Food Stories

Alice has many tales of bad eating philosophies, ventures, and mishaps. The stories here are all true. It is ill-advised that anyone try to reenact these stories.

Vinegar Rice

My friend, Elinor, came over to join my sushi-making party. She really likes vinegar rice. I do too. I like to make it extra vinegar-y. When I make sushi, I use vinegar powder. It comes in a bright orange-yellow packet.

Elinor, being silly, decided to make herself a big mixing-bowlful of vinegar rice. She did so and ate about half of it. About 15 minutes later she asked for aspirin; she had a ripping headache. She ended up cancelling her evening plans because of the headache. We couldn't figure out why she had a massive headached until we realize that the vinegar contained MSG. The girl had eaten a giant bowl of vinegar rice and given herself an MSG headache.

She eventually recovered, but I say it kinda served her right for eating so much of the stuff.

Bananas

Bananas are one fo the few fruits that ripen off the plant. Most bananas you buy in the store are plucked from the tree while green and then sprayed with some form of ethylene. In high school I did experiments to determine significant ripening factors. This involved cases of bananas. I ran the project 3 times to collect reliable data. If you're interested, the most important factor is heat though a plastic bag helps contain gaseus hormones with a side danger of growing mold.

Anyway, after the project was done I had more bananas than any consumer would ever want to deal with. I ate a lot of bananas. And I gave away bananas. And I made banana bread. And I tried to make banana cookies...

The banana cookies didn't quite work out. I followed a recipe, only I noticed that when it was time to put the cookie dough in the oven the spoonfuls looked pretty runny. I figured maybe it would thicken after baking. I was wrong. It was just a warm, runny, sticky mess in the baking sheet. Apparently I somehow forgot to add the flour to the mix. Weeks later I tried again much more successfully.

The lesson here is never forget the flour when making cookies.

The Snickers Diet

For a time I lived with my eldest sister. The trek to and from college campus got to be a pain. My sister and her husband would sleep at 10pm, the time I started to buckle down to homework. To avoid apartment sleepyland I hung out in a student office.

Very often I wuld get hungrey in the office. I didn't want to go home yet but what could I eat in an office? My options were 1) fast food from the student center across campus   2) the pub, which I wasn't old enough to enter   3) the vending machines down the hall. I opted for the vending machines.

At the vending machines I came up with the brilliant idea of getting the most disgusting item possible and eating two of them so I would never want to eat again. What a great way to stave off hunger. For weeks I lived according to this thinking. I bought Snickers bars and forced myself to eat them. Usually I couldn't make it to the second candy bar because I would be feeling just too disgusted with myself. Needless to say, the next semester I put myself on the school meal plan and thought that dining hall food was wonderful.

Peanut Butter

I lived with my middle sister for a summer. One dat at around 3pm i sauntered into the kitchen to find something to eat. I hadn't eaten yet. Pacy was set on going out for burgers at 4pm – a whole hour away! In the fridge I fund very little to eat. The shelves were empty except for condiments such as mustard and mayo. The pantry didn't have much either: stale cereal and I did not want to put in the effort to bake something in the summer heat.

Aaaah, what to do? Pacy said, "Why don't you go over to the market and get something? Can't you wait until 4 for burgers?" Too lazy to walk the entire block to the store, I opened up the fridge again and spied the peanut butter. I ate a spoonful of peanut buter. I decided I was hungry enough to eat more peanut butter. I got out a rice bowl, put a scoop of peanut butter in it with a glob of honey, and proceeded to eat. It was still a while before 4pm according to my stomach. I scooped another bowlful.

After the second bowlful, it was 4pm and time for burgers. Walking to the restaurant felt really weird. All that peanut butter just gummed up my body. The only kind of burger I could think of eating was maybe a jelly burger, which I hope doesn't exist.

And so the lesson of the story is never eat two bowlfuls of peanut butter.