2 stories about food

Blue Cheese

A woman pours herself a cup of soup but realizes she’s out of cheese. No soup without cheese, she thought. It isn’t right. So she got dressed, did a little bit of her make up and she walked out of her dingy apartment, out into the gritty streets onto that public bus, on her way to buy a block of cheese from the grocery store. Getting on the bus with all those strange people was worth it, because the cheese they sold at this boutique grocery store really hit the spot. It was one of the few joys that life still permitted her, and the sweetness of this cheese necessitated the making of this voyage. When she arrived at the grocery store, she found that they were not in stock of the cheese she liked. She saw instead that they had an alternate brand which the store manager insisted was just as good. Disbelieving though she was, the woman rode back in sad resignation on that bus, in the defeated posture of someone who has bought a brand of cheese that they do not recognize and that they worry they may not like. Back at her apartment, she made herself that cup of soup. Pouring that piping hot water from the bright red kettle she cooked those noodles and hydrated those crispy vegetable bits into something that slightly resembled a meal. With a few boiled eggs, some crunchy, stale, over-heated toast, and at last a clump of that new cheese she had just invested in, she was ready to dig in. While watching political debates on her laptop and washing down the cheaply-preserved cup soup with a little cardboard box of chardonnay, she sat grimly, thinking: is this what her life has become? The cheese was in fact not the same as the other. It had an unplesant tartness and lacked the exquisite creaminess of the other cheese she held so near and dear to her heart.

Infinite Ingredients

The man discovered a rat tail in his chimichanga. Immediately, the discovery repulsed him and threw him off of his appetite. The third, more unexpected reaction, was one of grim amusement. The severed vermin appendage cooked in corn oil appearing suddenly in his morning breakfast seemed a stark reminder of his reality. How did it get there, he wondered. It must have severed itself from the clip of a mouse trap and somehow made its way into a massive vat of ground-up chicken breasts. When the rat’s tail appeared in his breakfast, it was as though an illusion had been lifted. The colorful box and plastic packaging the chimichanga had been wrapped in could no longer obscure the facade. Days before, when he had this same lunch of a chimichanga with a blast of sriracha, he didn’t have to think about where this meal came from at all. Its flavor was simple but vaguely enjoyable, and two of them were enough to satiate his hunger. Just three minutes in the microwave, and your hunger pangs were cured. That was all that mattered to him. Much like the working class of America, it was not a thinking man’s breakfast, but it got the job done. You ate it and that was that, your existence persisted for a little while longer. But he never wondered how this fried flour tortilla with meat shavings and gooey dairy substances had landed on his plate. For all he knew, these things just sprang magically out of thin air into the frozen section at the grocery store. For all he cared, this food came from nowhere short of a magic land of infinite ingredients. Now all he could think about was the factories and the slaughterhouses. He thought about all the underpaid possibly undocumented workers that had to slaughter those chickens. All those faceless drones he would never have to face in his real life. And it put him off his appetite.