Food

It’s official, I love food. I thought I just liked it a lot, but after really talking with people, I think I love it. I love going to grocery stores, I love cooking food, smelling food and finally eating food. My meals are one of the highlights of my day. Food is one of those special ways we interface with the world and with nature. If you think about it, most everything we eat was at one point alive, therefore eating is an especially rewarding communion with nature. As we nestle away in our buildings and sit in front of our computers for the better part of our lives, it’s nice to think about one of our last remaining portals to the natural world.
So naturally I’ve been cooking more lately and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. It’s funny… when I cook, everything kind of melts aware. Work worries evaporate away in sautés. The smell of onions and sizzling steak put to shame the recycled air of the office. The sound of sizzling is more stimulating than that of telecons.
I’m amazed to hear that people don’t like the cuisines of entire countries. Indian? Chinese? Mediterranean and Thai? I remember the exact restaurants I first had most of these, most were in Boston. The experience was as thrilling to me as walking out into that country personally. It was seared into my brain. Ok enough with the bad puns.
So yeah, I love food. What do I hate? I hate rushing through meals, overcooked food, ground beef and potato salad. I consider potato salad a form of prison food. It is bland, mostly condiment and often served cold. It is the most disgusting food I have ever eaten and I’ve had boiled chicken feet, cow tongue and eel liver soup. As for ground beef, beef is too perfect a meat to be treated in such a horribly demeaning way. Ground beef in the grocery store is a horrible cocktail of animal fat and a few dozen cow scraps. If I need ground beef for some unforeseen reason, I’m going to ask butcher to grind a roast.
My favorite foods? That’s REALLY hard to say. For some reason eggplant parmesan is amazing to me, it is my comfort food. I used to eat eggplant parm subs all the time in college. I love Jamaican jerk chicken, conch fritters from Belize as well as their coconut ice cream. The food in Belize by the way blew me away. Indian food is amazing as well as Mediterranean. Japanese food is great too but after going to Japan I’ve had both the best food I’ve had in my entire life and the strangest. The single best bite of food I’ve had in my entire life is a piece of toro (fatty tuna) in Kyoto. Sarah videotaped me eating it. It was food nirvana, my entire head was a taste bud.

Books

I just finished a book called “Rocket Men” and it was pretty good. I would describe it as a wonderful jumble of anecdotes.. and I do mean jumble. I like it, I really do, but it is completely schizophrenic. The author jumps wildly as he describes various parts of the program, the astronauts and the hardware of Apollo. Seriously, I think the author fell into a synclastic infundibulum in the 60s and just started writing. (Any Vonnegut fans out there?) Anyway, it was still good and I finished it because I’m determined to start finishing books. My former self may not have. He did do a good job of finding quotes from Neil and Buzz. It was amazing to read how they described the lunar dust as smelling like ashes from a freshly put out fire and how the lunar module jolted and bucked while it guided itself to lunar orbit. There are many more anecdotes like that that made it worth it. Overall the book helps to answer that question that we all ask but NEVER get a good answer from astronauts… what did it feel like to go up into space?
It was good to read a book glorifying space travel for a change. The press seems to be so negative about it lately, or I might just be sensitive about it. The thing about space travel is that it forces us to build basically perfect machines. Nothing else does this. Our cars are very reliable but if they break it is no big deal, we pull over and call a tow. Planes however are manufactured to a much higher tolerance and have much more redundancy. They simply have to be made better. The parts are looked at through x ray machines and tolerances are phenomenal. This is because if a plane breaks you are in trouble, you’ll have to land or you might die. Now spaceships are yet a whole other level. They are incredibly expensive because they are much more complex AND they have to be for all definitions perfect. If it breaks, then you almost certainly die. The outcome is hardware that is only beat in perfection by nature herself. Like some unnamed government official said during the launch of Apollo 11, if just a sliver of this engineering perfection makes its way into the industrial sector, it will have paid for itself. If that is not a practical reason for a spaceflight program, an R&D program that produces historic achievements, I don’t know what is.
All that being said I’m not in it for the practical reasons.

I've started a few more books including a cooking book by Alton Brown. It's awesome. He describes EVERYTHING about cooking. How does frying "work" on the food? What really happens when you cook meat? And how can you use all of this knowledge to become a master chef. It's the difference between just doing a recipe and understanding how that recipe came to be. It is for the curious.