Never put other people’s eyes in your mouth, you never know where they’ve seen.
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Hey, I’m a manly man*. I know its cool to suck on eyeballs and then crunch down and pop them so gunk flows out, but I confess, I just can’t do it. I can’t eat something that something else has been looking out. Except perhaps a window. But that’s for another post.
(However, it is ok to lick the blind. But not a window blind. Ironic? No, just stupid.)
*says me.
Someone at the lab remarked just the other day “isn’t it funny how we don’t eat rocks?”. We do indirectly of course in that plants obtain nutrients from the earth, but we are heartily sick of plants being our middle man. Person. Sorry. Like with that great social evil, photosynthesis. Our teeth are made of stern stuff here (stainless steel – we have the technology, we can rebuild ourselves – some people get tattoos, we pick a bone every year to have replaced), so we weren’t afraid to chomp down.
We found that a lot of rocks are actually unpleasant to eat. In our region, there are many sedimentary rocks, so we had a diet based around sandstone. Its very gritty, isn’t it? Sure, a high fibre content, and like the emu, our stomachs now have lots of little buddies to assist with grinding down the other more ordinary food. Its just that the little bits hang around in your mouth for days afterward.
Much of the soil we consumed was of little nutritional value. There was no ice age here to grind down metres of rock and release nutrients and minerals, so while eating, one had the sense of one’s mouth being filled with great eons of time, which is a bit creepy, and the sensation of cold winds sweeping across iceless deserts. Howling spaces. Call it Gondwana-mouth. Some rocks and ores were denied to us completely. Gina Rinehart owns all the iron ore and has promised it to the Chinese, so we were stuck with sampling rust, which is not the same thing at all.
Perhaps we should have imported a greater variety of rocks to sample. As a multicultural society, it is not clear to me why newcomers to our great southland have not brought a wide range of rocks from their homelands with them. This is a subject worthy of greater sociological study. Our government should be encouraging immigration from more geologically interesting societies. We are sick of bland anglo-saxon and western european rocks. Surely there is some ethnic rock out there that tastes like chicken? Now that would be a scientific discovery.
Those of you who have been subscribing to the analytical reports of the Chip Laboratories since ancient times know of our well founded efforts to ethicise (ha! take that, dictionary) omnivorism. We are trying folks, we really are. We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals.
Some of you maybe scoffing, as you associate these creatures with parlour games and carnivals. However, I am not talking about simple domesticated balloon animals. I am talking about great sweeping herds of massive fortean creatures, blocking the sun on their nomadic trek as passenger pigeons once did sweeping across America. And no, there would be no reliance on foul, poisonous oxygen. These are great helium or methane filled beasts, nodding and swaying as they are blown by the currents of wind, just as giant jelly fish are swept across oceans. Picture them now in your mind, see them billowing and filling the sky. Tremendous storms of them. The wondrous sight of them as they rail against the elements, indeed as they rail against their own ridiculous existence. Observing them as over time they are pitted by hail, scarred by lightning. And the wonder of them is that their pseudo life is no life at all, it is a mere impersonation. Brave balloon bound hunters shall pursue them without ethical quandary, intrepid mountaineers shall stalk them to their winter homes, small children and we here at the laboratory shall wonder at them.
O! If only we could get some nutrition into their skins! Some flavour into the rubber. Some texture into their form. And find some way to stop giant sea turtles from choking on them in their thousands when they critters deflate and drop into the sea. Perhaps it is impossible. But is not the dream as important as any mere actuality? At least this dream can unite us all, omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians, lacto-vegetarians, lacto-ovo-vegetarians, pescetarians, pollotarians, and pollo-pescetarians, the dream of the hunt of the giant pseudo-beasts in the sky that can sustain us all without troubling our consciences.
Until then, at least we have salad.
[“Life’s Solution” by Simon Conway Morris, p112 ‘Fortean bladders’]
After extensive experimentation in the Chip Laboratory, it has been determined that despite many claims being made about their inherent nature, flags are essentially flavourless. It is the nature of a flag that it may be likened to a thin bland filo pastry, dependent upon that which it envelops for its flavour. A flag may be an encasing on a sausage roll, or it may have a fruity filling. A flag may also be thought of as tofu, useful for soaking up the flavours in a laksa, but otherwise, bleh, what is the point.
A flag may also have other useful qualities. In Glossolalia, they are often flown from expensive (and unnecessary) utes*, so that upon awakening from a drunken stupor, the driver knows what country they are in. However, my view is that there should be very little call for a nation’s flag to be flown within the borders of that nation. Really, the only flags that should be flown are those of other countries, at their embassies for example. Otherwise, one could just have a piece of material with the word “FLAG” printed on it, because barring some damage to brain, we all know what it is. The only flags for domestic purposes should be those associated with the things that separate us, not the things that bind us, like flags for sporting teams or service organisations (you know, like Lions will kill Rotary, that sort of thing), or schools or perhaps class (for example, a flag signifying ‘intelligentsia of working class origin’, which can also be signified by lack of a Porsche, I have found).
National flags are excellent for Olympics and in association with killing foreigners, that makes perfect sense, it is the domestic use of national flags that puzzles me. One’s neighbours may fly flags from their homes to prove their patriotism. I would prefer it if they paid their taxes and reported all suspicious behaviour to the authorities. I see politicians adorned with them, sports persons draped in them, young men with them tattooed on their necks. My favourite is seeing children ignoring them. It is disrespectful to burn a flag and I do not approve of that, but there are many other things of which I disapprove more. However, these are my personal opinions and have nothing to do with my expert taste testing laboratories.
Flags taste only of other things. They can taste of virtue, hope, respect, eagerness and pride. Sometimes they have crunchy centres that taste of avarice, cowardice and hypocrisy. In too many of the flags we tasted, all other tastes were overwhelmed by blood. However, we have determined beyond doubt that a flag can certainly taste like chicken.
(The Joe Chip portal has been updated and can be observed by clicking here. Please have a look, there is a nice picture of a falcon on a power pole.)
*perhaps you refer to them as pickups or bakkes – the little trucks favoured by persons of trade, and also by other persons who have no need for such a truck.
Sorry, I see that I have been doing this all wrong. Don’t say I don’t learn. I have now read every other food blog and I see what I should be doing. Lets start again.
I made a salad.
First I took an iceberg lettuce. I broke it up, washing the fragments, carefully removing slugs and returning them to the wild. (Tip – don’t use soap.)
I sliced some carrots with my knife. It hurt them more than it hurt me.
I cut up some capsicums.
I sliced some lebanese cucumbers.
I mixed them together. (Technical term – tossed.)
I threw in some coloured cocktail onions (mmm, food dye), just for a change.
I made my own dressing with lemon and vinegar and the blood of a third world child*. (*No I didn’t but I don’t have any of the exotic herbs everyone else refers to and I felt left out.)
I opened a tin of sliced beetroot and served it separately.
I took lots of pictures of my shitty salad but they did not turn out well. However, that would not stop me adding them if I knew how.
I drank half a bottle of vodka later and vomited everywhere*. That is the picture I really wanted to add. (*No I didn’t. I have never drunk vodka again since a fateful night with a very large Russian when I was young and hadn’t learned I was not invincible. I learned otherwise two hours later.)
Bugger, I didn’t use macaroni. Everybody else uses macaroni.
Yummo, it was nearly as good as germ sausages, and it tasted just like chicken. (Must check microbes – see “Aboot”.)
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
********
“your writing isn’t nearly as “creative” as you think it is”
is that better?
Coming soon – spaghetti from a tin – ON TOAST!!
Tears of a Clown, no longer easily obtained at my local bottle shop, does not taste like chicken. Other products tested this week which do not taste like chicken include:
Unfortunately, separate reports are only available where indicated.
Next time, we shall look at salad. Doesn’t that sound interesting?
No don’t be disgusting, I am not advocating that you eat insects, that would be gross and it is not what your mate my mate Joe Chip is about.
We have all of course at one time or another wished that we were insects. Who has not wanted to be a cockroach with the ability to run under the fridge, or to be a fly mindlessly belting time and again against a window? A slater rolled in a ball, a moth struggling in a web. It is only human nature to desire such a thing.
Given this overwhelming urge to become a six legged invertebrate, why not take it that one step further and adopt the insect diet. It is more insectophile than insectivore. No diet could be more ethical, than to eat what is just lying around and going to waste anyway. It is only our prissiness holding us back. Don’t be square. Throw off your bourgeois shackles, your antiquated “oh I won’t eat that its rotting and it stinks” mindset, your 1950s Victorian hangups. This is (almost) the last taboo, and it has to go. Our children are getting sick because they are not exposed to enough dirt. Asthma and allergies abound because we have cocooned our kids in protective cradles that crush the creation of their immune systems.
Come on, billions of animals cannot be wrong. Reduce your carbon footprint to zero. Embrace excrement. Desire decomposition. Revere rot. Gratify yourself with garbage. Move over mealworms. Begone beetles. Buzz-off bees. Move on mosquitoes. Take off termites. Aroint thee ants. There is a new biological break down agent in town, and its us. If an insect eats it, its good for you, and good for the environment. Devolve now, avoid the rush.
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I was born an omnivore, and shall die an omnivore, like the pig and the seagull. Omnivorism is genetic and hardwired into us. No amount of aversion therapy can convert a person to either vegetarianism or carnivorism, those unnatural extreme positions. I too have heard claims by individuals that they lived a large part of their lives happily mixing with other omnivores, when suddenly they became a carnivore or a herbivore, but we know that not to be true, they were always like that, and hid it to keep themselves and others happy. That is a matter for them. I hide all sorts of things to keep others happy, such as my hobby of amateur surgery – “outing” oneself on matters such as these is of questionable utility, but I leave it to others.
This is not to say that a thoughtful person such as my writer does not have concerns from time to time. I like little lambs in various ways – they are wooly and cute; they have their own worth as a living creature; and I very much enjoy eating chops and legs. (I do not like to eat their brains, after all I am not a zombie sheep, however that is the result of childhood trauma, and I shall comment upon that another time, you will be very glad to hear.) They are useful subjects for nursery rhymes. I chuckled at Bear Grylls and his “sheeping bag”, but of course no ethical issues arose there, it was not a cute little lamb that he gutted and inverted, it was a dead old sheep that was not cute at all and not alive at all.
If I could find a way to eat a lamb, and it could remain alive, would I choose it? Of course I would, under certain conditions. In Glossolalia, where I presently survive, lamb is expensive, so I would not want the price to increase. Ethics only go so far. But I think the cost of genetically modifying a lamb would be outweighed by the increased availability of meat. For example, if a lamb was to be genetically modified: let us stop there – “genetically modified” is a harsh phrase, loaded with emotion and laden with baggage of controversy and debate. Lets use a more neutral term. I shall pick one at random – “cuddled”. If a lamb is cuddled by using the genes of an insect, it should grow six legs instead of four. If it is further cuddled with the genes of a reptile, if it loses a leg, it should grow back. Through those two cuddlings, we have a cute little lamb with an excess of legs that can be regrown and so are crying out to be harvested – it would be an outrage, so very very wrong, to leave the lamb with those two mutant legs growing out of its shoulders, especially when they can be cut off time and time again. Grass can be converted easily into lamb shoulder legs, and the starving can be fed in a way that was once preserved only for the rich, and that only on a Sunday lunchtime.
I would still have reservations. I would not want to be spitting out insect carapace when I ate my Sunday roast. And I would hope that the addition of reptile genes would not add, say, a flavour of chicken. Lamb is something I do not want to taste like chicken. I want it to taste like lamb and mint and rosemary and potato and carrot and pumpkin and garlic and salt and pepper and oil.
There would still be problems. If the lambs were not slaughtered, soon there would be an excess of lambs turning into an excess of sheep, which though amusing, are not cute. The lambs would have to be further cuddled so that they did not live beyond a few years. Those lives would be rich, enjoyable ones, without the fear of the slaughterhouse. All we have to do is find another creature to cuddle them with, one that lives but a few years, then without warning, painlessly explodes in a rush of glitter and streamers and confetti, with a satisfying bang. How much better would our world be!?
You Are What You Eat 