I want to talk about a recent trend I have noticed. It seems that these days food cannot be itself but must be dressed up, even tarted up in an attempt to turn it into something it was never meant to be. What’s wrong with plain baked chicken with some lemon or rosemary and thyme? Why does the local deli where I sometimes shop for quick dinner s find it necessary to coat it with roasted red pepper mixed with goat cheese? Or you might see some perfectly innocent pieces of chicken lying there. You think: those will be nice for tonight with some salad and maybe left over green beans. But no, upon closer inspection, it seems the chicken has been baked with red pepper flakes, sesame oil, garlic, onions, turmeric (which they are especially fond of these days) vinegar, soy something or other and before long, it doesn’t sound even remotely like any baked chicken you ever ate.
The conversation I have with the trying-to-be-helpful deli clerk goes something like this:
Me(pointing to some innocent looking chicken pieces): Is the chicken hot?
He: You mean, temperature-wise?
Me: I assume as it is in the hot food case that the temperature is warm. No, I mean is it spicy?
He: There are some spices on it, yes.
Me: What kind of spices?
He: Uhhh. There’s some garlic salt, some sea salt, some turmeric, some uhhh other things.
Me: Like?
He (beginning to have the long suffering look of deli clerks everywhere): Uhhh some pepper and some turmeric. Did I already say that?
Me: Would you say it was spicy hot?
He: Not to me.
Me (Sigh) Look, I’m trying to find out if it will burn my tongue with the hotness of some kind of pepper that I can’t see and that will catch me unaware and burn all the way down into my digestive track and then burn for awhile down there causing embarrassing repercussions until I am thoroughly miserable, and I have to go to bed so that I can then toss and turn into the night.
He (with a look of incredulity): But it isn’t even really hot.
All I can do as I walk away is to think for the thousandth time that this is one of the many prices one pays for getting older or oldish as my granddaughter likes to say. And that someday when the clerk is well out of his twenties with some digestive disorder maybe caused by a lifetime of eating hot food, will he even remember these encounters with the grey haired people he must serve every day? Probably not.
