Foods for thought

by RAF KATIGBAK

I have a friend with slight OCD and major toxicophobia, which, if you didn’t know, is the fear of being poisoned. This combination means that, while being one of the most interesting people I know, she is also the most difficult person in the universe to go out on the town with. At a bar, she’ll only drink things in a bottle, which she will guard ferociously all night. In fact, she’s wasted so much money on dumping almost full bottles of beer because someone moved it that she’s resorted to carrying her drink with her at all times, much to the chagrin of the people she keeps dousing with beer on the dancefloor.

Being extremely suspect of foods not prepared by her own hands turns eating out into an ordeal filled with nervous bites and short spurts of mild panic, immediately followed by hyperventilation and bug-eyed gasps of “I think I’ve been drugged.” These are then followed by my attempts to reason with her that it is highly unlikely that anyone would roofie her Dagwoods Gino sandwich. On more than one occasion, she’s called me in a panic because she thinks she’s poisoned herself because she bit her nails and maybe swallowed a bit of nail polish.

Suffice it to say, to make life simpler, she leads a rather restricted life, at least culinarily. She eats almost the same thing, prepared the same way, every day. This puts a strain on our friendship because I’m the exact opposite. Not in the sense I eat new foods because I want to get poisoned or roofied (although I am a bit curious about the latter), but rather I find trying something unfamiliar, like intestines and eyeballs, kind of exciting.

Perhaps it was growing up in a Filipino family where tongue, blood stew and partially formed duck foetuses was part of the culinary landscape, but point me to a strange snack and I’ll be all over it like a fat kid on Smarties. Gnarly chicken feet from China? Sign me up. Fried bugs from Thailand, or any kind of seemingly inedible animal or animal part? I’m up for it.

It reminds me of comedian Louis CK’s bit about seeing a barrel of duck vaginas in Chinatown where he’s scared to try them. Not because he doesn’t like the idea of eating a duck vagina, but because he’s scared to discover that he LOVES eating them. In my case, I’d be totally fine, perhaps even excited, about developing a full blown duck vagina addiction.

But while I’m mildly obsessed with exotic food from far off countries, I’m even more obsessed with weird local snack foods, specifically with what I consider the pinnacle of snack foods: chips. Have you seen the flavours available here? Poutine, bacon, all-dressed pizza, roasted chicken? It’s feels like that ’50s idea of the future, except instead of all food coming in pill form, every flavour for every meal will be delivered via a sliced, fried potato.

Don’t get me started on chip technology. First there was the “Extreme” chip movement, which basically tasted like doing vinegar and Tabasco shots. Then there was that whole “Collisions” thing, which tasted like they swept all the stray chips off the floor at the factory and put them into a bag. Then there’s Scream Cheese, which should be familiar to locals as being the chip named by the eight Montreal students who won the name-that-flavour contest last year. If you can forget that it tastes not even remotely like cream cheese and that the name more aptly describes a venereal disease, you’ll find that it’s actually not half bad. It’s a dizzying world of synthetic flavours, ridiculous packaging, silly marketing schemes and really, really bad puns. But for some reason, I’m obsessed. Maybe it’s an interesting barometer of where we’re at in our popular culture, or rather where males 18–26 are at. When jumping out of airplanes on snowboards was cool, chips became extreme. With the rise of sites like YouTube, so the chip market followed with a “make your own viral video commercial” campaign. Only question is, where’s the “taking huge bong hits and playing Xbox until your girlfriend dumps you” flavour?

And what about the rest of us? Surely there must be a chip that speaks to my older demographic? If chips flavours followed the trends of the world at large, maybe we could have something like Frito-Layoffs. The bag could read, “The stinging bite of rejection combined with the bitter taste of dreams unfulfilled,” or maybe we could have Volcanic Ash flavour: “It’s like a million tourists complaining in a Paris airport in my mouth!”

I’m sorry, maybe I lost the plot. I think it’s just the duck vaginas talking.