In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks: And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (17 page)

HONEY

A tablespoon of honey is probably the work of two hundred thousand bees and the pollen of a million flowers. The work that goes into it is astounding. Given the process of making honey, it should be a lot better for you. It should be a magical elixir. You should never age and it should make your dick grow. And it should cost like seventy dollars an ounce. Instead it’s just slightly better for you than sugar. If you replaced sugar with honey, instead of morbidly obese you would just be fat. And it should come in a squeeze bottle shaped like a bee, not a bear. We’ve decided bears love honey. But have you ever seen a bear eating honey? If bears could talk, they’d be pissed at this stereotype. There should be some sort of bear anti-defamation league.

SPECIAL K

Not too long ago, I realized that the
K
in Special K stood for “Kellogg.” How is it that it took me until halfway into my forty-fifth year to figure this out? Special K isn’t even really a cereal. It’s more a base for cereal. It’s a cereal substrate. You can’t eat it without slicing a banana or capsizing the sugar bowl on it. Maybe that’s what makes it special. Maybe they mean special like Special Olympics.

MOVIE-THEATER FOOD

The movie theater is brutal if you’re on a diet. Whenever I’m trying to lose weight, it seems like I go to the theater with someone who’s decided to pack on a few. My wife will get a Hebrew National hot dog, caramel corn, and some Goobers. How long can you sit next to a person, smelling their hot dog, hearing them suck on the Coke, and staring at their trash-can-sized tub of popcorn, without saying fuck it? Movie theaters should have an eating section and a dieting section. Also, a quick message to movie-theater owners—if you don’t want me to keister a Snickers into the theater, lower the goddamn prices.

GOOBERS VS. RAISINETS

Speaking of movie food. Raisinets outsell Goobers ten to one, but any sane person knows chocolate-covered peanuts taste better than chocolate-covered raisins. I think it’s the name. One is Raisinets, and the other is named after the semi-retarded mechanic from
The Andy Griffith Show
. This just goes to show you what Madison Avenue can do. They got behind an inferior product and manipulated everyone into thinking it was better. Also, I can’t believe George Washington Carver came up with 256 things to do with peanuts but didn’t think of Goobers.

MOUNDS VS. ALMOND JOY

Why would anyone get Mounds when there is Almond Joy? Could there be a worse name for a candy bar? Why not just call it Lumps or Piles? One has the word
joy
in it, and the other is something termites live in. Plus it’s confusing: Almond Joys have a
mound
of almond on top.

I’m not cheap but I have a poor person’s mentality because I was born among super-downtrodden people. I can’t turn something down if it is free. If I order a sandwich and the waitress says, “That comes with cat shit on it,” I would say, “Put it on the side.” It’s not like the Mounds is twelve cents cheaper or you get 10 percent more coconut. Even if I were allergic to almonds, I would still get the Almond Joy, pry them off, and put it on eBay. Essentially you’re offering the same product, minus the best part, and giving it an inferior name. This would be like offering a second Milky Way, without the nougat, and calling it Turds.

KETCHUP PACKETS

Life is a process of constant evolution. Just like computers, cars, and cell phones: By the time you get them home, the next model has already hit the showroom. Everything has evolved except the ketchup packet. Horseshoe crabs have evolved more than the ketchup packet. Someone signed off on them in 1956 and made the proclamation, “There’ll never be a better way to transport ketchup than this tiny, filthy, plastic, unopenable condom packet.” It’s absolutely insane how long this horrible design has hung on.

There’s no clear way to open it. No pull tab, no perforated stripe, no pop top. It’s like trying to give a hamster a reach-around. You have no choice but to place it in your mouth and use your teeth like a bench vise while your hand tears the packet away. This creates a diagonal rip that goes further down than it does across. The end result is ketchup all over your shirt and a filthy corner of plastic in your mouth.

This brings me to a bigger point. Why is it in the germophobic, Purell society we’ve built, in which we cover our hands with our sleeves to open bathroom doors and the time-honored handshake has been replaced by the Howie Mandel fist bump (call me old-fashioned, but I remember when one gent fisted another, it wasn’t up top), we happily shove these filthy packets, probably fresh off a container ship from China and dripping in melamine and roach feces, into our mouths?

The only thing that’s got more shit on it than that ketchup packet is the cardboard burger box we milk the ketchup onto. The one the high school dropout with SARS handed us at the drive-through window fresh off a pallet from the back of a stake-bed truck that came over from Arkansas. Here’s the bottom line. Not how many germs there are or how foolish we are. No. It’s how none of this shit matters. If you were gonna get sick, it would have been from the two thousand ketchup packets you put in your mouth that were from God knows where.

The day the first McNugget was sold in 1980 should have spelled the end of the ketchup packet. If they can figure out a way to get forty-five different flavors of sauce into those convenient dipping containers, why not ketchup?

And don’t get me started on soy sauce. That’s an even bigger abortion. It comes in the same packet as the ketchup, but soy sauce lacks the viscosity of ketchup, so when it tears open it goes airborne and quickly becomes weaponized. Nothing ruins a white dress shirt faster than a paintball shot of black soy sauce. What’s up? Do we not have other containers? Couldn’t it come in one of those little plastic airplane booze bottles or the keychain-sized Tabasco containers? How about you put the fucking soy sauce in that? Nope, we cannot improve it. I just spent eighty-seven dollars on take-out sushi, couldn’t you spend three cents on a functional container to hold the soy sauce?

One last complaint about the ketchup. Everything has been super-sized except the ketchup packet. You’ve got eighty pounds of fries and a thimbleful of ketchup. Somewhere during your ninth packet, you’ve managed to moisten four fries.

JEWISH FOOD

As a people, Jews are not exactly stuntmen. Danger is not their middle name, it’s Neil. You won’t find them jumping the fountain at Caesar’s Palace, riding in dune buggies, or on the vert ramp at the X Games. But when it comes to food, they suddenly turn into Johnny Knoxville. Cow tongue, gefilte fish, pickled herring. They’re the only people who think cold gelatinized mackerel sounds good. And have you ever had a chicken-liver omelet? Of course you haven’t, you’re sane. When these guys pull up to the dinner table they should be wearing leather red-white-and-blue jumpsuits and be sponsored by Red Bull.

RAVIOLI

I never order ravioli at a restaurant because they only give you six of them. Canned ravioli is a disaster, but the flash-frozen stuff that comes in a sheet and you toss into the pot is usually decent. I’ve never had a bad outing with that ravioli. The great thing about ravioli is that there’s nothing you can put in it that’s bad. “What is this?” “It’s beef.” “Awesome.” “What is this?” “It’s cheese.” “Awesome.” “What is this?” “It’s pumpkin.” “Great.” “What is this?” “This is BBs from a shotgun shell.” “All right, I’ll try it.” “What’s this?” “It’s one of your mom’s spent tampons.” “All right, I’ll give it a shot.”

PIZZA

Pizza is a controversial topic. People will argue that the thick-crust deep-dish is the best kind. I have no problem with deep-dish. But to me the best deep-dish pizza from the best deep-dish place in Chicago doesn’t stack up against a slice of average New York–style thin crust. I’m talking about the kind you can fold like a taco and funnel the grease directly into your mouth. For most guys, pizza’s in about the same category as blow jobs. Some are better than others, but even a mediocre one is good. Unfortunately, there are those that are hell-bent on fucking up a simple food that is universally loved. Here’s how you fuck up a pizza. There’s a highfalutin way to fuck up a pizza and a NASCAR white-trash way to fuck it up.

Let’s start with the top-shelf pizzas. I’ve never had a mushroom pizza or a black olive pizza or a sausage-and-onion pizza and announced, “Something’s missing. I know what it is, it’s poached salmon.” I could eat pizza three meals a day, seven days a week, and would never grow tired of the seven or eight traditional pizza toppings and the two thousand possible variations you can create from those. What is it with our endless obsession with changing things that shouldn’t be messed with? There’s nothing less broken on this planet than pizza. Megan Fox should get a nose job and a tummy tuck before we start considering altering pizza. If you don’t like a good sausage-and-onion or Canadian-bacon-and-olive pizza, then you don’t fucking like pizza and you should get the fuck away from
my
pizza. You homos should spend your extra culinary effort fixing the salads you fucked up eight years ago. I would rather stand in the orchestra pit for two thousand straight showings of
Puppetry of the Penis
than eat a pizza with goat cheese.

Now for my blue-collar friends who enjoy inexpensive delivery pizza—Domino’s, Papa John’s, et cetera. Let’s deconstruct these shitty pizzas like it’s a gastronomic crime scene and get to the truth about why they suck. Let’s start at the top and work our way down. The toppings. I’m ashamed to say that I can’t tell the difference between Domino’s pepperoni and a high-end trattoria pepperoni. The mushrooms are essentially the same, the onions are the same, the black olives are the same. So it’s not the toppings. On to the next suspect: the cheese. I bet if I shaved you a sliver each of Mario Batali’s mozzarella and Little Caesar’s, you wouldn’t know the difference. So let’s continue our ridiculous investigation. Now we get to the sauce. I know there’s such a thing as great pizza sauce, but it still comes down to crushed-up tomato, basil, and a little garlic. Not that Pizza Hut hasn’t found a way to fuck up this amazingly simple task, but I still claim it’s not the real culprit. If this were a robbery, the sauce would merely be the wheel man who will be found shot in the van near the alley where they switched cars. Who is the Keyser Söze of this culinary crime? The dough. The crust is the kingpin. It’s bad and there’s too much of it. It’s like a band you hate coming out with a double album. It has the consistency, flavor, and girth of carpet padding. If they made their crust thinner, not only would it save them money, it would make them money because we would eat more of their pizza.

Here’s my analogy. You either want to be on the beach with the thin crust or out past the breakers with the Chicago-style thick crust. It’s in between where you get pummeled. Think about it. Who likes doughy crust? Kids. And what are kids? Tiny, dumb adults. Therefore if you are into that chewy, spongy dough, you are mentally deficient. Also, I’m no dietician, but everyone knows carbs are the worst thing you can eat. And the pizza with three times the crust is going to have three times the carbs. Domino’s thin crust is fine; if they were smart, they’d only make that. But of course they refuse to learn this lesson and come out with stuffed crust. Again, this is for morons. The point of the crust is to have a dough handle for the rest of the pie. There’s already cheese
on
the pizza, it doesn’t need to be
in
the pizza. If you want a tube of melted cheese, order the goddamn mozzarella sticks. This is also a declaration that you make a horrible pizza. It’s the culinary equivalent of pleading insanity: You know you’re not winning the case, you’re just hoping to avoid the chair. And Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and other chains, please stop trying to kill us with your dessert attempts. Two slices of your stuffed-crust Philly-cheesesteak pizza is equivalent to eating a gingerbread house. Do we really need to cram in another two thousand fudge-flavored calories?

I hate the people who love the vegetable lover’s pizza. Nobody who loves pizza wants the horn of plenty dumped onto their pie. This always gets ordered for the handful of vegetarian assholes who have to destroy everyone else’s dining experience. Someone should just order a dinner salad for those douchebags and let them eat it in the car. Or better yet, just order them a goddamn mushroom pizza. It’s not that vegetarians love vegetables, it’s that they love cows. Oh, and hate people.

Now that I’ve said my piece on pizza, let’s get into how to order it. Here’s how not to order it: “There’s thirty guys showing up for the Super Bowl party. Give me ten cheese and ten pepperoni.” I find pepperoni is tolerated but never loved. Like a chick with a pretty face and a fat ass. Guys will have sex with her, but they’d rather be with the Victoria’s Secret model. Or in this case, the sausage-and-onion or the meatball. Now that’s a pizza I’d like to have sex with. I claim the “give me ten cheese and ten pepperoni” is a vestige of our childhood when you’d go to some kid’s house for a birthday or slumber party and Mama knew that the eight-year-olds would eat anything with salt and grease she slid in front of them. This mentality gets dragged into adulthood and eventually the office place when it comes time to order pizza for the Christmas party. Here’s my ten-pizza, please-everyone ordering combo: two cheese, two pepperoni, two sausage-and-onion, two meatball, one black olive, and one mushroom. There. All bases covered, everyone’s happy, and I guarantee you the two meatballs will be gone before one of the pepperoni pies expires.

BLUEBERRY, CHOCOLATE, AND JALAPEÑO BAGELS

Another food that’s often ordered at the workplace is bagels. When it comes to ordering bagels, I’m going to need you to take everything I just taught you about pizza and throw it out the window. In the world of bagels, less is more. I feel qualified to speak about bagels because even though I’m not a Jew I do possess many Jewish qualities, such as a huge cock and an incredible vertical leap. We started off with two or three varieties of bagels and worked our way up to 175. This is why when the peon from the office returns from the bagel run you can look forward to the blueberry bagel, the jalapeño bagel, the cranberry bagel, and the chocolate bagel. By the way, we’ve had chocolate bagels for two hundred years—they’re called fucking donuts. So instead of enough plain, onion, and egg bagels to go around, he gets a United Nations chub pack of bagels nobody wants. But here’s the problem. Eventually, because it’s free and somehow free food at the workplace turns everyone into a bear at Yellowstone Park, the cranapple and strawberry-yogurt-flavored bagels get consumed, and this sends the message to the lackey, “Nice work. Next time order the exact same thing.”