DRIED SLUG, OR VINEGAR, SUGAR, AND HINTS OF TOMATO

Sea cucumber is delicious! One of my apartment mate's coworkers gave her some sea cucumber to take home that she had prepared herself, and my apartment mate made disgusting nom-nom-nom sounds while eating it. Naturally I was jealous. Nobody ever (!) gives me sea cucumber, and my colleagues wouldn't recognize it if it came up and bit them in the gand.

Most of them start screaming hysterically when they barely look outside their culinary comfort zone. One of them has a hardboiled egg in his lunch several times a week.

The only points of difference, at times, seem to be the degree of hot sauce and their wildly divergent cigar preferences.


Personally, I can understand people not being on the same page regarding hot sauce -- there are so many types to choose from -- but besides adding a necessary vegetable quotient to one's diet it does tend to make food in the suburbs at least passably edible, which without it far too often isn't.
So I am surprised that the egg man doesn't use it.
Hardboiled eggs and salt.


There are packets of ketchup in the work refrigerator. That's pretty much universal in the United States (and probably nowhere else in the world), because everybody always grabs extra, just in case we run out when someone needs it, which is obviously a common fear.




IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, MANY OF YOU ARE DULL

There is almost certainly a correlation between gustatory adventurousness and mental acuity or breadth of vision. That probably explains why many groupfeeding rituals are dominated by boring shit and pizza. Much more so, and much worse, when it involves company lunches. Which is one good reason why I am happy not to work in a "normal" enterprise, and I still shudder when recalling the choice between vegetarian and vegan.
Two or more kinds in each category, good grief.
How more San Franciscan can it be?

Of course, in the rest of the country, the choices are between beef, beef, beef, and beef, so the vegetarian-vegan-vegetarian trichotomy is an understandable reaction, but still.


For lunch today I shall have rice, or noodles, or rice sticks, or mien pao, or mantou, or even a kong si saam man ji. Stirfried, steamed, boiled, baked, or simmered, with a plentiful choice between two and four legs, feathers, scales, shells, carapaces, and none of the four vegetables that all white people in this country agree upon: lettuce, tomato, onion, and broccoli.

I might even find me some sea cucumber.

Or peanuts, gluten, and meat.

Plus hot sauce.



And I still can't believe that the ONLY condiment that all of you ever agree upon is ketchup. Salt, sugar, vinegar, preservatives, red food colouring.




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