Parting Thoughts on Food

Living the past 3 weeks hand-to-mouth, dependent on scrounging up the cheapest take-out I can find, I've had some time to think about food.

About 3/4 of what I ate in Sydney and Cairns was Asian food. Sushi, Chinese, Thai, Curry, ect. Of that, atleast half was noodles. I found when you enter a more authentic arena, such as Sydney's Chinatown, the food starts to plummet in price and nutritional content. However, the quantity and taste there are best. I suppose the ingredients are FOB too.

One would think that eating it too often would make me bored of it. However, the great Mae West once said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." Frankly, making stir-fry noodles a daily part of my life for the past three weeks has just made me love stir-fry even more. I look forward with renewed zest at returning to The Village, or even Center Court.

And then, there's Easy Mac. I became familiar with the powdered goddess back at WashU, but here it became life-sustaining. Dinner is served at 7, then stops. The Supermarket is open till 9, and Subway closes at 10. That means that if you wish to eat after 10pm, you have exactly three choices: Expensive (but delicious) kebabs, Ritz crackers and peanut butter, or Easy Mac. When you stumble back to your room drunk at 3am on a Thursday, the choice is easy. You're too broke for a kebab (and they're closed by 3 anyway), and peanut butter on dry crackers does nothing for the drymouth and impending hangover. It's Easy Mac all the way. Some weeks I'd have it every night. I owe my life to it.

College food, on the other hand, was not a case of "more is better". 4/5 days, the food was utter crap. The other 1/5 is atleast passable. See, this makes me angry. From the rare special functions (A&P dinner, ugh) I've attended, I know the kitchen staff can make genuinely good food when they want to. They just refuse. Instead, we get lumpy meat pies, overcooked beef, fowl chicken [bad pun], flavorless curry, mystery noodles, grotesque pizza, and what I believe is supposed to be lasagna. And always fucking potatos!

Dont get me wrong, I do enjoy my starch. But when everyday is either boiled potatos, fried potatos, or deep-fried potatos, with the occasional mashed, you start to get really sick of it. Something routine and bland like potato is barred from Mae's truism.

However, I have learned that any cake, even shitty dry college cake, can be vastly improved by immersing it in warm egg custard. That is good. When they give us cream, which is essentially milk without the characteristic milk taste, that does not count as a successful substitute. Cream is just... wet flavored. Always custard.

On names: Why do they call ketchup 'tomato sauce'. Yes, it is, but then what do you call pasta sauce? Well, they call it 'pasta sauce', but that could easily be carbonara or alfredo, couldnt it? So instead they'll call it 'tomato paste', but then there's already a tomato paste in the supermarket, and its definitely not the same as Ragu (or even Newman's Own). It just makes no sense.

And speaking of no sense, why do they say tomato like toh-mah-toh, yet say potato as poh-tay-toh. There's no fucking consistency. Say what you will about America's bastardization of the English language, atleast we're consistent. Right?

Finally, that brings us to the one thing you've all been curious about. That's right, Vegemite. This charismatic Australian delicacy is pure beer yeast extract. In other words, someone went into a beer fermenting tank, scooped up the black crusty sludge on the bottom, and thought it'd go great on toast. This, my friends, sums up the entire Australian mindset.

I've had Vegemite myself on multiple occasions. Before I left, my friend Katie said that if I took a picture of me licking a spoonful of Vegemite and sent it to her, she'd give me 5 bucks when I got home. So naturally, as one does when confronted with mild peer pressure, I went ahead and did it, licking it like a savory Vegemite lollipop. I nearly threw up.

Later, I was told the correct way to eat Vegemite is to take bread, toast it till its real dry and crispy, load it up with heaps of butter, then spread the thinnest layer of Vegemite over the top. I have done this. In such low and dilute amounts, it doesnt cause an instinctive gag reflex, but it still tastes like salty crap. So why do I persist in eating it? Because apparently it's high in vitamin B and reputed to keep the mozzies away.

I think after sampling much of what Australian cuisine has to offer, it comes down to this: Plenty of the more bogan [redneck] locals in Australia complain about the high numbers of Asian immigrants, but frankly, if I was dependent on eating only British convict food, I'd be retching everyday. I say God bless immigrants (legal and otherwise) and their delicious import foods. You hear that, gringos?