By Nathan Omprasadham
Don't you hate when food blogs have a story before the recipe?
Ugh, don't you hate it when you're trying to find a recipe for chicken cacciatore and the blogger has like 5 pages of backstory about their grandfather before the actual recipe?
Isn't it so annoying that this person is giving me a recipe with personal significance to them at no cost to myself whatsoever, a
nd has the sheer audacity to try and tell me the story behind that significance?
Don't your fingers ache and cramp from that extra two scrolls it takes to fly past all of the compelling prose that makes this recipe more than just a collection of ingredients that speaks to the lived experiences of an actual human being who you might possibly connect to if you spared the 2 minutes it took to hear them out?
Gosh, doesn't the thought that someone took the time to start a cooking blog (despite the fact that it likely made them no money and they're doing this just for the love), and then decided to use that blog to speak to how food is irrevocably tied to the stories that make us who we are just piss you off?
Isn't it the greatest inconvenience of
your miserable and wretched life that you must suffer through the valences of text that serve as a reminder that food has always been and will always be about people, and people will never stop telling stories that accompany the food they make?
Aren't you at your wits end trying as hard as possible to divorce the humanity of those people from the resources they are able to provide you so you don't need to consider the many invisible hands that go into making every aspect of you comfortable and seamless life what it is, completely bereft of any recognition that
incredible amounts of labor go into making our world what it is, much of it underpaid and unrecognized?
Does it not wrack your pitiful soul with waves of abject terror to consider that maybe, just maybe, there's a button on the right side that says "skip to recipe" ?
Isn't it just ... the worst?
Comments