Food, Self, and Society

At some point last week I declared to the world (via this blog) that I would watch “Supersize Me” while eating McDonald’s this weekend with my sister and a few friends.  It was to be a party, and my expectation was that I would not want to eat fast food for a very, very long time after this.  It seems like a logical conclusion to come to, given that the whole point of the movie is to show how excessive intake of fast food will make you sick.  Indeed, after this weekend, I will do my best to avoid such foods as long as possible.  (I say “as long as possible” because I know that I don’t have the willpower to avoid these foods for that long.  I know that eventually, I’ll be unable to resist the temptation of those golden fries, despite knowing how processed and bad for me they are.  I know that eventually, I’ll want crown-shaped chicken nuggets.

Burger King's Crown-Shaped Chicken Tenders

It was not, however, Morgan Spurlock and his McDonald’s exposé who turned me away from all this.  I had come to that conclusion a full day earlier in my three-day-long adventure in fast food.

Day 1

The journey began, like so many journeys do, on an absolutely beautiful Thursday morning.  The sun was shining, my stomach felt great (it had hurt me a LOT the night before, though I still am not sure why), my teeth weren’t bothering me (I’ve been delaying calling an oral surgeon to make an appointment to have my wisdom teeth pulled), I had dropped my sister off at school, my girlfriend at her internship, and damnit, I was feeling good.  Not great, mind you – I had to go to school soon and begin four or five straight hours of work on various papers and projects.  In the mean time, however, I was looking forward to parking in the newly-built parking near the ferry (actually, about a ten or fifteen minute walk from the ferry, depending on your pace) garage and taking a nice, leisurely stroll to The Pastry Shoppe, where I’d gotten the best cup of coffee I’d ever had (and still have ever had) in my life last week.  While there, I figured, I would also treat myself to a cookie (their hamentaschens are great, and very big).

Anyway, I was walking along, enjoying the sunshine, and crossed the street to the side of the street where my destination awaited.  However, as I crossed, I saw the Greek restaurant down the block that I had promised myself last week I would go to this week.  I was torn.  Though I really wanted the amazing coffee, I wanted to broaden my food horizons, so to speak… and so I went into the Greek restaurant, Papouli’s (see below for address and directions from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal):

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The first thing to notice about Papouli’s is this amazing mural painted on the right-side wall when you walk in.  It’s beautiful.  The next thing to notice is the service – the owner works right out front and serves you, pays attention to your needs, talks to you when you want to be talked to and leaves you alone when you want to be left alone to eat (somehow he knew the perfect moments for each).  Whether you’re the only person in there (as I was for about ten or fifteen minutes) or one of many, you get the same level of attention from the staff, which is to say, you get incredible service.

But how was the food?  Amazing.  I got Belgian Waffles (the owner was very proud to be newly offering them, and asked me to please comment on their quality as they had created the batter themselves and wanted to improve upon it where necessary).  Realizing full well that getting a familiar breakfast food was not going to broaden my horizons, I asked him what his favorite Greek pastry was, and was given a short lesson about the various different Greek desserts, what season they are usually eaten in, what’s in them, what they’re eaten with, etc.  This was incredible, and I loved it.  I don’t recall the name of the pastry I got, but I remember the flavor.  I remember the flaky crust with a light dusting of powdered sugar, I remember the slight taste of wheat, I remember the dousing of honey… I remember closing my eyes and just basking in the satisfaction that a simple, deliciously crafted pastry could bring.

I didn’t want to leave, but I knew that I had schoolwork to do, and lots of it… so I dragged myself off of my stool by the counter and walked out, beaming from ear to ear, into the sun for the nice, warm stroll to my car (next time, if it’s that nice, I’m parking on the roof of the structure.).  I didn’t do any of this, however, before paying my bill (and leaving a 42% tip – the service/food/atmosphere was that good), having a short conversation to say goodbye with the owner, during which I assured him I’d be back the next week, and having one last sip of coffee (you get a cup of coffee with free refills if you eat breakfast in the restaurant between 7 and 11 am, though they deliver locally too).

Night 1

My friend has been away at school for months, and was back for spring break.  One of the things he looks forward to most in coming to my house is going to KFC for dinner, since it’s a two or three-minute walk from my house.  I was looking forward to that dinner, as I’d been craving fried chicken.  Or maybe I’d subconsciously built up my desire for it, since I knew he was coming over and we’d be having it.  Either way, I wanted it, he wanted it, and my sister (after some convincing) wanted it.  So we went to KFC, my friend (we’ll call him “Ted” in this blog) looking forward to his usual four drumsticks and a small popcorn chicken, with my sister and I eager to try the new filet they’ve been advertising on TV.

The music in the restaurant was great (a song off of Bruce Springsteen’s newest album was the first one we heard, followed by an Aly & AJ song, and a Paul Simon song as we were leaving), and Ted’s food was nicely prepared.  My sister and I, however, had to wait fifteen minutes for our food to be ready, and when we got it, there were literally pools of grease on our chicken fillets.  After taking off as much grease as I could with my napkin, I picked up my fillet with my fork (I wasn’t going to touch it with my hands), and let more grease drip off of it.  This lasted for about fifteen to thirty seconds, after which I commenced eating what I will admit was an absolutely delicious piece of chicken (excepting, of course, the grease).  We got out of there as quickly as possible – we didn’t talk about it; we just wanted to leave.  I was absolutely disgusted, but we’ll talk more about KFC when it comes time for day 3 of my adventure.

Next we went to ShopRite to get some chips and Coke.  The chips were Pringles whole wheat, or something like that, and the soda was just regular ol’ Coca Cola (NOT kosher for Passover Coke like Ted had promised).  We brought all this home and played Mario Party – Teddy once again kicking my ass in it.  I ate way too many chips, and thought I was having an allergic reaction to them.  I wasn’t.

Day 2

The original plan had been to have a day between KFC and our Mickey D’s adventure.  Plans changed, however, and Supersize Me was moved to Day 2.  My girlfriend, her brother and I went to Modell’s so I could buy a bat bag for my baseball bats/gloves/balls etc, so that I could carry it all in my car with me and not have it bang around, damaging things, after which we picked up my sister, went to Blockbuster to rent the movie, and went to the McDonald’s drive-thru across the street.  I wanted to supersize my meal, but forgot to.  I later found out from the movie that this would have been impossible, since shortly after the movie’s release, they eliminated this option.  All in all, the food was great.  I mean, it’s McDonald’s, so it had to be, right?  The funniest thing was a bonus segment entitled “The Smoking Fry.” The nail was in the coffin – I would not eat fast food ever again, for as long as I could possibly maintain that.  We’ll see how long that is (I’ll be sure to let you all know).

Day 3

Day three has barely begun.  I had Peanut Butter Crunch for breakfast.  I am, while writing this (in word, as I have no internet service), in Wagner College waiting for my sister’s SAT Prep course to let out.  I called KFC and complained about the food from Thursday night.  They were extremely helpful and patient, and the wait time was less than a minute, if there was any wait time at all.  I don’t know if I’ll be getting any coupons in the mail, but I really hope I do.  Free food is always, always nice.  Also, we’ll be going to Perkins shortly after getting out of here… I’m not sure if I’ll get pancakes or some other breakfast food or just avoid breakfast altogether and go for a big, juicy cheeseburger (As I typed that, the various images from “Fast Food Nation” came to mind.  Maybe I won’t get a cheeseburger.).  I’ll let you know next time I write for this blog, if I remember to.  Or you can ask me if you talk to me tomorrow or later.

Until then, my friends, I bid you adieu.

This is not my video.  I did not create it, nor did I post it.  I’m merely providing a link to what is probably (or so I’m told) the best part of a classic Disney movie.  ”But Jon,” you may ask, “why did you post a video from Alice In Wonderland?  Isn’t that movie old?”  Yes, it is.  But, as seems to be the trend nowadays, there’s going to be a remake.  Of course, that’s not really a fair description.  It’s NOT a remake of the original Alice.  Instead, you have Tim Burton and Johnny Depp coming together again (a masterful pair, those two), creating a movie that is a revisitation, if you will.  Here, we find Mr. Depp as a very… distinguished, shall we say? looking Mad Hatter in Wonderland ten years after Alice has left.

But this isn’t about the movie coming out this Friday (March 5th).  Nor is it about the original Alice movie.  I am, however, going to the midnight showing at my local theater, and that’s about the most second most exciting thing this week.  We’ll talk about the second later.

So, other than tea parties, what other purpose could I have to talking about Alice In Wonderland?  The food that I’ll be eating there.  Movie Food!!!  (I don’t know why I felt the need to put three exclamation points there, but I did it anyway.)  Movie food has such an incredible array of choices, none of them cheap.  There’s the $6 popcorn, which, to the theater’s credit, comes with free refills for the night (but who, I ask, would leave a movie they paid $15 to see in the middle of it?  Isn’t that a bit too much like wasting money?).  Then there’s the $6 drink (also with free refills), or the $5 nachos, the $7 hot dog combo, etc, etc, etc.  That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t give in to the desire to buy these foods.  Indeed, quite the opposite – I almost always try to go get food (though I know it’s wrong), while relying on my friend or sister to remind me that I don’t really want the food there, that I don’t want to pay that much for snacks that I don’t really want or need.  And so lately, I’ve avoided that stuff.

This week will be different, however.  I fully intend to buy the large popcorn as soon as we get to the theater.  The four of us in our group will eat it, and enjoy it, and get the free refill, all in the time it takes for us to get on the line into the theater itself.  At least, that’s my plan.  We’ll see if it actually happens.  Maybe I’ll end up having to go during the movie itself, though I won’t be very happy about that.

Of course, there are many other options to movie food, none of which I plan to do this week (for time’s sake).

1. Buy food at a fast food restaurant nearby, keeping it in its wrapper, in your pockets.  So long as it’s not obnoxiously huge and conspicuous, I don’t think they really care.  Just don’t make a lot of noise, and don’t be annoying to all the other people in the theater while you eat it.  This is much cheaper than buying food in the theaters.  Having done this once (when I went to see 2012), I’ve found that it is indeed the most brilliant method out there.  For the price of half a soda, or less than half the price of the hot dog combo, you can get a more filling amount of food.  Yes, it’s fast food and it’s not good for you, but hey, if you’re eating movie food anyway, is that really that good for you?  I didn’t think so.

   (For the record, I cannot take credit for the creation of that method.   That honor belongs solely to my friend; he knows who he is.)

2. Make your popcorn at home, and bring it in your bag.  This, of course, works only if you could legitimately be coming straight from school (in which case everyone would have a bag anyway), or if you have a girl in your party (or if you are a girl) and she is (you are) carrying a particularly large purse, since it’s not uncommon for you to have one, anyway.

   This method also includes bringing candy from home.  Ultimately, this is your cheapest method, though it’s the most inconvenient.

3. Finally, you can buy candy from nearby stores.  Two stores that I can think of next to the closest movie theater to my house (in a shopping center) specifically sell “movie candy” – the exact same candy we could buy in the theater – for less, or less than half the price.  Sounds good to me.

Of course, the easiest, best thing to do is just to buy your food and candy at the theater.  Yes, it’s more expensive, but you’re avoiding the hassle that would otherwise be involved.

Now that we’ve figured out movie food, let’s talk about coffee.  Nearly every morning, I go to Dunkin Donuts to get myself my daily energy blast.  I know it’s bad for me to be hooked already, and I don’t really need it, but it’s very pleasing to me in the morning, after having been rudely awoken by my alarm clock at such an ungodly hour, to have that nice, hot, sweet cup of coffee handed to me with a smile.  Of course, that’s if Person A is there.  Person B usually jokes with my sister and I (we go together in the morning, on the way to me dropping her off at school), but almost never laughs.  Person B smiles, but never laughs.

Anyway, the point is not Person A or Person B.  The point is Dunkin Donuts.  Occasionally, I’ll get a sausage egg and cheese on a toasted croissant, but more often than not, if I get anything with my coffee, it’s a chocolate donut.  Being that I go so often, it’s only natural that I would seek to obtain coupons and try to save myself some money.  (I know what you’re thinking.  Why not save money by not going to Dunkin Donuts every day, and just make the coffee at home?  My answer is simple – their coffee is better.)  That’s why I bought, for a dollar, a DD calendar with 2 coupons attached to every month.  I used January’s coupons, and decided to wait until the end of the month to use February’s, because I would treat myself at the end of the month.  Then February 28th comes around, and I realize that day’s the end of the month.  Being busy all day, I had my sister bring me the coupons so I could use them on the way home.

Want to know the funny thing?  I didn’t use the coupons.  I didn’t buy anything, even though I wanted to; I was buying donuts just to use the coupons, and that’s bad.  If I didn’t really want what I was buying, what was the point?  I guess that applies to everything, and not just food.  If you have a coupon for something (and will thus save money on it if you buy it), but don’t want the product, don’t buy it!  Ultimately, you’re saving more money by not buying the item in question than if you buy it with a coupon.

Carrabba's Take-Out Bag

“There is no love more sincere than the love of food.”  Truer words have never been spoken.  Think about any person that you really, truly love.  You’ve shared a meal with them, and chances are that you’ve shared more than one meal with them at your home, or their home, or out with that person at a restaurant.  To take that a step further, there’s almost nothing more intimate than to share a meal with a person.  There’s a story behind this night’s eating out, but there’s nothing exceptional about it except that it’s a meal after a long day of being snowed in.  Nothing special – I shoveled for hours, that’s it.

And, finally, the MOST exciting thing happening this week!  Ladies and gentlemen, baseball’s back!  The first Spring Training game happened today.  For those of you not familiar with baseball, this is the preseason.  For those of you not familiar with sports at all, that means that these games are practice games amongst teams who will play each other for points when regular games begin.  Yes, this is a very, very simplified way of putting it.  But that’ll suffice for anyone who doesn’t know a thing about sports.

So yes, ladies and gentlemen, baseball is back.  That being the case, it’s time to talk about stadium food.  That is, food memories at the various baseball stadiums in the NYC area.  First and foremost, there’s Shea Stadium.  Yes, I know it’s not there anymore, but I miss it, a lot.  I had the best hot dog I’ve had in my life there.  It wasn’t at a Mets game (it was a Springsteen concert in the stadium, in October of 2003).  My father had been away for a year with the military, but on that day, the day he had come back, we went to the Bruce concert.  It was freezing, but my dad got me two hotdogs (we each had two), and they were absolutely fantastic.  I’d go into more detail, but this entry’s approaching the point where it’s too long.

Next, of course, comes CitiField, the new home of the New York Mets.  There’s a much, much larger food selection.  I’m not going to go into detail here (mainly because I haven’t actually bought food, as far as I can remember), but I can assure you that later in the year I will be going to games, and I will eat there.  They have sushi.  I’m not getting it, because there’s something inherently wrong with eating sushi at a baseball game (in the United States).  But they have it.

Of all the odd foods I’ve ever had at a stadium, though, the best by far was at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.  I was in California, and the Mets were in town.  I was staying about 30 minutes by train from San Francisco… how could I resist going to the game?  Again, there was a great selection of food, but I chose Garlic Fries.  Essentially, they’re potato wedge-type fries, cooked with garlic.  The flavor permeates the fries, and the garlic smell permeates your body for days.  But gosh, were they good.  The hot dogs there weren’t bad, either.  Hell, I think it’s probably impossible to get a bad hot dog at a baseball game – the two just seem to go together – baseball and hot dogs!

That being the case, let’s talk about the Brooklyn Cyclones.  The food in the stadium is really good, but the best food anywhere near there is about a two to five-minute walk away.  That’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs!  After the ones that were at Shea Stadium, these may be the best hot dogs in the world.  Add to that the Cyclones are the Mets minor league affiliate, the stadium is really, really beautiful, and it’s on the water so that you have a beautiful view when watching the game (or, really, when you’re not watching the action of the game), and it’s an amazing little baseball experience.

Sticking with the minor leagues, let’s go over to the Staten Island Yankees.  As a partial-season ticket holder, I was entitled to all-you-can-eat hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda and water.  This was great.  The food was average for a baseball stadium (which, in other words, means that they were fantastic – though maybe I’m biased by my love for baseball), but it was unlimited until the end of the 7th inning.  Add to that that it’s my hometown team, the beautiful stadium, the beautiful view of the New York harbor and Manhattan skyline, and the general minor-league baseball atmosphere that I love, and it’s amazing.

And, to finish tonight’s tour de baseball, we’ll turn to Yankee Stadium.  Concerning the old Yankee Stadium, I’ve had a hot dog there, that I can remember.  It was great, but nothing particularly noteworthy.  At new Yankee Stadium, however, I had the delight of having buffalo chicken sliders, and soda in a collectible cup.  The food was an interesting choice, and it was definitely delicious, but the price is somewhat of a hindrance – $10 for three little sliders, and there might have been fries.  Actually, if there were fries included, that’s a really good deal.  The food, however, was not as important that night – among the most exciting things in baseball, one of the best is when the Yankees beat the Red Sox at home (and that’s what happened that night).

And now that this entry has reached over 2,000 words, I bid you adieu.

Alright, here’s the thing.  I started this blog with the intention of writing every day.  I wanted to expose the world (who hadn’t been exposed yet) to Bruce Springsteen through a song a day, and through other artists, too.  I wanted a brief summary of noteworthy things that have happened in my life.  I wanted to make commentaries on other things, too – everything that annoyed me, really.  I’ve come to the realization, though, that writing every day was a very unrealistic goal for me; now that I’ve started school, it seems nearly impossible.  Frankly, I’d given up on blogging at all.

So that’s the first hiatus I’m talking about today.  It’s over now, thanks to Professor Cho’s Food, Self & Society class.  For those of you reading this who are not in that class, it’s a sociological, anthropological, psychological, etc way of looking at food and it’s function as to society and to the individual.  For those of you who are in that class with me and are reading this, my having made such a distinction may seem odd.  Allow me to explain – I’m writing this in my blog that I’ve already established and have entries imported via an RSS feed of some sort to the class page.  It’s a bit more convenient that way.

The new point of this blog, then (at least for the next few months), is to document my life around food in some way or another.  Posts will not be uniform in style, nor will they be uniform in frequency.  One week, I may post only once.  Another, I may post several times.  Most likely, it will be the former.  We shall see.

Right now, I haven’t figured out how exactly to bring food into this, though that’s just as well – this is merely a re-introduction of sorts.  You can look forward to a new entry soon, with the new format (we will be retaining the Springsteen song of the day!).

For now, I bid you adieu.

PS – the second hiatus?  Fall Out Boy, and how they’ve seemingly broken up.  They’ve had a nice run, and I won’t pretend I’m not just a little bit disappointed.  At least I got to see them live once before.  All I can do at this point is wish each member the best of luck.

Good night, world.