I’ve seen it all now.
On the tube yesterday, coming up the escalator was a bloke with a bald head. Not that a bloke with a bald head is a revelation, but I mention the slap-head appearance in order to give you a mental picture of the vision with which I was confronted.
Smartly dressed, intelligent-looking (at least he probably was) but when you walk around the capital with Bluetooth deaf-aid wireless mobile phone antenna sticking out of EACH lug-hole, one is prone to looking like a complete fucking idiot.
He looked fucking ridiculous. Like someone had taken a magician’s wand and hammered it through his head, via the ears, until it protruded on the other side. Yul Brinner with handlebars on his head. What a git. Like Frankenstein with the bolts in the wrong place. Like a huge nob with a big nail through the helmet.
Was it to get perfect stereo balance and have the voices directly inside his head? Or was it to have more than one call on the go at any time? Maybe if two calls came in simultaneously, we would see him spinning round talking to himself left and right.
Either way, he looked like a right nob.
So did the transvestite on the platform at Baker Street. Dressed in a leopard print coat with a matching Thunderbirds hat and shirt in electric blue satin and high heeled shoes. Fantastic. The world needs freaks like these!
Friday, 27 May 2011
EAT SHIT AND DIE
I wrote this last September, but didn't actually get around to publishing here. Because I couldn't be arsed. And then I forgot. But here it is anyway, albeit nine months after the fact:
I’m here in the US, stuck in Washington Dulles airport. Or should that be Washington’s Dullest airport? En route to New York in an hour or so, to kill some time I have indulged in a ‘Five Guys’ bacon cheeseburger and Cajun fries, and now find myself writing some more crap while eating more crap. Well, as fast food crap goes, I have to admit this is somewhat better than the usual McDonalds/Burger King crap. They are probably just there for show, but in front of the counter are several half hundredweight bags of spuds, with a notice stating the name of the local Virginia farm they have been sourced from.
I’ve been here since the beginning of the week, and it’s now Saturday. I’m no stranger to American food culture, having been here a few times over the years, but I’ve always – at least to some extent – accepted that the food is so much more processed than that we are used to eating in the UK. Accepted, that is, until now.
Fuck me, is there nothing in this country’s culinary output that does not contain a plethora of chemicals, additives, minerals, vitamins, soya, artificial flavours, sweeteners, colourings and other such shite?
I bought a bottle of ‘pure’ water yesterday, thinking that it would be spring water bottled at source somewhere, like Colorado. It was purified water. In other words, it could have come out of a fucking drain pipe, or a Mississippi swamp. And it contained ‘minerals for improved flavour’. Christ, even the pure water isn’t pure – it has been fucked around with by adding some sort of unnecessary shit to it. It’s supposed to be water – why can’t they just leave it at that? I don’t drink water for any flavour, I drink it to quench my thirst and stay hydrated, and flush out my kidneys etc.
Unless you can find some sort of organic heath food shop – not easy in the US, at least not in the deep south of Alabama, where I’ve been visiting friends – everything you eat contains a list of ingredients longer than your arm, that do not relate to any food I’ve ever heard of. Sulphites, sulphates, potassium this, alluminium that. Fucking hell! Alluminium! What are they doing? Grinding up old saucepans into the food?
At a hotel in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the other day, we came down for the ‘free hot breakfast’. Some greasy little strip of bacon, and what was supposed to be an omelet – which was in a neatly stacked pile of perfectly sized and folded little pancake-looking egg and cheese type of deal. There were no marks where the frying an had crisped up a bit of egg – all these ‘omelets’ were uniform in size, and without evidence of it having been anywhere near a pan. There was some kind of bread available for toasting – looked like eggy bread. I asked the black lady who laid out the breakfast what it was exactly, but she wasn’t even sure. She said somebody else made it and froze it, then posted it out to her. Nothing here was actually cooked on the premises – the same thing must have applied to the so-called eggs and bacon. All out of a packet and into the microwave. The thing is, the fucker wasn’t even warm, let alone hot. I had to get it microwaved again. Also, what really bugs me, apart from the fact they didn’t produce anything other than shit out of a bag, was that all the cutlery and plates were plastic and Styrofoam – the lazy bastards could not even be bothered to use proper utensils and wash up. No, just chuck it all in a binbag and bury it in the landfill. Just one ‘breakfast room’ in one hotel, in one town, in one state in America – just think of all the plastic everyday, getting binned off all over the country, just in the average motel/hotel, not to mention any other food outlet, like fuel stations, and takeaways. All because the bastards are too lazy to fill a dishwasher and press a button.
And the coffee. Fucking hell, the coffee. Now I’m quite partial to a good cup of coffee. In fact I love the stuff, and take great pride in the daily ritual of making my brew in the morning, using only the best Brazilian beans and all that nonsense. Well, here at this hotel, there were five different jugs containing coffee on display, but only one of them had a label saying it contained decaffeinated
I managed to find some ‘regular’ food the other day – a bag of crisps. ‘Classic’ potato chips. The ingredients read, potatoes, salt, sunflower/corn oil, no preservatives or additives, and that was it. About 4000 calories a bag, mind, but at least it was real food ingredients. As soon as you looked at a flavoured variety, the ingredient list became the now familiar long list of stuff I would normally associate with a chemistry lesson back in school.
Go to a diner, or a burger joint, or just about anywhere for that matter, and look at the ridiculous choice of different shit you can ingest. Down south, it’s stuff like fried chicken, chicken fried chicken, chicken fried steak, grits, biscuits with gravy. Yes, biscuits with gravy. Basically, it’s a dried up old scone with a dollop of congealed wallpaper paste dumped on it. Chicken fried chicken, we had assumed, was a chicken that had cooked another one of its own. A sort of cannabalism, whereas a chicken fried steak was a piece of cow, fried by a chicken. Impressive stuff. But the waitress in the Holly Springs diner put us straight. “we fry EVERYTHING down here in the south”.
Chicken fried chicken, apparently, is boneless chicken, as opposed to fried chicken, which is chicken with a bone in. Usually with some sort of ‘finger-lickin’ batter turdy stuff around it. Chicken fried steak, on the other hand, is a piece of beef fried (presumably without bones) and covered in battery turdy stuff again.
And of course, the chickens won’t be just chickens – they will be full of growth promoting hormones, added water, flavour enhancers and other shit.
So there you go. They fry everything – even Snickers bars, just like those Scotch twats. Down in the Mississippi Delta they appear to be obsessed with fried chicken. It’s just about all they eat. Apart from perhaps, the odd Corn Dog. That, I think, is a hot dog on a stick, covered in mushed up sweetcorn and battery turdy stuff, then deep fried.
I’m here in the US, stuck in Washington Dulles airport. Or should that be Washington’s Dullest airport? En route to New York in an hour or so, to kill some time I have indulged in a ‘Five Guys’ bacon cheeseburger and Cajun fries, and now find myself writing some more crap while eating more crap. Well, as fast food crap goes, I have to admit this is somewhat better than the usual McDonalds/Burger King crap. They are probably just there for show, but in front of the counter are several half hundredweight bags of spuds, with a notice stating the name of the local Virginia farm they have been sourced from.
I’ve been here since the beginning of the week, and it’s now Saturday. I’m no stranger to American food culture, having been here a few times over the years, but I’ve always – at least to some extent – accepted that the food is so much more processed than that we are used to eating in the UK. Accepted, that is, until now.
Fuck me, is there nothing in this country’s culinary output that does not contain a plethora of chemicals, additives, minerals, vitamins, soya, artificial flavours, sweeteners, colourings and other such shite?
I bought a bottle of ‘pure’ water yesterday, thinking that it would be spring water bottled at source somewhere, like Colorado. It was purified water. In other words, it could have come out of a fucking drain pipe, or a Mississippi swamp. And it contained ‘minerals for improved flavour’. Christ, even the pure water isn’t pure – it has been fucked around with by adding some sort of unnecessary shit to it. It’s supposed to be water – why can’t they just leave it at that? I don’t drink water for any flavour, I drink it to quench my thirst and stay hydrated, and flush out my kidneys etc.
Unless you can find some sort of organic heath food shop – not easy in the US, at least not in the deep south of Alabama, where I’ve been visiting friends – everything you eat contains a list of ingredients longer than your arm, that do not relate to any food I’ve ever heard of. Sulphites, sulphates, potassium this, alluminium that. Fucking hell! Alluminium! What are they doing? Grinding up old saucepans into the food?
At a hotel in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the other day, we came down for the ‘free hot breakfast’. Some greasy little strip of bacon, and what was supposed to be an omelet – which was in a neatly stacked pile of perfectly sized and folded little pancake-looking egg and cheese type of deal. There were no marks where the frying an had crisped up a bit of egg – all these ‘omelets’ were uniform in size, and without evidence of it having been anywhere near a pan. There was some kind of bread available for toasting – looked like eggy bread. I asked the black lady who laid out the breakfast what it was exactly, but she wasn’t even sure. She said somebody else made it and froze it, then posted it out to her. Nothing here was actually cooked on the premises – the same thing must have applied to the so-called eggs and bacon. All out of a packet and into the microwave. The thing is, the fucker wasn’t even warm, let alone hot. I had to get it microwaved again. Also, what really bugs me, apart from the fact they didn’t produce anything other than shit out of a bag, was that all the cutlery and plates were plastic and Styrofoam – the lazy bastards could not even be bothered to use proper utensils and wash up. No, just chuck it all in a binbag and bury it in the landfill. Just one ‘breakfast room’ in one hotel, in one town, in one state in America – just think of all the plastic everyday, getting binned off all over the country, just in the average motel/hotel, not to mention any other food outlet, like fuel stations, and takeaways. All because the bastards are too lazy to fill a dishwasher and press a button.
And the coffee. Fucking hell, the coffee. Now I’m quite partial to a good cup of coffee. In fact I love the stuff, and take great pride in the daily ritual of making my brew in the morning, using only the best Brazilian beans and all that nonsense. Well, here at this hotel, there were five different jugs containing coffee on display, but only one of them had a label saying it contained decaffeinated
I managed to find some ‘regular’ food the other day – a bag of crisps. ‘Classic’ potato chips. The ingredients read, potatoes, salt, sunflower/corn oil, no preservatives or additives, and that was it. About 4000 calories a bag, mind, but at least it was real food ingredients. As soon as you looked at a flavoured variety, the ingredient list became the now familiar long list of stuff I would normally associate with a chemistry lesson back in school.
Go to a diner, or a burger joint, or just about anywhere for that matter, and look at the ridiculous choice of different shit you can ingest. Down south, it’s stuff like fried chicken, chicken fried chicken, chicken fried steak, grits, biscuits with gravy. Yes, biscuits with gravy. Basically, it’s a dried up old scone with a dollop of congealed wallpaper paste dumped on it. Chicken fried chicken, we had assumed, was a chicken that had cooked another one of its own. A sort of cannabalism, whereas a chicken fried steak was a piece of cow, fried by a chicken. Impressive stuff. But the waitress in the Holly Springs diner put us straight. “we fry EVERYTHING down here in the south”.
Chicken fried chicken, apparently, is boneless chicken, as opposed to fried chicken, which is chicken with a bone in. Usually with some sort of ‘finger-lickin’ batter turdy stuff around it. Chicken fried steak, on the other hand, is a piece of beef fried (presumably without bones) and covered in battery turdy stuff again.
And of course, the chickens won’t be just chickens – they will be full of growth promoting hormones, added water, flavour enhancers and other shit.
So there you go. They fry everything – even Snickers bars, just like those Scotch twats. Down in the Mississippi Delta they appear to be obsessed with fried chicken. It’s just about all they eat. Apart from perhaps, the odd Corn Dog. That, I think, is a hot dog on a stick, covered in mushed up sweetcorn and battery turdy stuff, then deep fried.
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