As if I didn't have enough unqualified and overappreciated nonsense to deal with.

 

I was recently reminded of one of the most infuriating and degrading experiences of my life. Beginning, of course, with someone asking for my help. What they wanted was for me to acclimatize a friend of theirs to what might be experienced as everyday food in Japan. Apparently the subject was considering a trip. 

Then I found out who it was.

I'd introduced this same person to a variety of new foods in the previous months when they would drop by to visit my current housemates and dinner happened to be near. I was never told about incoming guests, of course, but an extra plate is nothing- there are always leftovers when cooking for a full house.

Now, when I say 'new foods', I'm not talking nonwestern exotics like Jollof Rice or Lamb Vindaloo.

I'm not talking Euro classics like a simple risotto or a baked Brie en croute.

We're talking things like... Oven-baked fish, topped with parsley and breadcrumbs.

Broccoli, gently roasted, with a pat of butter.

Corn. 

Corn.

The difference between dino nuggets and karaage was apparently already too much.

I gave it due consideration, and then flat out refused.

You couldn't possibly pay me enough to make it easier to inflict such a culinarily-crippled menace on Japan. For starters, Japan is in general... less than kind to individualists. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered back down" was a common turn of phrase in my East Asian Studies undergrad classes.  There is nothing about this person that could possibly thrive there. Something personal- it's a place I've been trying to go for literal decades, and have had the opportunity ruined for me many times over. I will absolutely not help someone enjoy a luxury they're not even capable of qualifying for when someone like me keeps getting snubbed and sloughed off.

The hazardous someone in question is an adult. Somewhere in their mid to late twenties, and that grew up here in the US- in the midwest, no less. Though "grew up" is one hell of a reach in a case like this. 

The approach and experience is infantile, and the timing decades out of date. How does one near thirty without awareness and comfort of basic fundamentals of a western diet? Stuff you see in the canned goods aisle and the freezer case all year round? Or that you see in most TV dinners?

That, and more, was what comes to mind when I saw this.

A new cookbook: "COLOR TASTE TEXTURE: Recipes for Picky Eaters, Those with Food Aversion, and Anyone Who's Ever Cringed at Food".

In some ways, to some people, it might be seen as a step in the right direction. Not to me. 

You're not supposed to make things easier for difficult people. You're supposed to make better people.

New Disability, Same Indifference... New Way of Life?

 

    Covid sucks. It's shifted from pandemic to endemic because some people weren't cautious enough and a lot more people actively enabled the spread through willful ignorance. Thanks, assholes. Your attitudes have killed several million people- and counting.

    But this isn't about the virus's body count. Nor is it about the ego driven political tribalism that enabled its rise to endemic-dom, or it being the one massive piece of leverage the general public could potentially have used to ensure lasting positive social and cultural change.

    This is about what it's done to food industry professionals. A smaller-stakes issue in some ways, but no less a global problem.

    Remember how it started? People who caught Covid were frequently losing their sense of smell. The phenomenon became so noticeable that papers got written on what was sometimes called the Yankee Candle Review Index, wherein upswings in Covid infection rates were sufficiently correlated with negative reviews of scented candles and other similar products that the surges could be predicted to some degree.

    Industries like food and beverage are hard enough to begin with, on physical, mental, emotional, and financial levels. Professionals still continue to juggle plague-induced operational closings, safety of their staff, their own personal safety, and an endless pile of other problems just to survive. Not only is the pandemic killing more food workers than almost any other demographic, it's maimed a great many more. 

    The cooking school I was teaching in suspended operation in March of 2020, but I'm almost positive I picked up Covid right beforehand. The last event we did was for a passel of people fresh off that damn Disney Cruise. There was no reliable test yet (one of my housemates worked in biotech, and was part of a team developing one of them), and the lockdown was was about to begin. My senses of taste and smell have never failed me. (I do now have a never-ending cough a la General Grievous, but that's another problem.) As far as anosmia, I got lucky. But I know a good few people who didn't.

    Imagine going about your day as normal, and suddenly you're stricken blind. Everything that was familiar now feels as foreign as the moon. That's what it's like when someone whose livelihood is built around food loses their sense of taste or smell. So much of what they knew, expertise honed by constant practice over years, is not simply gone, but often worse- distorted. 

    The olfactory system's nerve pathways don't seem to recover from an attack like this at an even rate, and so all perceptions from it are rendered suspect as recovery slowly, unevenly, uncertainly tries to happen. To be unable to trust one's own senses when others are relying on them is a terrible state of being, and rapidly becoming regarded as another of what are often called "Invisible Disabilities". 

    You know how hard it is to get disability comp in America? Even when it's something physical and as obvious as can be, it's still a hardscrabble fight for every iota of aid and respite. Something like this, that's so much harder to quantify, that we can't even really treat yet? A seemingly futile struggle... and yet it's one that can't help but continue. Too many lives are at stake.

    There are plenty of people, mostly paycheck to paycheck, that are afflicted by the aftereffects of Covid-induced anosmia and parosmia. They're desperate for anything at all to keep them solvent. In lieu of proper disability provisioning or support, the crumbling F&B workforce is giving up their goals in-industry, and taking whatever it can wherever it can to survive. 

    To me, the future of food looks grim. It's always been a marginalized, derided industry, and now it's awash in a new danger full of unknowns. I know where it needs to go, and how to get it there... but I don't think it will get that chance.