raxkingisdead

i agree wholeheartedly with your soapbox issue!

i guess mine would be: food simply shouldn't be this cheap. meat especially shouldn't be this cheap. most of us were born into an aberrant form of prosperity that sees cheap tomatoes in the winter or cheap steaks at every supermarket as its birthright. that prosperity can only be won on the backs of workers far more immiserated than most of us are, and by straining the environment and the supply chain both to their absolute limit.

ooh this is a tough one, i like it! in my classes on writing personal essays, when students want to talk about food writing, i actually advise them to try extra hard to describe exactly how their taste buds perceive food — terms like 'rich' and 'depth of flavor' that you see in so much food writing don't pertain all that closely to a food's taste when you sit down and interrogate them, do they? but if you close your eyes and hew to exactly what your taste buds are really telling you about a food's acidity or heat level or texture, you're likely to come up with something more interesting that people can relate to. (david kaplan's "the philosophy of food" was a fun read for helping me to interrogate my own food writing cliches!)

basically, when i write something personal about food, i have two aims: describe the food in a way readers can relate to, without leaning too heavily on food-writing cliches, in the hopes of getting them on board with my ideas about why the food is important. and then use that food to call back to my own memories. and i try to always excavate deeper memories than the most obvious ones, especially in food writing. "eating tootsie rolls always reminds me of when my mom would take me trick-or-treating" is nice enough stuff, but doesn't make for exciting writing — ideally, you're writing about a food that's pinned to something deeper and more human than that

lmao i need any law enforcement types who are reading this to know that NO I DO NOT

if you didn't get it from me then yes, absolutely

mm salad is pretty well ruined for me. i've worked at restaurants with salad bars and can confirm that the lettuce bowls get washed once in awhile, maybe. people always worry about getting food borne illnesses from undercooked meat and fish but a huge amount of them come from raw vegetables that haven't been washed properly!

hard to say what the inverse would be — i have a huge amount of respect for what line cooks are able to do considering the stress that's inherent to their job! to me, it's impressive that anyone is able to cook any food under a professional-level time crunch lol