Country Bumpkin

There have been times when I really felt like a country bumpkin. Like the time I thought I would try this new restaurant when I lived in Atlanta. Usually I could go to a restaurant that served food that I had never eaten before and just order off the menu and the waiter would bring it. But this was a little different. This was a Mongolian Barbecue Restaurant. When the waiter seated me, he just pointed to what appeared to be a salad bar and left. He probably knew that I didn't speak Mongolian, so he didn't even give it a try. I got a plate and started picking out the things that looked interesting. There were several different kinds of raw meat and all the vegetables you normally see on a salad bar. I wasn't sure about the raw meat, but I thought "what the heck, I'll give it a try." I went back to my table and started eating. After a few bites of the raw meat, I was thinking that I won't be eating here again. Then I noticed that the other customers were taking their plates to a guy standing by a big grill. He was throwing the plate of food they had picked out at the salad bar on the grill and cooking it. Well of course he was cooking it. I guess I had it confused with a Sushi bar.

I was on a ferry going from the North Carolina mainland to the Outerbanks and I was starving. This was before microwaves. It wouldn't have mattered anyhow, I was a real country bumpkin back then. There was a vending machine with food in it. I put some coins in and got a hamburger. I ate it. As I stood there thinking that it was the worst hamburger I had ever eaten, I saw the oven that I was supposed to cook it in.

On another occasion, I made reservations at a restaurant in Atlanta. In order to get in, I had to make them 3 months in advance. When they told me they only had two seatings each night, I was thinking "no wonder it takes so long to get dinner there." The evening was totally confusing from beginning to end. The meal was served in courses and it seemed like an excruciatingly long time between courses. Besides that, I had never eaten a meal with that many courses. The waiter was extremely pretentious and when I couldn't understand what he meant by "boof", he whispered so that the other customers couldn't hear "beef". Then the ceremony the Sommelier went through with the wine almost put me to sleep. Again my country bumpkiness was showing through and I was growing impatient. When I thought we were through eating, I got up to go look for the cashier so I could pay the bill and get the heck out of there. Well the waiter headed me off at the door with a look as if I was trying to get out without paying. After all the pomp and circumstance, I should have realized there wasn't going to be a cashier.

You would think that I would have made a fool of myself enough, but no not quite. I went to see a play, "Streetcar Named Desire". I was pretty bored with the performance and after what seemed like forever, everyone stood up and applauded. I didn't want to get caught up in the traffic, so I made a beeline for the parking garage. I was the first one to get to my car and thought to myself that we had beat the rush. Then I realized that we were the only ones in the parking garage. It turned out that we left before the play was over.

We Are What We Eat

I've read a lot of articles about the foods we eat. I get a daily email from "Real Age", which has an overwhelming amount of information about the foods we should eat. Overwhelming is the key word. As a result, I'm also confused about what is healthy eating. I received an email from a friend of mine who wanted to make a point. She invoked her status as a medical professional and told me that my "food experiments" are, this is my word, "crap". She's right. She asked me if I had read a book by Michael Pollan and I haven't. But I have now looked it up on the Internet and at least have the gist of it. In his book, "Food Rules" (not to be read as yeh man, food rules, dude), he lists 64 rules about the kinds of foods we should eat. There is a short article here that tells you about 7 of them. I don't want to over simplify or misstate what Mr. Pollan has written, but he seems to be saying that you can eat almost anything as long as you eat it before it gets to the processors. My friend seemed to be particularly offended by the Ramen noodles that I put in some of my "food experiments". I don't know how they are made or what is in them, but I am pretty sure that if you buried them and they were dug up in a million years, you could still eat them. I think that breaks one of the food rules, "if it won't rot, don't eat it". That reminds me of the comment that I made about letting food "rest". My friend said, and again this is my interpretation of her words, "if it's already rotted, don't eat it".