An emergent set of gross food practices. Research updated yearly.
An emergent set of gross food practices. Research updated yearly.
So what i have is a concept I've had sometime in the past year, I think, and it involves in the spirit of dark arts it involves innovations in food technology and snacking complexity. What it is, I call it "a sandwich sandwich" or a meta sandwich. Previously sandwiches were items sliced in the deli, you had your meat, something that fills the role of a meat, maybe a secondary meat or cheese, then possibly lettuce, tomato and other fixings. #00:01:15.5#
Which is a dark term itself...#00:01:20.3#
One of my personal first realizations of darkness, which I can get into later. So the sandwich was sliced items on bread with, of course, condiments. And then eaten like so. But we can go further with that idea. Instead of eating that sandwich, we have multiple sandwiches at our disposal here. Then we can put those in the same way that we slice meat, in a meat slicer, and put those cross-sections of sandwiches on a new sandwich, with new fixins, condiments, etc. on that and eat that. And that enables us to have a next level sandwich experience. #00:02:20.0#
So without further ado, I'm going to begin assembling my three sandwiches, and then layer them on the meta sandwich, and create the first sandwich sandwich ever, that I know of. That's what I'll be doing throughout the course of this discussion. #00:02:43.6#
I have a question about your methodology, you're just going to use a knife here? #00:02:52.5#
Yeah, I have this kind of bread knife. I tried to get a slicer, but they're either 15 dollars in Staten Island and full of rust, or like 700 dollars. #00:03:07.0#
What is the content of this sandwich sandwich? Or of the original? #00:03:11.3#
Kind of a subplot of this whole thing is that I wanna prove, I think there's a lot of misconceptions that darkness has a lot to do with meat, and I wanna prove that you can have a meatless dark item. So I have mostly seafood, I have sardines, smoked oysters, tuna, and vegetarian turkey. So I'm gonna make some melt-style sandwiches, and combine those for a melt-style seafood meta sandwich. #00:03:42.1#
What do you see as some of the biggest problems, potential challenges? #00:03:49.7#
The two biggest challenges that I have foreseen so far, I'm sure there'll be others, are the high bread to fill ratio. So to compensate for that I'm going to try to put as much filling in. As you can see I've got relatively slim breads, so I can stack them high and then slice them and put them onto this more bready thing. But I'll remove some of this bread to improve the ratio also. The other question is how to get these things to stick together. And that's an epiphany that just came to me today, and very simply, dark arts knows melted cheese. So if you stick these in the toaster to melt the cheese and kinda distribute the cheese so that it will coagulate a little more. And that way when I slice it won't be completely messy, though I have some very messy meat type items. We'll see if that works. #00:04:55.5#
I think there's room in here for everyone to have their own idea about what is and isn't dark. But there is some sort of consensus. Part of the reason I wanted to talk about lime beer is because I feel like when you think about dark arts really, I think the first thing that comes to mind is food. You're talking about things you eat. I don't think people talk about beverages as much. Which is not to say beverages couldn't be dark, and this is why I'm sort of excited about this possibility and having this opportunity to come together with all of you and talk about what it means to be dark. There is a lot of interesting research going on into non-food darkness these days. Jeff has a very exciting new theory about best buy that I'm very interested in. The goal of this presentation isn't necessarily to determine whether or not lime beer is dark; it would be nice if we could come across that, come to an answer, but that's not the idea. It's more to talk about the phenomenon of how these things get made, introduced into the marketplace, which is often taken as a given. People will drink anything with a slice of lime. #00:09:52.0#
I just tossed my lime into the beer and it fizzed a little bit, a reaction, it's more like you're making a drink. It's closer to having a mixed drink. #00:10:14.5#
Mixology is another point I'd like touch on, not now, mixology, these people wear labcoats and charge $30 for a cocktail, throwing eggs and vodka together, that is pretty dark shit. I once bought a $25 cocktail, a good checkmark on the list of "new yorker" questions, how much of a new yorker are you. #00:11:19.6#
From a marketing standpoint, how do you think that factors into all of this? #00:11:26.4#
It's almost 100% marketing. (we can start with the corona, cheers) The interesting thing about the lime beer is that no one knows who started the process of putting a lime on a bottle, like a corona. There's no real reason why; there is the idea that people just put limes in everything. There's a lot of speculation that the reason it became so widespread is that light damages beer, which is why most beer bottles are dark brown — they keep the light out. Clear bottles and light green bottles let in a lot of light, interact with hop particles, and make the beer go bad. A lot of people would say that the reason people started putting limes in corona is because corona bottles are clear. That they would taste like shit if you didn't put the lime in. There are some other wacky theories on the internet about the origin of this stuff. That people put limes on their bottles so it keeps flies away. That bottle caps would rust, and you'd use the lime to wipe the rust off. What I'm getting at is that I think you can make the argument, that even if putting a lime into a bottle of corona is not dark now, it might have originated as a dark practice. And became accepted as "this is what we do with corona". And it became accepted so much that you end up with this stuff: "we know that you're just gonna put a lime in it in the end, so let's do it for you, for an extra three bucks, sparing a walk to the produce section." #00:14:36.0#
But no one has put a lime in an MGD before? #00:14:45.0#
Not that I know of. Let's move on, let's taste a few of these. I wanted to get to the Bud Lime in a second, it's fascinating, it's actually just Bud Light that they added lime extract to. With Miller Chill they made a new beer, with lime and salt, but Bud Light Lime is just Bud Light with lime extract. Exactly what you're talking about doing with MGD. #00:15:20.0#
Miller Chill is what you have in your hands right here. This is a beer that's actually made with salt, which is quite strange. It tastes like juicy juice to me, like really watered down fruit juice ... it has a super watery body, because all of this is supposed to be summery and light #00:17:17.1#
Which by the way, finding Miller Chill in Greenpoint in December is not easy. The thing with this is that it's pretty much not beer anymore, it's lime and salt, soaked with alcohol. If that's what you like, that's fine. #00:18:04.9#
I think the Bud Light Lime is clearly the darkest. Because the artificial is by far the strongest flavor ... an interesting point that there is a clear delineation between Gross and Dark .. yeah I wanna discuss that because I think the lines are blurred, it has to be taken on a case by case basis, but that there are no necessary rules ... the aftertaste reminds me of the Japanese high end deli-oriented fruit snacks #00:19:01.0#
I don't know if these beverages are dark. I think Miller Chill is. Bud Lime probably is too. What's interesting about it is the way that these things just appear on the shelves. That this is what you drink now, or that this is what you want. This happens to all sorts of shit. The best example being peanut butter and jelly in the same jar. How far does this trend go? At what point is it ketchup and mustard? #00:19:53.3#
Have you tried the bud chelada? #00:19:54.8#
I want to talk about that next year. For those of you who don't know, bud has the Budweiser Chelada, it's a mexican drink, clamato juice mixed with budweiser, in a can. Clam juice and tomato juice. So you're taking something that's already a dark fusion, putting it together with budweiser. Apparently it's really popular too, at least in California. Bud Lime is crazy popular. They have all these stratifications, it's classified as a "premium lager". #00:20:54.1#
I would like to say if you are interested in trying the lime beer and genuinely seeing if you like it, I recommend getting the Bud Light Lime in 8 oz bottles and starting there and building a tolerance that way ... I would also say that if you are interested in the Michelada, definitely try the real one first. Well they have a beer, and they have one that's even like a meat or meat tenderizer one ... there's MSG in the bud one .... so they're really spicy. #00:21:43.6#
This is a funny thing, because I feel like the concept of clamato juice and budweiser, if you did it yourself, it's not bad, but if they do it for you and put it in a can, it's dark. For me, that's the idea with these beers. #00:22:16.8#
I just poured myself some control, because it's the only thing that tastes kinda good, these other beers are putrid, they're disgusting .... I donno, I don't agree, I like the Bud Lime. As somebody who grew up on soda, it smells terrible but a couple sips in, it's fine. It's interesting that there is a generation of people who will have never put actual limes in beer, only knowing this as what it means to have a lime beer. What is the implication of that? #00:22:54.6#
You think it's inevitable, that limes will run out? It has nothing to do with limes running out, it's knowing the process that you buy limes to put in beer is a sacred knowledge that could die out within a generation ... or parts of the country don't sell limes with the beer ... I would say that Bud Light Lime, as being the carefully marketed researched product, that has to make a profit, would more likely die out than putting lime in a beer ... but think about other products that emulated something existing and replaced the thing that they emulated ... but I think that there is the possibility of a backlash moving several decades down the road, where someone says lets return to the lime beer! ... but what's interesting about the dark arts is that there has been no successful backlash, no food movement that has succeeded in quashing the progression #00:24:15.6#
What about food from the 50's and aspic and weird jello? ... but that's not around anymore, it moved on to bigger and more technological things... #00:24:35.5#
I was tossing back and forth between several ideas about what to talk about here. Obviously dark arts is something that I have been messing around with on Double Happiness the website that me and jeff and ricky and borna do since 06. We don't always hang out but we get to see what each other post and there's lots of gross food images, and I think a lot of our ideas and dark theories have come out of image searching and that kind of thing. So something that I tied onto and also my girlfriend kate who couldn't be here tonight, is the presence of goo in imagery, and goo is something we're attracted to in a weird way. That part of darkness that we wanna look at, horrible and engrossing at the same time. I want to spend some time and tell you about my findings, some quick research about GOO, taking a look at the history of GOO through the foods. Where we are today. Some dark food trends. And maybe talking about what this has to do with society, and then we'll open it up to discussion. #00:27:49.5#
I will say that this research does stem pretty much directly from a piece we did called PARTY TRAY PLUS, a goo machine we built, where we had a lot of sauces. We're gonna take a look back at history and how goo has moved away from its origins. So what is goo? As loosely as possible, it's just food products that are somewhere between a solid and a liquid. Going back in history, you might say that our ancient goo is dips, in the sense that there was this time before utensils and plates. Really when people where mostly eating vegetables and stuff, that you had to eat your mashed up vegetables with other vegetables. You were inherently dipping from the start. I think that Hummus is probably one of our more ancient goos, in that cradle of civilization (tigris and euphrates) they grow chickpeas out there right? So one thing about dips is that they're kind of, when you think about dip, they are often composed of a number of discrete ingredients. It's either I take a lot of one thing and mash it up, so take beans and it becomes bean dip, or I take these vegetables and I chop them up and they become salsa. It has a new name but everyone knows that a dip is a convenient way to put things together. So it's a primitive goo in that sense. I would say that ethiopian food is a pretty good example of dipping (you use your hands right?) all the food is served on this large piece of bread and you tear off sections of the flatbread and then you scoop up the cooked vegetables, the different kinds of dips, and then you eat it together. (little oases of dip) Little stacks, little mounds.
Moving up in time we get more able to cook, culinary skills and mastery of fire, cooking implements, that becomes the era where we move into sauce. Dips and then moving on into sauces. They are similar to dips in that a sauce, in the definition I'm working with here, has to be paired with another food. You can have a sauce by itself, but you would always eat it with something. It would always dress something, or be paired with something. And that actually vibes with what a lot of research has said; people made sauces because meat didn't keep as long, no refrigeration in roman times, so sauces both disguised the fact that maybe your meat was tainted and added a more flavorful element. #00:31:49.9#
How is the sauce a goo? #00:31:54.6#
Sauce moves like a goo, between a liquid and a solid. Some sauces are definitely liquid ... sauces are really broad, and that was kind of when goo blossomed, because you can have sauces that are really light, some people would say a broth is a sauce. But at the same time, caramel sauce which is really hard and slow flowing. So sauce has a broad spectrum, but it's something that falls between solid and liquid in most cases. Dips always reference what's in them, whereas a lot of prominent sauces are given a new name. Like the best example is probably mayonnaise. Do you even know what's in mayonnaise? When you break it down, it's very simple. It's such a potent base that it became, there is this whole term that I didn't really get into called "mother sauces", and there's like people sort of have these five mother sauces, roux is one, mayonnaise is another one. #00:33:24.4#
Obviously sauces exist today in a lot of different forms. How do we get towards modern goo? I think the next step really is that I'm interested in the ones that, if dips were always eaten with another piece of food, and sauces were paired with meat, what were the goos that you could just eat by themselves? That you were supposed to eat by themselves, with a utensil? Somethings that come to mind are like yoghurt, pudding, desserts in general are a field where dark arts flourished in that with desserts, there's this whole novelty part of it, it's supposed to be an exciting experience such that you're not super tied down to traditional foods, you can really break free. Something like pudding, which is kind of just a gross looks-like-diarrhea, could be great as a dessert. Also grits, and oatmeal, very oozing gooey things. In the sense that these, they become their own food, what could be a sauce kind of gets elevated to this food status. #00:34:59.8#
So where do we go from there? What I'm calling "new goo" or contemporary goo, is also, if we want to look at it in the continuum, a lot of it is post utensil. You can see here this guy is eating energy goo, which is a brand of energy like goo, energy performance product. A lot of this comes in these squeeze tubes. Another good example of new goo is gogurt. While it is very clearly yoghurt, the marketing and branding clearly is suggesting the idea, literally the tagline is "squeeze and slurp, grab and glurp" and then the kid who skateboards by, and he throws it to the other kid, and goes "LOSE THE SPOON!" So there's a clear message that the goo is the focus, it's kind of this new goo. Energy goo and gogurt are both good examples because they say this thing that "My lifestyle, I don't even have time to eat anymore, I'm so fast so extreme that I'm on a skateboard all the time, so what I need is just energy to sustain myself". Contemporary goo isn't even attempting to reference a flavor or a food, it's kind of skipping over food and just going to energy or results. It's not event about eating anymore, just about the result of that. In a way, that's really exciting. For marketing in the sense that goo can represent any possibility, any flavor, goo can be any flavor. Somehow we took your favorite flavors and squeeze them down into this thing. You don't have to sit and eat a meal, you just get the satisfaction of experiencing your favorite flavor. Suck down that goo in one thing. Reducing food, kind of similar to astronaut food, this cousin, "You can dehydrate anything, the world is limitless". That idea of possibility and being able to imagine goo as kind of whatever you want it to be, part of the reason why we see it so much. Even if some of these other pictures are stuff that you're familiar with. It might be stuff you're familiar with, but you can kinda imagine that as having any flavor. Maybe that's a piece of pineapple, or maybe a piece of cheese, and these are grapes or olives or white sauce goo. It also has this appeal of freshness, because it's kind of flowing and alive. I would say on a subconscious level, there's all these connections with human body stuff. Mucuous or cum or nasty shit, all that stuff in your body is all gooey. I just think that it becomes, as a contemporary object, it's ripe to be used in imagery in marketing and that kind of thing. So I'm curious to see what other contemporary goo products are gonna come up. I mean gushers is one that I kind of breezed over, but that was an important touchstone for a lot of people our age.
Do you think a lot of people actually eat goo? Is there a market? #00:39:30.0#
Right now it's definitely marketed at this level of extreme, people that are into running or cycling, extreme exercising, but also that extreme part of kids, food being extreme and weird and kind of novel. Although ice pops have been around in that exact same form as gogurt. I mean the companies that are making energy goo are the same people who are making energy bars and clif bars. It's in that hyper sports arena. I don't know, for example, couldn't you imagine in New York next to the mini cupcake place there is a goo bar or something? Where they would just have "Cool man I'm really into that new bacon rhubarb cheesecake goo" or also people will get the salmon goo. #00:41:09.1#
Goo in popular culture, you might remember this scene from Hook, where they have the food fight. You remember the scene where he's arguing with Rufio, they're trading insults, and he's trying to use his imagination, and he's able to finally tap into his imagination by flipping this spoonful of unspecific custard goo and starting this food fight. And this is cool because it's about using your imagination for the ultimate banquet, with all this other meat stuff, also just piles of goo. #00:42:05.5# #00:42:05.7#
Is milk goo? Is muscle milk goo? #00:42:11.2#
No, Milk is a liquid. Have any of you guys seen Fantastic planet? There's a point where the Aliens are just eating goo, standing in this column of undulating goo, flying in little pellets into their mouths. Aliens are gooey, you know.
Do you personally believe in the promsise of goo? That there will be a day where we can sustain ourselves only on goo products? Like the Star Trek premise, "Chicken park with a rosé goo" #00:43:06.0#
In a way I do believe in that. I hope for that in the same sense that we hope that new technology will reveal all the solutions to environmental problems. Yes we can hope for that, we can show that mankind has achieved something great, on the other hand there is some deep dark thing that we will have lost. I love to cook, but yeah, if we can get goo to the point that it makes something in your brain imagine chicken parm, I would definitely eat that. #00:43:53.2#
Do you think the genesis of goo is more of a consumer phenomenon where consumers wanted more convenient substances or a marketing triumph where the producers really just wanted to extrude a goo directly into packaging? #00:44:14.4#
I imagine that it's probably cheaper to squeeze goo into a packet from the manufacturer's point of view than it is to bake a layer of bar. I think that genuinely it probably came out of research related to runners and stuff, sports drinks, how do we keep athletes achieving an insanely high performance, how can we give you so much calories and sugar in one blast, and also you digest it quickly because it's in this state. Because it's solid you can pack more calories in it. So there was a mix of the two. But I'm sure that someone at Power Bar recognized how cheap this would be and realized you could save a lot of money. But probably the technology was striving to hydrate athletes, I imagine, was the first...somebody probably made homemade goo. #00:45:29.7#
Powerade has the three step program now, the last one is the goo ... or gatorade, rather .. do you think that advertisers or companies have had to fight against consumers' reaction to goo, squeamishness etc.? Movements to convince them that goo is okay? #00:46:22.9#
I like the way that they put out "Here's our line of goo. It's called Roctane. It's high performance-goo, you don't want that regular fucking goo, you want that Rock goo." #00:46:55.2#
Bennett, do you have a comment on combos snack products? Where they've engineered the goo to taste like all of the elements of these foods that we enjoy? #00:47:17.2#
Pizza combos right, broad claim. #00:47:29.3#
Pizza flavored things, that's from the 90's right? #00:47:32.4#
I think that you have to remember Banana flavor doesn't taste like banana, or like blu razz, there's no such thing as a blue raspberry, but everyone knows that it's a blue raspberry. Maybe there's this weird acculturation thing, it'd be amazing if goo would take on some sort of hormone aspect, really make your body react in a scary way, get into the other experiential parts of eating, before you would feel that they were replicating the experience of eating. Because I think artificial flavors our brains are much more apt to say "oh yeah that's pizza flavor". #00:48:34.0#
I know there's a lot of research with obesity into satiation, how can we stimulate or cut off satiation, how do we make you feel like you're full before you're full, or after you're full. #00:48:53.7#
Thanks guys. #00:49:00.9#
I'm going to talk very briefly about chip dust. It's a way to talk about other things. So chip dust is a folk phenomenon, that people know about, but no one has ever made into a thing. But feel safe that the chip industry is aware that this is happening. In 1994 when Dorito's had this massive rebrand, which was the biggest snack rebrand that had ever happened, one of the choices was to have rounded corners on their chips. Which were apparently so sharp before that, that there was a lawsuit which was settled, where a man claimed that the chips were so sharp that he suffered lacerations in his throat. So that was all factoring into this moment where they rounded their chips, and I'm choosing Dorito's as a way to talk about chips generally. But anyways, Jerry Vogel, who is some sort of Dorito's spokesman, talks about rounded corners saying that "And a lot of the scrap that was in the bottom of the bag was from the corners breaking off, it was just a waste." So clearly chip companies are well aware that at the bottom of chip bags they have a lot of particulate matter be it small pieces or even dust, which might be the form of seasoning or something like that. So I think that's interesting that the entropy that's going on in chips is something that Dorito's is familiar with.
This is an aside, but in this article in the NY Times about the Dorito's redesign which you guys should look up, one Roger J. Berdusco was quoted talking about what the consumers want, similar to a character some of you might know, James Brdeco. Another good name, Brock Leech, was quoted as saying "We aren't trying to correct a problem, but to accelerate the growth of our biggest brand." So they were occasionally admitting that they were wrong and trying to progress towards a more whole chip strategy. SO this is the industry reaction. #00:51:47.6#
One thing I want to talk about too is that different people have different definitions of how small is too small with regards to what's the smallest size when you're eating chips beyond which you're like "fuck it".
Here's something showing again that the industry is very well aware of this problem, an ad from Australia I think. (video of chip dust sharing). So where do we move on from admitting that chips are something that breaks apart? There's an anecdote, not at all mine, and I know that it's one of your guys', relating to God Bless deli. Apparently at one point in time, who was this that had this happen to them? #00:54:38.5#
That was the darkest experience for sure. It was literally on the shelf. I have two chip related stories. The first, I grabbed what was a new Dorito's flavor at the time, I grabbed what I thought was one bag, but another bag came with it, and I realized that the two bags were fused two bags together, and you could pass the contents of both the chips between the two bags together like a rainstick. And I said I wanna buy this, and the guy's mind was blown, he charged me for one chip bag. But what's even darker is that they were selling an open chip bag that they saranwrapped closed on the shelf, amongst the other chips, they thought they could actually play that off, I was really impressed by that. A note that the double chip bag was used in a Double happiness show and I still have it at my house. #00:55:36.8#
I have a theory that it's impossible to store chips beyond a certain period of time. Like chips are something you buy and must eat before a certain period of time. So secondary markets, relating to that anecdote specifically, you know maybe there is some way of reselling unused chips be it small or large? and that's an example of that happening, but a lot of people for whatever reason are uncomfortable with that. It's not a problem but a problematic, I think. #00:56:15.5#
Another thing, some of you guys might have seen this, about two years ago there's this guy whose wife had found this nugget of pure doritos flavoring and was trying to sell it on ebay. This was a quote I grabbed from some forum, "At first I thought it was a chicken nugget coated in the dorito cheese", but no in fact it was pure dorito seasoning, just a powder that had sort of emulsified. So there's an interest here in the leftover elements in chip bags. I don't remember what it ended up selling for, but more than the bag of chips. So in that sense it was a successful thing. #00:57:21.2#
The last bit before I go on to the resolution here is that I'm interested in general, in terms of darkness, in products that people try and emulate, things that people really love. Because they love it, they try to make it, using commercial products. This was something I found yesterday, I was going to bring it but I didn't have enough time, this was on the Grasscity.com forums which is about weed, but this was in the Chemical category, and what it says is "One of the best parts of going to Taco Bell is to get Baja Blast, but I have now figured out the secret to Baja Blast." So before I get into what the secret is, this is another anecdote, and I forget who told me this. But at one point in time, some special flavor soda you could get at Taco Bell, the way that it would be delivered, you'd order the soda at the corner, you'd pay they'd give you the change. And then they'd give you a cup filled maybe two milliliters full with syrup and say "OK, now go fill this up with Sierra Mist." That was interesting to me, and that relates to this, which is sort of a fan tribute to the original, which they determined to be Powerade and Mello Yello. And that that was Mountain Dew Baja Blast, which was a Taco Bell only flavor (the reason why people were trying to emulate it.)
Anyways all these elements combine in my world of chip dust. One last related thing, before I was on the internet, in the age of email forwarding, there was a Nieman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe that would always spread around consistently, whose legend was that someone stole it, or had a bad interaction, and was having retribution by spreading it as far as possible. So again, another kind of fan tribute. #00:59:54.2#
In summation, Chip Dust is all these things, a small dark phenomenon that people are familiar with, but what do we do with it? What's the end result? This is by way of proposing a solution that doesn't exist yet, but has some potential, called RE-CHIPS. The idea is that you, end-users, would pour chip dust into a Netflix-style envelope and send that into the RE-CHIPS business. We would then grind that up into a fine particulate matter, flour-like, and recook it into either one big or normal sized bag of chips. I don't know how the economics would work out specifically, whether you'd get the chips back, or accumulate chips points sort of like ePloids (that Pepsi product points system). There'd be some sort of thing whereby you send chips in and get chips back. I think it's cool because it's definitely dark but also the degree to which dark things can also tap into the Green/Organic phenomenon. I'm very interested in dark things that are branded as green or branded organic. Because that's in a way, deeper or darker, because it's masquerading as something else, unaware of itself. So that's it.
I've discovered that the enterprise White Castle now seems to be using what may be a cool ranch chip dust to flavor their ranch flavored chicken rings, because its not sauce its not a different batter, its merely a dust type substance thats clumped. #01:02:23.2#
Well its like when Rick and I were working on this project to revive Hydrox cookies, the genesis of that was realizing that the place where Hydrox cookies lasted the longest past its commercial viability was as a topping at Dairy Queens. Hydrox fans were able to tell that crumbled Hydrox were being used as the substitute Oreo flavor at Dairy Queen, and thru Dairy Queen which was thru Warrant buffet was the way that we could continue that brand. #01:03:30.5#
I think I'm dealing with a very important topic here, this feels close to me, I'm dealing with Meat-as-Bread, or breadlessness. A futuristic term, you can invest in it, take it, revolt against it, but its definitely gonna happen, I'm not creating it or standing in its way. #01:10:37.8#
This is the genesis of where I got the idea, it came and it came again. The KFC Double Down, you all know what it is. I was really blown away by this. I felt like, my brother called me to tell me he had one, he got the grilled one. THis is obviously where the bread should be, and they just put two pieces of chicken. And i guess its okay because they're KFC and thats their racket. But once you takeaway the KFC logo you really open up a dark road that can be gone down, so briefly I want to talk about that with you guys and what that meant to me. #01:11:32.2#
There's kind of a battle against carbs that's going on. I don't know when carbs turned the time. But this is an example of the caveman diet. This goes anywhere from eating raw food to imitating the actions of a caveman before you eat and then eating raw foods and meats, and there's no bread because you couldn't make bread in the caveman era. How do they know that? They're extracting what they think cavemen did, but I think it's really a fight against carbs and their general hatred of bread. So I'm not saying that these people invented the doubledown, just people who are against bread cross-section. #01:12:38.4#
This is an image of Ziz, a general strong guy, when he was a kid. Ziz on Facebook, you can like him, he's super buff. This is a non sequitur from working out. So the Atkins diet, which I felt was so dumb I knew it was going to go away right away, it got much more popular, they had Atkins brand stuff. #01:13:05.4#
THere are some people who are working for bread though. A screenshot of Jeff's movie the Breadtape Vol. 1. So let's do a brief history of bread. Bread as it first was, a loaf, the elements: flour, water, yeast. Whereas meat is only one. This is sliced bread, and then this (KFC). Why is this so important? Well here's a fact: adult restaurant goers who are randomly given olive oil with their bread use 26 percent more oil on each piece of bread compared to those who are given block butter, but they ended up eating 23 percent less bread in total. This finding illustrates one way in which fat intake can interact with consumption of companion foods.
Another concept: to meatify a thing. This blood is courtesy of hemospat.com. A look into the softer side of meat-as-bread, everyone knows meatloaf, and more examples of meatloaf. So this is where meat-as-bread is a great idea, grilled cheese, meatify it and it would taste great. Peanut butter and jelly, thats foul and awful, and possible. I didn't get into the thought of where you could go, there's different types of bread, there's tortillas, and how do you make goes into meat, and you have to find the perfect meat substance, totally open to discussion later. I'm more trying to tell you how this idea came to me.
Religious implications, "give us our daily meat", loaf? that doesn't sound right, you'd have to change various prayer books. The symbology of bread, and all you have to do in the end is take the symbol of bread, and denote that this is bread or meat or "breat"? Getting rid of the bread element, now I'm realizing it's all about bread for me. #01:16:32.5#
Steve Jobs has "one more thing", but my slogan is "what's next". FISH. Moving on from bread (breat) I think that somethings gonna happen, 2012, end of the world, freesh. It's fish and cheese. SO you are going to have sandwiches with no bread, just sandwiches with meat and fish. #01:17:14.8#
In your research, have you seen people making sandwiches with meat loaf slices as the outer part? I've had a meatloaf sandwich with a meatloaf in the middle of bread, but I had never thought that that's like a lot of slices of loaf. #01:17:37.5#
I wanted to figure out if you had a turkey at thanksgiving, a loaf style meat? I feel like you could do a lot of stacking things. You really could get where you're going backwards, the meat goes so far, where you forget what bread is, you have "back to bread". Caveman people will get rid of bread all together? #01:18:30.8#
Maybe now is a good time to interject with the concept of middle bread. Because when you first brought up meat-as-bread, the first thing that came to mind was bread innovation, that people are changing the concept of bread. Inserting bread in between a sandwich is paving a way for the meat to become the outer bread, its like a cellular mitosis, push the degenerated cell off and then the meat will become the bread. Maybe we'll see that eventually. That general idea. #01:19:10.0#
You speak of a conservation of bread? #01:19:15.5#
Yeah because its like half, its the inverse. #01:19:14.2#
I don't think bread has that much sandwich, its just the most convenient thing, it's just dry enough, the technology is definitely there to make something. #01:19:35.5#
That's sounds kind of tricky though, the idea of sandwich, the invention of a sandwich was with bread. It wasn't really about the filling or the meat really. You're flipping the entire concept of what a sandwich is. #01:19:57.5#
My understanding of the origins of the sandwich and correct me if I'm wrong because I swear I learned this on reading rainbow or something because there were animated parts to what I'm thinking of, was that the Earl of Sandwich liked to gamble and he liked to eat but he couldn't hold his cards and eat a meal with chicken and a salad and all that, so he literally started stacking stuff together for convenience ... I think it's apocryphal but I'm sure whoever came up with sandwiches came up with it for that reason ... I mean there are several foods that came up out of convenience. I'm told that Pie was invented because coal miners could hold the outer crust and eat it and throw the crust away if their hands were dirty ... it's not pie, it's those pockets, those meat pockets. #01:20:58.4#
I wanted to talk about piles, and in honor of piles, I got something from God Bless Deli, and it's a big chicken thing ... [WHAT] ... it's too much. But they were really honored to make it, and I took a picture with them. I told them I wanted a chicken plate but bigger, because I was going to a party. The invitation to this event had a photo of a famous pile. Sebastian Podesta was a roommate of ours some time ago, he was kind of an oafish fun-loving guy. He created this dish one night where he came home with a pound of ground beef and a can of green beans. And he cooked the ground beef in a pan, I watched him do the whole thing, I was a little baffled, and then he put it onto a plate and topped it with green beans. I was like "did you really make that?" and he was like "yeah, it's good, I got my meat and my vegetables in one" so I took a picture of it. I can't remember, I think he was placing it down, I think he was putting it down on the chair so he could sit on another chair.
Chair as plate is pretty dark or chair as table? ... chair as plate is really dark! #01:23:24.1#
Later the concept of the dark arts we developed and I submitted that photo for Sebastian to consider him as a potential member of the consul. I don't know what he's up to, perhaps he denied. I think tonight we've spoken a lot about processed food, food advertisement, but I think some of the darkest food is food made in the home, and it tends to be food made with whats at hand, and this often comes in the form of piles. #01:24:19.8#
Halal is sort of a classic pile in that, how many people have actually tried to concoct a chicken plate a home, it's not something you do it's something you get. That's sort of where it's a different kind of pile...to get back to what Dan was talking about, like what we talked about the other day, the Fridge sandwich, the sandwich that's made from what's left in the fridge. #01:24:54.3#
But there's also the fridge stir fry, or the fridge boil. Maybe Ricky you could discuss the Andrew Piccone specialty. #01:25:10.6#
Actually I brought those canned sliced beets in his honor tonight. He kind of extended the tuna melt in a very different way. Inside the fridge there was a half used can of sliced beets, a tupperware of cooked pasta, aside from that there was a can of tuna and condiments. What happened was the pasta was stir fried with the can of tuna and sliced beets, over which slices of kraft singles were melted, on top of that ketchup mustard mayo and a lot of sriracha ... do you guys ever have shameful where you cook something at home and you're really ashamed that you made it? #01:26:17.9#
Yes, it's happened to me, I described this to Jeff, where every element was burnt, some very dark bread to start because it was some cheese jalapeno corn bread I made and toasted too much and it was burnt, and then I burn the eggs and put on top and covered with hot sauce. But that leads me to another thought, which is that the ultimate dark foods are not intentional. They're not meant to be discussed or honored. The product that lead to the term was a spicy pickled sausage called the Tijuana Mama. And I think the true dark artist would get that on its own and eat it and not tell anyone. And not think that it was an abnormal thing to do. The same of Pico's recipe at home. #01:27:39.8#
It's what you're doing, not what you're trying to do. #01:27:36.0#
Yeah exactly. These kind of unintentional and unabashed disrespect to food in a way. #01:27:51.7#