Dinhternet

So I was read­ing ran­dom arti­cles on the inter­net today when I came across this post. Funny stuff, reminds me of the old “Look at these fuck­ing pep­pers!” pic­tures.

Then I noticed that one of the links is to a pic­ture of a savory Jell-O salad. That’s right. I can’t tell what exactly is in it, but looks like at least olives, cel­ery, and yel­low bell peppers/cheese slices. Eddie C thinks that the cel­ery is shrimp. This mon­stros­ity could likely be one or more of the lay­ers of the Eric­son Fam­ily salad. Who knows?

Any­way, appar­ently fine Amer­i­can cui­sine went through a phase where every­thing was jel­li­fied. Gelatin sal­ads and aspic meats. They used to have cel­ery, mixed veg­etable, tomato, and Ital­ian fla­vored Jell-O.

I was ini­tially put off, but I have to admit a cer­tain (mor­bid?) curios­ity about the whole idea. Eddie C says he’s down to try it. I guess I’m going to try to re-create this for his birth­day trip down in Pismo. (Fair warn­ing to every­one else going… you may want to make back-up din­ner plans.) I looked around a found a cou­ple of inter­est­ing recipes. Maybe I’ll try to pair with a good meat Jell-O recipe, too.

The last time I made any­thing Jello while on vaca­tion was TAK Retreat, when we tried to make Jello shots with Ever­clear and it wouldn’t set, so we a thin Jello cap over a Dixie cup full of rub­bing alco­hol. This has got to be bet­ter than that, right?

Oh, and accord­ing to this web­site, (not Wikipedia, though) Jell-O used to make an offi­cial whisky fla­vor! How did I miss out on the best era ever?!

Dong Ha thinks that our fam­ily is some­what food snobbish.

I don’t think that’s quite right… we were cer­tainly raised to appre­ci­ate food. In fact, my whole extended fam­ily is pretty food-centric. We appre­ci­ate good ingre­di­ents. We were taught to be culi­nar­ily adven­tur­ous. (We always go out to try new dishes and then try to fig­ure out how they were made in order to re-create them at home.)

That said, I don’t think we’re snobs. I enjoyed SPAM as much as the next per­son before I turned veg­e­tar­ian. But I mean, taste (as in pref­er­ence, not gus­ta­tion) isn’t a bad thing. And my par­tic­u­lar pref­er­ences can be pretty inex­plic­a­ble anyway.

For instance, take the following:

(from Can­d­wich and Gigizine [in Japanese].)

The are both instant foods of ques­tion­able ori­gin. What makes one seem so appeal­ing and the other so revolt­ing? The world may never know.

Choos­ing to be veg­e­tar­ian can be hard.

You’re often misunderstood -

(Peo­ple don’t real­ize that I don’t hate meat. I do still have crav­ings. I just com­mit to my choice.)

It puts a damper on your social life -

(I always feel bad when hosts have to make spe­cial pro­vi­sions for my choices.)

And there’s a lot of options out there in terms of what kind of veg­e­tar­ian or semi-vegetarian route you want to take.

I’d like to think I’ve done a pretty good job in the roughly two years since I made my choice. I’ve been mostly a lacto-ovo veg­e­tar­ian. Tried to go straight lacto veg­e­tar­ian, but it was too hard for me because eggs are in so many processed foods. Briefly con­sid­ered going full vegan, but that basi­cally elim­i­nates eat­ing any­thing but my own cook­ing, and I don’t have the resources to han­dle that right now. I have made a cou­ple of excep­tions at major hol­i­days with family.

Hon­estly, at this point, I’m just used to it. I don’t have to think about what I can eat, menus are just men­tally fil­tered. But lately, some arti­cles I’ve been read­ing have been chang­ing the way I’ve been think­ing about vegetarianism.

One talks about how oys­ters are “safe” to be eaten, even for veg­ans, because they (and other mol­lusks) can’t feel pain (at least, not as we know it) because they lack a cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem and farm­ing them has little-to-no neg­a­tive impact (or even a pos­i­tive impact, accord­ing to some) on the envi­ron­ment (unique to oysters).

The other arti­cle is one that I posted a while back on Face­book about how respon­sive plants are to attacks.

Sci­ence, why you gotta go chang­ing every­thing up on me? What an odd world it would be if I could eat oys­ters and not plants.

But I just have to look back to my orig­i­nal rea­sons for becom­ing veg­e­tar­ian and I know what I must do. Even if mol­lusks and plants don’t feel pain as we do, they obvi­ously feel some­thing, since they can react to attacks (and even counter-attack). Ide­ally, I want to become fruitar­ian like some Bud­dhist monks. But that’s prob­a­bly not going to happen.