El Milagro may make some of the best corn chips on the planet, but the packaging reveals a few dirty secrets. Forget the fact that the brown paper bag is prone to rips, tears and splices that make the chips go stale in nanoseconds (I often resort to transferring the chips into a few, one-gallon Ziploc bags)–but if you go that route, please, take a moment to read the back of the bag. Have you been enlightened? It’s quite possibly some of the worst POP copywriting I’ve ever seen. How do they get away with this shite? And the fact that there are copywriters out there employed to write this bullcrap really grinds my gears. Are they serious? Is this for real?
The cabbage soup diet is billed as a diet ready-made to shed pounds quickly, efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately for people like my mother, it is not a seven-day stint of slurping a bland mixture of stock and veggies but rather a way of life–as if she may be preparing for nuclear war. I found the official Cabbage Soup Diet site on the Internet and was taken aback by the list of pros and cons. Case in point:
* You’ll lose weight fast
* The diet should not be adhered to for more than seven days
* The soup is bland
* People have reported feeling light headed, weak and have suffered from decreased concentration
*It provides a kick start to a moderate diet
Which is all precisely why my mother brews the soup on a bi-weekly basis and stock piles it in plastic tubs in the freezer. The eating is ritualistic. Soup has been a staple of her kitchen well before I came back to Chicago via Milwaukee. My girlfriend Tracy, before she moved to New York, used to amuse my mother by coming over and eating the cabbage soup, which I at first thought was equally amusing, but later found out that she actually liked the soup, with all of its nonexistent flavors and textures. Imagine.
More freezer burn.
The other day I found six tubs of it stacked amid an array of cleaning products including Pledge, Windex, some orange colored spray with Mr. Clean on the front, and a bottle of Simple Green. The juxtaposition struck me as both odd and obsessive. I immediately wondered if the two notions of “antiseptic” had aligned themselves in a blast of cosmic perfection. Did my mother spray the living room coffee table with waxy wood shine while juggling a bowl of soup in one hand and a rag in the other? My mother’s penchant for cleansing the system with cabbage can work congruently with such notions of cleaning the cabinets with Lysol. Then I began to wondering, “She has been doing this for so many years, hasn’t her life become as flat as the soup itself?”
Need salt?
I’ve tried the soup. It’s not bad after you shake about 30 hits of salt into it, some hot sauce and fresh ground pepper. Fresh slices of zucchini, carrots, onions and, ehem, cabbage all float their way around a flavorless broth. And while its freshness certainly stands on its own, I question the routine that she grinds herself in — cabbage and cleaning products alike. Is this a two or three-dimensional life? Sometimes I wonder. But then I think there has to be more to her private life than the demands of rigorous routines. After examining the soup, I went into the living room and started examining her self-styled DVD collection (which she is slowly upgrading to Blu-Ray). What I found was a laundry list of movies with dark undercurrents entrenched in sex, drugs, murder–hardly two-dimensional and bland at all. Among the head turners: Bright Lights, Big City (“There’s something I just connected with when I watched that movie,” she told me once while babysitting The Guys in Oak Park). Sure. Piles of coke, Keifer Sutherland, vodka martinis on lunch, 6 a.m. nightclub stints–very cabbage-centric, I see. Jagged Edge, The Door in the Floor, Against all Odds, Fatal Attraction–all of these titles are far exploratory cries away from the blandness of frozen soup or sponges.
So, what’s really going on underneath? Perhaps they are reminders of places I’ll never really see. Perhaps they are preludes to places she really wanted to go. But under the constraints of cabbage and cleaning and ticking time, I doubt either of us will ever see any of it fully realized. My mom’s been collecting cabbage soup for seven years–not seven days–too long to change now. Were there places she really wanted to go, ideas she wanted to explore? I only hope to never live with those same regrets. I’m working on it.
Why does this place exist? I am, of course, talking about the fast food chain, Pockets, with its clever marketing tagline, “Fresh Food Fast.” I’m overwhelmed by the creativity. I understand that in addition to drive-thrus (you can thank Wendy’s for that invention), Darwinism essentially spawned the notion of “pocket food” to support our on-the-go lifestyles. But at least in the ’80s and ’90s they were doing it with some finesse. Case in point: Hot Pockets, the original pocket food. Remember this clip from a time way too long ago? Maybe you even lived it out as part of your after school fantasy. I know I sure did.
I’m offended that in the naming process of the different Hot Pocket species, the talent glaringly left off BBQ Beef–the original, indigenous Hot Pocket, whose shelf life was masterful. Of course, it was frozen. But I never witnessed a case of freezer burn on it once, no matter how long it lurked in the freezer (which, if I knew about it, probably wasn’t for very long). In fact, the other day I bought a box of them and hoarded them in my freezer until I finally got the gutso to heat one up in its little crisper sleeve and sample it, bite by bite, hoping to relive my childhood in slow-mo. The sad part was, it tasted pretty frickin’ good–so good, in fact, that I found myself trying to practice some degree of restraint with the Hot Pocket, taking small bites at a time and then sealing it up in a Ziploc bag to save for later. That little pocket lasted me a good four days, because who wants to get overwhelmed by their childhood memories all in one rush (or develop disgusting Hot Pocket Thighs in the process)? Not me.
Splat.
Pockets as a restaurant concept is far fouler and less endearing. While I tend bar at a spot kitty corner from the joint, I have purposely never ventured inside. Today, I did on a whim because I was tired of everybody spinning tales of the grossness. The calzones, they say, are abominable– cheezy, gooey masses that shock the system like caloric bombs. I decide to start with the basics and order up the Original Pocket–awesome shredded iceberg lettuce, green peppers, shredded carrots, mushrooms and mozzarella. The entire thing is tossed into a brown, prison-esque lunch box and piled between two pieces of dry, wheat bread that still manage to defy science. One bite, and the texture is bouncing around your mouth like rubber. The lettuce is slightly browning, the carrots more muted than bright, and the sad packet of fat-free Italian dressing they give me looks as if it comes straight from the failed salad campaign launched by Burger King in the ’80s.
Dressing, circa 1986.
I can only imagine what the more complicated Pockets taste like. Some of the names can be easily converted into “Pocket Porn,” so to speak–The Asian Pocket, Bam Bam’s Pocket, The Greek Pocket (gold medallion chain sold separately) and of course the awesomely appetizing Tuna Pocket. The restaurant’s few saving graces include some canvas oil paintings of Pocket meals–a pretty ballsy move, if you ask me, for such stale, sickly food. To elevate wilted vegetables into a quasi art project is commendable. So props.
Straight from the Louvre
Additionally, I notice several bottles of Cholula strategically (thankfully) placed near some of the garbage bins, which work wonders in masking the taste. Good thing I spent a lot of time going there during my brief stay. A couple of bites and the garbage had my Pocket’s name on it.
A brilliant disguise.
Integrity at its finest.
So much for the Pockets Pledge, I guess. If the world must revolve around where-we-need-to-be-next and food is the ultimate adaptation, I’ll take a frozen Hot Pocket any day of the week. Bring on the beef (one small bite at a time, of course).
