Fuck you, Nabisco

What the flying fat has happened to the food industry in the last few years? Please tell me. I need to know. I smell a conspiracy and it's not gently wafting through my olfactory passages like hand-made bread lovingly kneaded and slowly baking in a warm oven. It stinks like that unidentifiable crap-filled tupperware in the back of the fridge that grew hair and made your eyes water when you peeled off the crusty lid.

Most food is sacred to me. It's consumed in joyous celebration and comforts most ills. I actually own this shirt. Yes, tis a joke, but funny, no? I'm not an eat-to-live person, I'm a live-to-eat. Breaking my daily bread is not merely an act of nourishment for my body. It's sustenance for my soul. And these people are jacking with my soul man. MY SOUL!

Continuing my quest to be the most convoluted, complicated kook you'll ever meet, I'm picky. Please contain your disbelief. When I was a child, my mother was not permitted to reveal any ingredient list for whatever meal she was serving. Eventually we'd get down to #3 or 4 and that's where I'd refuse to lift my fork. Without fail, after chicken, flour, and butter, some strange substance like eye of newt would be mentioned. Wait. What? I don't know what that is. It must be gross! Hey! The chicken is orange. I DON'T WANT IT.

I have been able to spend most of my life refraining from patronizing eateries who serve meals created by stuck-up Frenchmen who consider sputum-on-toast a delicacy. Where the ambient light is curiously low as to suggest they don't want you to be able to identify the mysterious tiny stack of what looks like meat steaming in the middle of your giant plate surrounded by a swirl of green jizz.

This has been a conscience choice on my part. I don't like freaky food. I won't eat any animal that is not on my very short list of acceptable slaughter. Cows, pigs, chickens, turkey's, some fish. That's it. No babies. No sharks. No Bambie's. No buffalos. No vittles. No fucking thing you shot in the woods or ran over with your car. Don't hide it in the spaghetti sauce, don't cover it with a bun. I DON'T WANT IT.

I've been tricked before. My bastard family thinks they're so funny. We had a group over for "fish tacos" one time and as we're all sitting at the table some smart ass starts humming the theme from Jaws. Then another joins in, then another, until I finally understand that I've just taken a huge bite of something I'm diametrically opposed to eating for personal and environmental reasons, AND I'm the butt of a joke. This is a lethal combination. Needless to say, I was not pleased and others went down with me. Jaws indeed. They'd wished all they'd suffered was being munched by a giant shark. Fuckers.

When I was in San Fran in November my best friend Matty, whitey and I went to a little bistro for dinner. The word bistro should have tipped us off right there, but I'd eaten at this place before and had a burger and fries. How shi-shi (chi-chi? Sheshe? You know what I mean) could it be? We opened the menus and immediately (most of us) had trouble finding something to eat.

And it was even worse for "I'd like a PLAIN, cheeseburger, PLAIN, please. Did I mention, PLAIN?" whitey, who immediately asked what the hell the conglomeration of vowels were that could be found as an element on half of the menu. It was explained as flavored mayo but they called it aioli or areola or uvula or some such. Go ahead, try to say that. Can't, can ya. Poor guy ended up eating a salad.

Let's talk about all these fucking pompous chefs with their over-the-top obnoxious extravagant elaborations of a side dish for fuckssake. It's not a subterrainian, pre-pubescent, imported, sliced on the thighs of Norwegian virgins, lightly fondled, deeply thrusted, urbanely seared, truffle infused pomme frite. It's a PO-TA-TO.

You can hardly traverse a drive-through without having the clown ask if you want to try the sun-dried, encrusted, re-fried, sauteed, hand-pressed, classic, retro, three cheese, free-range chicken wrap. NO! And tuna salad shouldn't make your mouth burn. Please leave the fancy fish for the fancy fish restaurant. That I don't go to. On purpose.

This brings me to my main complaint, just in case you were lost in the Rant Forrest I've plunged us in to. It's bad enough that almost every eating establishment has jumped on the "pseudo gourmet bandwagon". But all measure of eateries and manufacturers alike are trying to trick us. And I'm on to them.

They're treating us like we're dumb. And some of us are dumb, but not me sista-friend. I know that food is getting jammed with all of these crap fillers and recipe's are being touted as "new and improved" so we're not being served the good stuff. Fuck you Kraft. I know you changed the powdered cheese formula and then tried to change it back when it blew up in your stupid faces and you had to launch a world-wide campaign to convince everyone you were indeed the cheesiest after you fucked with it and turned it into the cardboardiest. But it's not exactly the same.

And how many times have you gotten a subway sandwich and you patiently peer behind the snot-guard, watching your sandwich artist painfully, carefully, peel apart and fold the paper-thin slices of congealed pressed turkeyfood, hap-hazardly slapping 3 WHOLE SLICES on your huge piece of bread, then spread their fingers as wide as they'll go, plunge down with all their might to the bottom of the shredded lettuce tub and dump a truckload on top of your sammy? WTF? Lettuce only tastes good when it's swimming in dressing anyway, don't force me to be a vegasaurus, asshole.

Or take the salad bar at my work. Recently they've started supplying the normal iceberg lettuce bowl with some nasty mishmash of lettuce, huge slices of dried out carrot slivers (gag) and that purple cabbage crap (double gag). (Yes, I know it's red cabbage, but that makes no fucking sense because it's not red, it's purple, and you're not the boss of me). I'm sure the crapateria ladies think they've invented some superior product. A salad that will be colorful and jaunty and varietous. But it's not. Now it's garden clippings.

I'm trying to be healthy. I'm trying to get some roughage in my system. I don't want to wade through my precious blue cheese slathered all over the top to pick out the fucking unnecessary rank-tasting filler you're putting in the lettuce to make it stretch farther. Charge me the extra .03582 cents and leave the rabbit food out of it! I DON'T WANT IT.

This phenomena is literally everywhere you look. I've been sick as a damn dog for the last 4 days and have eaten very little, which completely screws with my food-obsessed brain since I should be eating why aren't I hungry oh god I feel sick but I want to eat!! This sucks!

My friend brought over some provisions, one of them being Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup. That right there is bullshit. For anyone worrying about the number of fowl being killed every year, please don't put your focus on this company, because by my calculations there's approximately 1 chicken murdered for every 1200 cans of soup coming down the conveyer belt. Chicken Noodle my ass. It should be re-labeled to read, Yellowy Water with Floating Goobers Tons of Wormy Noodles and One Pink Chicken Nugget Soup.

Containers of nuts now say "less than 50% peanuts". I see. You've been ripping us off for so long, filling the thing with sub-standard nuts and peppering the can with 1 measly cashew, the coveted mother of all nuts, that you must proclaim, in print, that you promise, at least more than half will not be crap? How is that a plus?

I just don't understand why some establishments mound your plate with 14 servings worth of food and others give you a barrel of steamed rice with two chewy slices of meat and a pound of limp broccoli. Quit stinging on the protein people! Don't you know we're all afraid of carbs now? Sheesh!

Aaaaaaand another thing. Please stop making the bags, boxes, baskets, buckets and barges of snacks SO BIG that you need an SUV to get your chips home, only to find 5 sad little taters smooshed at the bottom when you manage to blow-torch your way into it.

I am on to you!