~ if there are any vegans left after reading our late lamentations over missing quality vegan junk foods, they might find themselves picking up cases of soy protein powder at pic ‘n’ save for pennies on the dollar without knowing what to do with it. we’ve done the research and can warn the reader to avoid mixing the powder with the following drinks/foods:
soy milk
oatmeal
‘vitamin water 10’
greens (turnip, collards, etc)
coffee
‘holly nog’
brown rice
‘marmite’
peanut butter.

low budget soy protein only works with equally crummy ‘organic water plus’. if your lifestyle is so fancy as to include orange juice, that works as well.

~ question:

I was at a double-century cycling event this weekend, and a rival noticed that I was packing Larabars into my kit. He informed me that the Larabars are engineered for the body of a woman (I am a male). Afraid of the effects that the bars would have on my body during the ride, I tossed the bars onto the nearest food table and rode away hungry. Are there adverse effects on the male physiology caused by a Larabar?

answer:

Dear Valued Consumer:

Thank you for contacting Lärabar with your inquiry. Lärabar’s are made of no more than 8 ingredients for both women AND men to enjoy. Please visit www.larabar.com for more information about our natural bars.

We hope you find this information helpful. Please let us know if we can help you again.

Sincerely,

Lori Quinn
Consumer Services

~ happy independence day!

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more. -Thomas Jefferson

~ dumbasses who’ve never met a veg*n before always think they can blow your mind by asking, ‘dood what if you like crashed a plane on an island and just like you and this cow survived…you’d eat the cow, right?!’, not grasping that such an implausible scenario deserves only implausible answers: ‘the cow eats me first’ or ‘the cow knows how to build radios’ or ‘what would lisa simpson do?’.

similarly, one might hear, ‘if you are going to die anyway, would it make a difference if you go ahead and ate a hamburger or some shit?’ this notion presupposes that a vegan’s choices are about ‘getting caught’ or ‘being seen’, and not about self-respect or what effects their choices have on the world beyond their own experience, regardless of whether or not they have a heart attack in a ditch beside a bike trail, covered with vomited pumpkin spice clif bars.

but! if we were to lose all integrity for our last meal, it would be by biting into one or more of the following five snacks:

doughnuts
of all things of which one might want to make a ‘vegan version’, the doughnut is the one that has never been successful, in our experience – albeit a limited one as it has not included a visit to mighty-o. all the packaged ‘donuts’ we’ve tried – with one possible exception from jackson, mississippi – have been too damp and greasy or too dry and cake like. none of the ingredients in ‘regular’ doughnuts seem to be so exclusive to be solely animal-derived, so we don’t believe it is a matter of composing the vegan doughnut from the proper ingredients. we believe that the problem stems from the hang ups that most vegans have about their diets being ‘healthier’ than those of others. a decent doughnut is inherently unhealthy, possibly more so than any other dessert, and every vegan who has it together enough to open a factory or bakery isn’t going to have it in them to fully commit to something as awful as a decent doughnut. please try!

apart from the time we spent working at a gas station where we were allowed to take home any doughnuts that didn’t sell by 10pm or so, we have not eaten that many of them; even then, most of the doughnuts we ate were of the glazed or powdered variety, not the colorfully iced or filled objects that get a rise out of us today. so, we don’t crave them because we miss the taste from our diet; we think that what turns us on is the presentation. whether they are in a box or on racks behind a counter, there is something alluring about their arrangement – like styles grouped together, fragile but not individually protected. you probably could put almost any thing in rows or some similar formation and we would want to eat it.

waffle house waffle
we have been to waffle houses hundreds of times – between learning to drive and graduating high school, a week did not go by without seeing us in waffle house at least 3 times; however, we don’t recall ever having never eaten a waffle there, so the ‘desire’ here stems not from experience or taste, but from, we believe, availability and ubiquity – knowing that you could swing in there at any minute of the day, and you know exactly what it will look like. somehow we are suckered into believing that they are masters of the type; would you visit paris and not try a street crepe? nevertheless, in the event of a return to waffle house fare, we would probably forgo the waffle and order scattered and smothered, which actually should still be vegan, if not for the foul surface on which they are prepared.

zero
before we became latchkey kids, we were babysat by a yankee lady who refused to do anything as southerners would do it. for instance, she cooked instant grits in the microwave and ‘brewed’ instant powdered tea and pretended to not notice a difference between pepsi and coke. anyway, one of those southern things must have been snickers or milk way bars, because she would always keep zero candy bars as a treat. apart from the super cool name, the zero bar was awesome for being covered with white fudge. since the colors were reversed, it was like you were eating the opposite of a normal candy bar. you felt like a true outsider.

nutty bars
when we bagged groceries at winn dixie back in the 80’s or so, we would spend our break in the parking lot devouring entire boxes of little debbie’s fudge rounds, star crunches, zebra cakes, swiss rolls and the occasional seasonal junk. recalling how we would wash this down with a quart of chocolate yoo hoo or with a half dozen of little plastic barrels of punch is almost enough to make us sick now. there was no draw to the the fluffy, sticky cakes apart from convenience, but the nutty bars had a process of consumption that made them special – lifting each layer and gnawing out the individual squares of the ‘peanut butter’ grid before biting into the wafers.

during our ‘lost year’ in atlanta, we found a store that carried a vegan off-brand rip off of the nutty bar, but the last we heard, that store had been converted to a trader joe’s, natch, and any pseudo-nutty bars they had left are probably in a dumpster behind big lots in snellville.

generic
this one has no name. we can not think of a 5th brand or particular item that we would eat; we have only the obsession with eating the cheapest, most base form of junk food available in a gas station by the interstate, a state park vending machine, or the ‘deli’ of the piggly wiggly. stop at any flying j or stuckey’s and look along any bottom shelf full of dust-covered cookies/crackers/pies; they should be packaged in a town somewhere within 100 miles of the station and sell for less than 25 cents. whilst some people have a fetish for destroying themselves with heroin or fantasize about passing out drunk in a squalid gutter, our addiction would be bargain-priced, corn syrupy fat and starch. if it is a brand we’ve never heard of, we would eat that junk by the pound, preferably out of our lap, on the road, driving a hot el camino towards our destiny in pierre.

honorable mention: pecan swirls

as a disclaimer, we should note that we discourage anyone from consuming any of the above foods. far from disparaging a vegan diet for missing these pieces, please note that all the foods are total crap, and any diet is better off without them. we don’t lament that we ‘can’t eat’ this shit, because we ‘can’; what we do is choose not to. if we weren’t vegan, which is to say, if we were too lazy to think about anything that we eat, the above is the kind of garbage with which we would thoughtlessly fill our ‘donut stick’ holes. rather than regret being vegan for the lack of shitty food, we are hoping that someone with skills will top these creations with vegan ‘versions’ for the rest of us.

on a personal note, our obsession with these foods appears to be based not upon what they consist of, but upon the appearance of the snack as well as the process of delivering and consuming it. much as we like to orchestrate conversations, situations, and relationships, we seem also to have an infatuation with style and presentation of foodstuffs, perhaps best evidenced by our collection of cake domes, carriers, and tins, and our 7,000+ item photo gallery of cupcakes.

~ now that we have heart disease, we are attempting to limit ourselves to a 2,030 calorie daily diet. trying to follow recommended serving sizes, and being hungry for two weeks straight, we wonder how the hell people survive on this. is everyone in the united states starving all the time, or are portions of ‘6 brussels sprouts’ and ‘1/4cup of raisins’ somehow sating everyone but us? either everybody suffers consistent hunger pangs, or americans are cheating on the absurd portion of ‘3/4 cup of pasta’ – that’s like 10 fusilli! are the nutritionists at the fda or whoever is in charge using dwarves or hobbits to determine servings, or are we doing something wrong? it doesn’t make any sense.

we are reminded of a theory that we once read about europeans in the middle ages being malnourished for hundreds of years; they had never known what it was to be full, so they just figured constant hunger was how they were supposed to feel, just like we will, until our heart craps out, any day now.

~ in the dark days of our ‘lost months’ abroad last year, we tried to explain to our host how the united states was ‘better’ than sweden. news from the horn of africa sums it up more vividly than bickering over the cleanliness of local buses:

The first pirate attack in more than 200 years against a U.S.-flagged vessel off Africa led to a tense standoff Wednesday after a crew of Americans retook control of the ship and the hijackers fled into a lifeboat.

if it had been a swedish-flagged ship, they would have given the pirates amnesty and free condos in stockholm. fact.

~ in the tradition of warning our american readers away from awful experiences: unless it is midnight, and you have to visit a chain store, or you are on a road trip, perhaps to florida, you won’t be forced to make do with ‘deli’ hummus, but when it happens, stay the fuck away from ‘athenos neo classic’ hummus; we were drawn in by the awesome name, before the first bite induced a gag reflex. it is the worst food we have tasted since sampling salted licorice (in sweden). terrible. try to find sabra’s hummus or the one that has a photo of brooklyn on the label.

~
update!

~ seeing the purchases of the soon-to-be-sorry sap in front of us last night, tj’s has the nerve to still offer ‘home browns‘ as they cancel pasta w/ flax and those refried black beans and that ‘hi-protein crunch’ stuff. i know that they keep things based on popularity; why would people buy frozen oatmeal whilst letting blister peanuts disappear? ‘has the whole world gone crazy?’

~ in a phenomenon reminiscent of the king arthur cake fiasco of 2005 [+], our last three (3) cornbreads have been utter failures. despite using our respectably time-worn and taste-tested recipe, the breads have come out dense enough to build a wall around gaza. it makes no sense that this would happen. is this happening across the nation? is it global warming? are they grinding meal too finely this year? does baking powder wear out after a certain date? is there too much lead in the water? is the gov’t chemically seeding the atmosphere? is it something to do with king corn being raised for biofuel? disgusting – we go back to the mixer.

~ warehouse quote:

“excuse me sir, are you a vendor?”
“no, i just like to take pictures of food that is bizarre and disgusting”
“i’m going to have to ask you not to take pictures.”

continue reading…