On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Gord Sellar wrote:
> Or, if you wished to speak about cars. Well, people already have a massive
> set of assumptions about what cars are and what they mean and so on. Before
> you can get even close to talking pragmatically about, say, the question of
> whether mass car ownership is a good idea, say discussing whether an idea
> say that might be wisely exported to the rest of the world, you need to
> clear away a lot of the fantasy of what cars are, mean, and do. And when
> you start in on that, you are bound to hit a wall of inertia,
and that's going to hurt like hell if you're going 100 kph, even if your
car *can* take out an SUV if you hit it just right at high speed.
> So you start by talking, maybe, about motor scooters and the way they
> were seen as sexy or manly or feminine and chaste, depending on the
> model of scooter, because that is slightly left-field, irrelevant, and
> *not* invested in by your audience. That's your in. Once you get them
> to admit that we do construct all kinds of weird meanings into foods,
> vehicles, clothing, sexuality, and the other quotidian stuff of life,
> then you can turn to what they *have* a lot invested in. For example,
> that the basis of any given meal is the meat component (in my family,
> even when I was vegetarian -- "Whats's for supper?" "Roast beef."
> "And?" -- this was the case for years and years, until my parents
> changed their diet when my dad was sick with lymphoma. Not a
> complaint, just a note about what's conceived to be the meal. I've
> seen it a lot in other houses, and the outlay of menus and main dishes
> in many restaurants seems to support it.).
Which tended to annoy me about restaurants at various times of my life.
The home-cooked meals I grew up eating often focused on a meat dish, but
when dinner is macaroni & cheese (from scratch, *really* good, and fairly
good for you, especially compared to the stuff out of a box) and broccoli,
there's no meat to focus on. And the big exception to listing the protein
component was "bread" -- homemade bread timed to come fresh out of the
oven minutes before we sat down to dinner; the protein component would be
scrambled eggs, and not lots of them, either. And some meat dishes just
had "assumed" sides -- if we were having Swiss steak with beer, there
would be the vegetables it had cooked with, and a great big bowl of egg
noodles, and we just knew that that was what would be included in the meal
if we asked "What's for dinner?" and the answer was "Swiss steak."
Anything done with chicken would be served with rice, so then the question
would just be the vegetable (and sometimes we would be asked our opinion
on that). But I guess the answer never started with the green stuff,
although at one time, that was the most important part of the answer to
me.
I have, at various times since moving to Texas, gone to Luby's regularly.
When I first started going there, the best meal bargain was the LuAnn
Platter. (If something from "King of the Hill" suddenly becomes funny,
congratulations.) You got a meat entree off a limited list, 2 vegetables
(and it always struck me as funny that mac & cheese counted as a
"vegetable") and 1 bread. I went to Luby's for the first time in quite
awhile back in February with my mom, and lo and behold, they'd added
another option to their menu -- you could now get 3 vegetables and 1
bread; I think it was a little cheaper than the LuAnn, and I remember
thinking, "It's about time they did that." I gratefully took advantage of
it, because I needed lunch but the thought of dismembered bird didn't do
anything for me at that point, while the thought of broccoli, potatoes,
and mac & cheese was just wonderful. (The thought of dead cow was even
more repugnant for some reason....)
> And "tasty", by the way, is a really interesting assertion in and of
> itself. It was a matter of economics and my ex-wife's digestive system
> that I had to switch back to being an omnivore, and that burgers and
> dogs were not all that "tasty" back then. I still can't eat hot dogs,
> actually, they taste nasty, though spicy sausages are sometimes okay.
> Another example, my French relatives here eat all kinds of stuff I
> can't eat, like this hyper-sweet maple-sugar-type tart . . . it's so
> sweet it makes my whole body cringe with just one bite.
"Tasty"? Yeah. Dead pig may be "tasty", but a couple of hours into my
digestive process, "tasty" doesn't mean squat when my intestines have no
idea how to deal with the stuff. I can't eat pork because I never really
*did* eat pork and my digestive system just can't handle it now. I don't
feel that I'm missing anything, and I'm content to live my life without
it.
As for the hyper-sweet maple thing, the other adult human member of the
household will sympathize with you on *that*. :)
Julia
obsessed with food today, since her body seems to be taking it a lot more
happily than it had been, lately, and she always likes to hear about cars
for a couple of minutes, at least
