrelated people remembering a different event than what actually occurred — in the existence of Taco Bell buffets. But I have a firmer lead in Payel Patel, a doctor who studied at Johns Hopkins, who tells me there was a Taco Bell Express in her dorm that was included in an all-you-can-eat meal plan option, though it only lasted one fleeting year. “You could order anything, like 15 nachos and 11 bean burritos,” she says, “and they would make it and give it to you, and you walked off without paying a cent.” A Johns Hopkins student newsletter published in 2001 corroborates the existence of the utopian all-you-can-eat Taco Bell, saying, “you can also gorge yourself on some good old Taco Bell tacos and burritos. Don’t forget, it’s all-you-can-eat. Just don’t eat too much; you don’t want to overload the John.” There are some concrete examples of fast-food buffets that still exist today. When a Krystal Buffet opened in Alabama in 2019, it was met with “excitement and disbelief,” according to the press release. Former New Orleans resident Wilson Koewing told me of a Popeye’s buffet that locals “speak of as if it is a myth.” When I dig deeper, I come across a local paper, NOLA Weekend, which covers “New Orleans Food, things to do, culture, and lifestyle.” It touts the Popeye’s buffet like a carnival barker, as though it is simply too incredible to believe: “The Only Popeye’s Buffet in the World! It’s right next door in Lafayette! Yes, that’s right: a Popeyes buffet. HERE.” Somehow, the KFC buffet is the most enduring of the fast-food buffets still in existence. And yet everyone I speak with feels compelled to walk me through the paths and roads leading to such an oasis, as if, again, it were the stuff of legends. There are landmarks and there are mirages, and the mirages need maps most of all. To get to the KFC buffet in Key Largo, Tiffany Aleman must first take us through “a small island town with one traffic light and one major highway that runs through it. There are the seafood buffets and bait shops, which give way to newfangled Starbucks.” The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die. New Jerseyan D.F. Jester leads us past the local seafood place “that looks like the midnight buffet on a cruise ship has been transported 50 miles inland and plunked inside the dining area of a 1980s Ramada outside of Newark.” Descriptions of the food are about what I would expect of a KFC buffet. Laura Camerer remembers the food in her college town in Morehead, Kentucky, as “all fried solid as rocks sitting under heat lamps, kind of gray and gristly.” Jester adds, “for all intents and purposes, this is a KFC. It looks like one, but sadder, more clinical. The buffet adds the feel of a hospital cafeteria, the people dining look close to death or knowingly waiting to die.” Then Jessie Lovett Allen messages me. “There is [a] KFC in my hometown, and it is magical without a hint of sketch.” I must know more. First, she takes me down the winding path: “the closest larger city is Kearney, which is 100 miles away and only has 35K people, and Kearney is where you’ll find the closest Target, Panera, or Taco Bell. But to the North, South, or West, you have to drive hundreds of miles before you find a larger city. I tell you all of this because the extreme isolation is what gives our restaurants, even fast-food ones, an outsized psychological importance to daily life.” The KFC Jessie mentions is in North Platte, Nebraska, and has nearly five stars on Yelp, an accomplishment worthy of a monument for any fast-food restaurant. On the non-corporate Facebook page for KFC North Platte, one of the hundreds of followers of the page comments, “BEST KFC IN THE COUNTRY.” Allen describes the place as though she is recounting a corner of heaven. “They have fried apple pies that seem to come through a wormhole from a 1987 McDonalds. Pudding: Hot. Good. Layered cold pudding desserts. This one rotates. It might be chocolate, banana, cookies and cream. It has a graham cracker base, pudding, and whipped topping. Standard Cold Salad bar: Lettuce, salad veggies, macaroni salads, JELL-O salads. Other meats: chicken fried steak patties. Fried chicken gizzards. White Gravy, Chicken Noodle Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Cornbread, Corn on the Cob, Chicken Pot Pie Casserole. AND most all the standard stuff on the normal KFC menu, which is nice because you can pick out a variety of chicken types or just have a few tablespoons of a side dish.” In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed. Then she adds that the buffet “is also available TO GO, but there are rules. You get a large Styrofoam clamshell, a small Styrofoam clamshell, and a cup. You have to be able to close the Styrofoam. You are instructed that only beverages can go in cups, and when I asked about this, an employee tells me that customers have tried to shove chicken into the drink cups in the past.” In the end, the all-you-can-eat dream didn’t last, if it ever even existed. The chains folded. The senior citizens keeping Ponderosa in business have died. My own parents reversed course after their buffet bender, trading in sundae stations for cans of SlimFast. Fast-food buffets retreated into an ethereal space. McDonald’s grew up with adult sandwiches like the Arch Deluxe. Wendy’s went on a wild rebound with the Baconator. Pizza Hut ripped out its jukeboxes, changed its logo, went off to the fast-food wars, and ain’t been the same since. Taco Bell is undergoing some kind of midlife crisis, hemorrhaging its entire menu of potatoes, among other beloved items. At least the KFC in North Platte has done good, though the novel coronavirus could change things. In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder, hovering over sneeze guards, sharing soup ladles to scoop an odd assortment of pudding, three grapes, a heap of rotini pasta, and a drumstick onto a plate. Maybe we can reach this place again. But to find it, we must follow the landmarks, searching our memory as the map. MM Carrigan is a Baltimore-area writer and weirdo who enjoys staring directly into the sun. Their work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and PopMatters. They are the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly. Tweets @thesurfingpizza. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/33e4Z8k

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/09/fast-food-buffets-are-thing-of-past.html