Not Poodle

My eyes passed over an ad that said “This isn’t just coffee. This is Starbucks.” This isn’t just a headache. It’s a tumor. This isn’t just one garden gnome. It’s angry garden gnome mob. And they’re coming after you, Starbucks.

The death of the independent coffee shop gives me a feeling in my gut that, up until now, was reserved for the intestine-purging, extreme fiber power of Kashi Go Lean. They’ve managed to turn a Starbucks barista into an oxymoron. They’re not baristas. They don’t make your coffee. They’re slaves to the Terminator-esque machines in the back that make it for you. The first “self-aware” machines will be the ones that know you like a double half-caff, low-fat, no whip mocha, with a twist of lemon. And then they will taunt you, giving you ¾-caff, just to piss you off.

We’re losing the ability to think with our stomachs. It’s coming to be that we’ve got artificial stomachs thinking for us. And that’s liable to hit us where it hurts.

And then we’ve got this, something that perhaps only artificial stomachs can, uh, stomach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2nqEfSx3Q

We’ll ignore the “sausage with a pen” bit; it’s too easy a target.

For those of you who don’t know, a doner kebab is essentially a hot dog in concept, but styled a bit more coherently, and with less mystery. Strips of meat (typically lamb), are molded together in a cylinder-like fashion, then skewered and roasted slowly. A good kebab comes with a garlicky yogurt sauce, some sliced raw onion, lettuce, and sometimes tomato, in a pita. Often they get cut using a slicer that is somewhat akin to a Flobie with a bucket-end. It shaves the twirling, skewered meat better than an adult film stylist, and for a few more pounds, the kebab guy will outfit your poodle with some racing stripes.

Let me be clear, though….pot noodle is not poodle. Ha. Pot noodle only succeeds in giving you more sodium, faster. I can only shake my head in sadness for Tony, at the undermining of his apparently delicious, if fictional, kebab. But I would assume that everything is delicious at 3am, when you’re back from the club, and you’ve sweated through your chiffon/polyester blend leisure suit. The fictional aspect of this product comes when you try to decipher what you’re supposed to taste. Now this is the first time I saw an ad, and as a direct result bought the product. I even followed the directions on how to make it. But that was about where the reality of the food ended; with the water. I appreciate water, I understand it, I know what exists within it, and what it does. I can’t say any of these things about this pot noodle, though. I just know that it contained some meat-like bits of flak (or flak-like bits of meat….scary how interchangeable they are), and some collection of noodle-like objects that came across more as the internal organs of a flour-based life form. All gussied up with a touch of curry powder, and it’s supposed to be doner kebab? That’s your in? Curry powder? You think a touch of spice is going to completely awesome-ize your food? (I’m looking at you, caraway. Carrot soup was doing fine before you came along; it even had ginger to fool around with, if it felt saucy. But you ruined it, and for what?)

Here’s what you do. Do a blind taste test of all the different flavored anything (potato chips, instant noodle, even sodas), and try to figure out what flavor you think they are, versus what they’re supposed to be. Do we really need chips that taste like Peking pork ribs? Or roast chicken and thyme even? When you’re eating instant noodles, why are dreaming of a doner kebab? That’s very naughty of you, mentally cheating on your food like that. If you want the doner kebab, tell the noodles it’s over, and go get your kebab. As long as you’re honest with you food, it’ll understand. But don’t come crying to me when your tofu dog tastes like tofu instead of dog. When you cheat your food, you cheat yourself. (Insert “The more you know” rainbow here.)

The problem is that we’re too quick to develop false food friends. The crinkle of packaged food should, but rarely does, give a sense of dread in people who trust the personified, smiling Chips Ahoy cookie (Chips Ahoy? Is he a pirate cookie?), or the script writing that makes you think that the very, very, very old Mr. Kellogg is still signing his boxes, fighting through some crazy bouts of carpal tunnel syndrome with regular amounts of heroin and hookers. Come on, you know he did it. There’s only so much you can do in Battle Creek Michigan. And what do I have to keep my interest piqued after liquid kebab? A second tub of pot noodle, this one telling me that I’m a Bombay bad boy. Or maybe that it’s a Bombay bad boy, which gives me only a tinge of concern about homosexual tendencies in my personal food world when I dive into it. The taste profile of that was so unremarkable, I won't even go into it here. In any case, it’s not nearly tasty enough to make me switch full-time, to boys or noodles. What it did tell me, though, is this: I’ve got a moustache-turn-kebab trimmer. If Andrew wants a kebab at 3 am, then that’s what Andrew will get. No more noodle nonsense.