Food Talks
Flying isn’t everything. You’ve still got to eat. The other day we ran out of milk so I couldn’t fix my usual breakfast of oatmeal and raisins unless I used heavy cream thinned with water to moisten the oatmeal. But that’s a substitution I don’t enjoy.
So I drank some tea lightened with several molecules of heavy cream and drove over to Jack in the Box for an Unhealthy Breakfast.
When my order arrived, I noticed that the paper placemat featured interviews with Jack’s three major meals, elaborating themes introduced in recent TV commercials.
“Besides dating supermodels and getting into the best clubs, nothing’s changed,” Breakfast answers to the question “Has being served all day changed you?” He does admit, however, “I have to wear a hat and sunglasses when I go out.”
“I’m the meal that matters,” snipes Dinner.
“I guess this is Breakfast’s 15 minutes of fame,” whines Lunch. “Hopefully, it’s more like five, though.”
A Silent Meal. My breakfast didn’t say a thing as I ate it. I could recognize it because it wasn’t wearing a hat and sunglasses, but I was.
Of course, Jack in the Box isn’t the only place that invests its food with personality.
During the last year, I’ve been a fascinated reader of the hot sauce packets in Taco Bell.
They’re the new fortune cookies, but they don’t offer advice: they’re generally self-involved, though they sometimes flirt.
“When I grow up, I want to be a waterbed,” says one.
“Careful! I don’t do well under pressure,” declares another.
“Of all those sauce packets, why me, why now?”
“My sauce is an honor student at Taco Middle School.”
“At night, the sporks pick on me.”
“Aah… We meet again!”
New Packets. I’ve seen two or three dozen different saucy messages. Every now and then a new batch arrives and I root around in the little bin to find the latest jokes.
This comic resource has slowed me down at the condiment counter. Gotta put on glasses to pick out an especially amusing batch of packets.
I only learned about sporks this past year from my friend Jennifer, mistress of pop culture. I’ve seen and used them for quite a while, but I didn’t realize that this hybrid spoon-fork had a proper name: spork.
They’re not great spoons and they’re pretty lousy forks, but if life gives you a spork, smile and eat.
The Taco Bell nearest Baylands now offers sporks or forks. The sporks can’t be happy about that.
The Big Screen. Given the trends in modern culture, I expect that within a decade we’ll see blockbuster Food Movies, with animated Jack in the Box meals, Taco Bell hot sauce packets, edible things with comic, engaging personalities.
The most popular will probably springboard into their own franchises and some wiseguy copywriters at an agency will start developing new layers of personality.
Perhaps the sporks’ time will come.
Tags: Baylands, Life.
Speaking of food…. I’d like to pass on a quote from Homer Simpson.
“If god had not meant for us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?”
Mike
This reminds me of an all-weekendly breakfast-dilemma. You know, I get up very early, like 5am, to get out to Baylands at sunrise (around 6am these days). Not in the mood to cook anything but LiPos at this time, what do you do? McDonalds on Lawrence is open. Or Jack in the Box. Well, they do serve sort of a substitute for my most important breakfast item overall, green tea. No, not that ‘coffee’, but I find their iced tea is quite agreeable. Jack’s, in particular. Jack’s breakfast has a life of its own, as you say Pete, competing with ‘dinner’ and ‘lunch’. How about a ‘Meaty Breakfast Burrito’ at 5.30am? Hmm, too heavy, but still better than those greasy hash browns, dripping of saturated fat. What to do? At McDo you can get a bagel, sounds good, but it comes with a ‘steak’. Hm. Can you take it, before sunrise, really? I’ve tried all of them, as you need something to keep you going when you get up that early. At Albertson’s they don’t even have their bakery stuff delivered so you may get a ‘Turkey wrap’ from the day before? Urgh. I’ll settle for Jack’s ‘French Toast Sticks’, not less greasy, but sweet to say the least. At least I’ll get my huge one-liter iced tea… but still looking for a better solution. Taco-Bell is not even open at the time, but at Jack you get some real salsa with those burritos. As I said, it is a dilemma!
More than one spork morphed into an airscoop. Probably the most notorious lives here:
http://timocharis.com/doodles/planes/espresso/
That’s from KFC, by the way. I haven’t frequented Jacks recently enough to see the Great Breakfast Debate. I do sometimes linger at the Taco Bell across the freeway from Harris Ranch, so there’s no excuse for overlooking the saucy remarks — save that I generally peruse BBC news on my aging Clie whilst dining at such elegant establishments.
Breakfast? Sometimes I cop a donut. More often, coffee (sugar & ice cream. Very nourishing).