Stuff I Learned From Food

Humans are the only species on this planet (aside from cats) who play with their food.  We mush it, we mix it and we marinate it.  We slice it.  We spice it.  We shape it with our hands.  We do things to food that nymphomaniacs and pyromaniacs only dream about.  At various times in our lives, food is our trusted friend, our relentless lover and our sworn enemy.  Food shares the blame — and the praise — for being both our master and our slave, and we can never quite reconcile that schizophrenic relationship.  Here are just a few things I’ve learned from food.

Fast food is usually neither.

If you can’t pronounce the ingredients listed on the package, they’re probably going to kill you.

Really good soup is actually just very wet salad.

That green stuff in the back of the fridge is never salad.

Red wine hates white carpet.

You can try but you can’t really disguise something disgusting simply by saying it tastes like chicken.

Haute cuisine is a French phrase that means “a bad cut of meat camouflaged with a pretentious sauce.”

Calling Italian cuisine “food” is like calling the Mona Lisa “paint.”

Potato chips (crisps) are free.  You’re actually paying for all that flavoured air trapped inside the bag.

The biggest secret in the world is that the vast majority of consumer honey isn’t honey; it’s some kind of weird, processed corn syrup.  (Sadly, this is true.)

Even though Cheerios™ taste like cardboard, they’re actually good for you.

“Swiss cheese is only cheese now and then.”  – Mitch Hedberg

Broken cookies don’t have calories: the calories escape when the cookies break.  Sounds legit!

You can run British mud through a French kitchen and you’ll end up with something that tastes pretty good, but if you run French food through a British kitchen, you’ll end up with mud.

In North America, barbeque is the last bastion of acceptable male behaviour.

Surprise!  Perrier is just water in a cute, green bottle.

If you microwave leftover pizza and call it “Italian toast,” it tastes better.

And finally:

Forget lingerie, music and candlelight — coffee, red wine and chocolate are the Holy Trinity of a romantic evening.