Alane is out with her mother this evening, leaving me here to control Da Chimpz for the evening. After getting them from the after-school we stopped at the Giant Beagle to buy some food. They're getting very picky, these gorillas. I went to the refrigerator section with the prepared entrees but there was nothing they wanted. So we sidled over to the hot food counter. Not a very elaborate selection there, either. In fact, all they really had in the steam trays were some fried chicken parts, macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes.
Eh, how bad could it be? Cookie and Mojo agreed: we'd get the meal offer, with the eight chicken parts, the two sides and the corn bread. She even put a cup of gravy on the side!
We got home and dished the stuff out. The chicken wasn't bad. But everything else was bad. Bad indeed. The mac-and-cheese was bland to the point of offensive. The potatoes had the consistency (and taste?) of sealing compound. And the gravy was outright yecho. Even the cornbread (individually packaged!) tasted strange.
As we sat at the table pushing the food back into its containers the three of us agreed: it had looked pretty good in the case.
Which reminded me of the episode of Unwrapped I saw on Food Network last night. It was all about mail order food. Cool, I thought, I do lots of purchases that way. So I watched. And they had the usual suspects: Harry & David, showing happy migrant workers picking plump native-born pears (oddly no mention of their truly horrendous shipping service); Omaha Steaks packing red meat into dry ice caskets; William Sonoma with all their groovy gourmet victuals; and some Vermont candy place that I'd never heard of...
Then they showed a photo shoot -- a team of marketing-types trying to get that perfect snapshot of a delicious food spread for a catalog cover.
Some would call it art; I call it disturbing.
They used plastic putty to hold the food in place, and to fake the look of morning dew on the glossy sides of fruit they dabbed the outside with glycerin water. Outside the frame of their camera lens (and without the soft focus) the scene looked like crap. They showed the finished cover. Yeah, nice.
But the damage was done.
I was crestfallen. Don't they know how many gourmet food catalogs I've sifted through, building in my mind some borderline erotic utopia of perfectly-arranged portions of culinary delight sliding from the copper-clad bosom of high-quality cookware? Those weren't faux kitchens in drab studios I was fantasizing about -- those were real Atlantic salmon, with authentic grill marks, stylishly garnished with freshly-picked sprigs of dill, sans the glycerin.
It was all, in my head... it wasn't hurting anyone.
And then they show me... that. It was like finding out how they airbrush the photos of the glamor models. Or when I learned the WWF matches were scripted. Or that Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin didn't really like each other.
"Disenchanted" doesn't even start to describe it.
They haven't just taken away my innocence. Those buzzkills at Food TV have taken away my food pr0n.