Speaking of Food 7/26/18

This week we happened to do a couple comics about eating in a fancy restaurant.  Which got me thinking about food.  The older I get the more I think about it. Which is part and parcel of going through your 60's.  For the first 40-50 years all I thought about was sports and sex.  Then your testosterone levels drop and you stop playing in your softball league, and tennis goes from singles to doubles, running starts to kill your knees, Crossfit hurts your back, skiing...well, I never really learned how to ski, I just go down a mountain in a modified snowplow and I'm told it looks sort of pathetic. Bicycling is okay, not so much pounding, but really all your left with is golf.  In a cart.  So this, in a long-winded way, is why food takes on an ever more important place in the life of 60 somethings.

We start reading restaurant critics. We extol the virtues of the spaghetti carbonara at this place and the caprese salad across town. We frown on the preponderance of kale and note how the addition of truffles automatically raises the price of any item by $16.00.  And of course there is the built-in utter ridiculousness of restaurant menu descriptions, which we made fun of in this week's comics.

The other fun thing about food is how by giving something an appetizing name, it suddenly becomes a popular food.  Anyone for some Patagonian Toothfish?  I didn't think so.  That's why it's been renamed Chilean Sea Bass.  Much, much tastier.  And prunes, yuck.  That brigs up an image of constipated old people.  Not very attractive,  But call them dried plums -- now you're talking.  And imagine a sign in a restaurant saying our fries are cooked in pure rapeseed oil.  Certainly not in the era of Harvey Weinstein.  But call it canola oil, and there's no problem, plus, it's healthy.

Next time you order sushi and tell the waiter, no uni, you might want to try out the initial name, whore's eggs.  And what was once Chinese gooseberries has now become kiwi.

That's it for me this week.  I'm hungry again.