Convenience

Many people have guilty pleasures, whether it's sleeping in till 2 PM, watching a trashy TV show religiously, or even reading romance novels. But almost everyone has a food guilty pleasure. My mom's is popcorn, my dad's is ice cream and I have more than one-- The Old Spaghetti Factory, and candy, lots of candy. However, I know how bad these foods  (if you can even classify them as real foods) are for you. A meal at The Old Spaghetti Factory easily has more than a days worth of calories, and candy is mostly just sugar and empty calories while simultaneously ruining your teeth. 

I often wonder when I'm having a craving, why it's a commodified taste that I'm craving. But honestly, it's pretty obvious. I'm craving the sugar and the salt; it's addicting. An apple just won't suffice. Sure, it's sweet, but it's nothing like a creamy Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Plain-old pasta won't do either, it's the salty mizithra cheese that I need. My body has been trained to consume this stuff like it's natural, like it's supposed to go into my stomach and my bloodstream and energize me for the day. But it's not supposed to and it doesn't. It satisfies me for maybe twenty minutes, and if I'm lucky the craving will be gone for an hour. But it always returns (unless I've made myself sick by shoveling it in). 

It's almost impossible to get away from commodified taste, especially when it is so convenient. The invention of the microwave makes it feasible for me to make s'mores from the comfort of my kitchen rather than around a campfire, I can grab a bag of chips from the pantry, and I can always reheat my leftovers from The Old Spaghetti Factory. In Roger Haden's "Taste in an Age of Convenience"  he comments on the microwave saying "Even though the 'nuker' would in practice be used less for actual cookery than for the reheating of pre-packaged and processed convenience foods, it was hailed as 'the greatest cooking discovery since fire. In the U.S. 'microwaves' would outsell conventional ovens in 1975, thus turning a 'culinary' fiction into a social fact."  The microwave, in effect has taken convenience to a whole new level. But it's not alone. Restaurants, supermarkets and clever marketing have all played a part in making convenience an accomplice, or rather a catalyst to guilty food pleasures. Yet even though I know all of this, as I sit here writing this blog post, do you know what I'm craving? A big bowl of microwaved popcorn. Yum.

photo credit: http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/candy.jpg