ice cream fork header
Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault
Allow us to set the scene:
12:30 am, at Chateau L’Fork; a long day capped off by a fleeting moment of complete joy upon remembering there’s cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream in the freezer, courtesy of L’Forkette. Having eaten some already earlier, our nighttime sweets itch remained unscratched. Tiptoeing into the kitchen, we silently pulled the scooper from the drawer and shoveled as much ice cream as would fit into a coffee mug (we like using a mug because we can hold the handle and not have chilly-hands—TM). A great plan at the time, a terrible plan upon waking.
Somehow we aged to a point in our lives wherein eating ice cream in the middle of the night or straight up DEMOLISHING an entire pizza on our own has become a bad thing. We can still drink coffee all day and night and not feel like complete shit—quite the opposite, actually—but when it comes to horking down something with lots of garlic or cramming more dairy into our gullets than would seem OK for even a younger person, our bodies are changing! There should be some 1950s health class video about this, but aimed at people who are...not old, really, but, like, not young.
We did some research.
This’ll sound really obvious, but your body changes over time. Duh, right? Of course it does. But while we obviously know this, it also bears repeating. When you’re young, OK, like, between the ages of birth and 10, you’re growing in just, like, the craziest ways. It’s seemingly endless. Teeth are literally flying out of your skull, your parents are begging you to not just eat chicken fingers shaped like dinosaurs and you’ve got a lot going on that requires a lot of food. Still, folks of a certain age surely recall their folks not letting them leave the table until they’d finished eating every damn thing on their plate, and it turns out this plays a role later in our lives when it comes to portion control. If we learn we’ll be smacked for not finishing that broccoli, not only will we tuck away cues to always eat everything, we’ll start to fear broccoli and avoid it later. This is a bad example for us, though, as broccoli rules. Put it on a pizza? You bet. Slap those bad boys into a steamer and go to town? Just try to effing stop us.
We’d point out here that media literacy becomes important for numerous reasons, not least of which the absolute barrage of junk food commercials that get blasted at children on TV and in print and on the radio and in skywriting and on buses and benches and walls and on and on. Big Sugar wants your kids hooked and you need to be aware. You probably are—but just teach your kids about media is all.
In the following 10 years—what we’ll call “The Bullshittery of Being a Teen”—people start to cement their eating habits. By the time we start heading into the world on our own, who’s to stop us from eating nothing but broccoli pizza? Or burgers. Or those huge Pixie Stix that are too freaking big? Nothing! We discovered young women are more likely to develop nutritional deficiencies because the world always does its worst to the ladies (we’re obviously exaggerating, don’t @us), and since teen people are growing even more than when they’re younger, they’re even hungrier. They eat more. The brain is set up to fire off rewarding chemicals when it gets things that are bad for us. What a bunch of bologna.
Looking to the following decade, the one that leads up to our 30s, things start getting even worse somehow. We’ve got the bad habits, we’ve avoided learning how to not get brainwashed by commercials; we’re getting more stressful jobs, buying houses, getting married, having kids of our own—it’s a real whirlwind. According to our research, we’re likely to gain weight that’ll stay forever at this point in our lives, but one way to combat such gains (and/or morningtime dairy-propelled sadsies) is to hone our sense of having eaten enough. Our grandma—the one who cooks like shit—is a psychotherapist, so we asked her if there was a psychological way to go about this.
“Well, you could always get hypnotized if you think it’s a real serious issue,” she told us, mainly because she’s always trying to hypnotize us because, we think, she wants us to admit to breaking that one vase when we were 5—WHICH WE DID NOT DO!
“The truth,” she continued, “is that while there may be things from your past that influence how you eat today, there’s no substitute for just doing the shitty work of listening to your body and not eating the things that make it feel bad. Easier said than done, and you can always talk to a therapist or counselor about making a plan.”
When we told her we went down this road because we ate a bunch of ice cream in the middle of the night, she had some more advice:
“Hey, stupid—don’t do that.”
Word.
Which brings us to the 40s, roughly, when, according to our mom, “everything starts getting really awful because you know you might look and feel like shit but you don’t care as much, and neither does anyone else, which kind of feels good but doesn’t help.” With another drastic body change in store for pretty much everybody, our research shows that folks tend to diverge here and either get it together food-wise (by which we mean eating better foods, eating less, etc.) or become midnight ice cream monsters. Presumably, folks around this age know what works and doesn’t in the food department—presumably by this point we’ll develop willpower.
Then we hit the 50s, 60s and beyond—points in the human timeline wherein all that awful food we didn’t stop eating starts really coming home to roost. Grandma says something about how her generation ate nothing but red meat while smoking cigarettes and frying potatoes. Mom says that it’s probably more about preservatives messing us up, and that people of grandma’s advanced age had jobs that involved more manual types of labor. We can see this. We always assumed Grandma started out as a little match girl then went immediately to work in the acid mines at around 10. Haha! Jokes!
Seriously, though, Grandma grew up working a farm, so she was pretty fit and didn’t have to deal with preservatives or the aforementioned cereal that has so much sugar it’s insane. Mom just eats healthy, which is smart—but she’s definitely onto something with the preservatives. Or, like, GMO. We’re not even out and out against it and, in fact, have seen some pretty compelling data. Still, the whole thing about “We don’t really know what affects GMOs might have yet” is a little scary. Corn syrup was supposed to be great, but it’s killing us.
At any rate, this is all to say we shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream, we’re paying for it today, and thank goodness for yogurt. And Mom. And Grandma. Still, we’re all about body positivity and don’t believe anyone’s goal should solely be about weight or weight loss or feeling badly about themselves. Eat and do whatever your want, friends, and don’t tell other people how to live.
We recently watched a VERY LONG video about the evolution of Sugar Bear, the mascot for Golden Crisp nee Sugar Crisp cereal. Ummm...setting aside his whole Bing Crosby thing (which we actually like), it’s pretty nutty to see how the cereal name itself and marketing were both like “SUGAR FOREVER, YOU IDIOT KIDS!!!” Anyway, here’s a bunch of commercials through the ages. They’re wild. We also promise if you go down this rabbit hole, there’s a lot to be weirded out by/enjoy. Shoutout to the Found Footage Festival’s VCR Party Live for sending us on our way with this.
Also
-Things are looking ever so slightly up for Santa Fe County residents and restaurants—we’ve hit the state’s criteria for yellow level operations. No, it’s not as good as green level, but it’s better than red level and, since we’re yellow and all, dining establishments can now up their numbers to 25% of their maximum capacity indoors and 75% outdoors. Places serving booze still need to close at 10 pm.-Albuquerque’s Fun Noodle Bar has come to Santa Fe, and its newest location over there on Cordova Road is now open as of this week. They’re all about handmade noodles over there at that dang Fun Noodle Bar, and it’s on our list BIG TIME.
-We’ve also got Quattro Mani Pasta on our list of places to eat. We want it. We need it. We will have it. These noodle-loving fools are also down with handmade and we’re down with that.
-Santa Fe’s own food-focused publication Local Flavor announced it is seeking a buyer after 25 years under the watchful eye of editor and publisher Patty Karlovitz. In a chat with The Santa Fe New Mexican, Karlovitz said that “in the past 25 years, so many amazing things have happened.” Sorry to see you go, Patty.
-Still, if you’re looking for food-based words, Fork Friend (TM) Natalie Bovis, aka The Liquid Muse, has kicked off a blog of her own dubbed Famished in the Fe. You’ll find it on her regular website, along with a piece about Santa Fe’s Robert McCormick, a local musician and flan fan who operated the sadly closed Cuba Fe a couple years back. Anyway, we’re hoping Bovis will still pop by with a drink idea for us, but more food words are never a bad thing either.
-If you’re looking for more Robert McCormick, think about joining his Santa Fe Foodies Facebook group. It’s public and sometimes there are bagel debates.
-While you’re on Facebook, check out Taz’s Finger Lickin’ Chicken, a DIY fried chicken biz from local artist/entrepreneur/human treasure Shontez Morris. We hear it sells out incredibly fast, but if you’ve been looking for some goooooooooooood fried chicken, this is the way to go.
-You learned about it in the print edition of SFR this week, but our editor just told us Blue Corn Brewery’s downtown location is no more. RIP. Still, if you grab an SFR, you’ll learn why that might just be a good thing.
More Tidbits
-Even though it’s been around since mammoths roamed the Earth, Coca-Cola announced it will introduce its first-ever 100% recycled plastic bottle in an effort to make you think things are getting fixed. They’re not, but this doesn’t actively harm anything as far as we know, so...a net gain?
-Local restaurant slayer DoorDash has acquired a company called Chowbotics, which makes robots which, in turn, make salads. DoorDash says this will somehow help restaurants, but we’re pretty sure they don’t care about that. Anyway, let’s hope the salad robots don’t become sentient and kill us all.
-Former First Lady Michelle Obama announced this week that she’ll launch Waffles+Mochi, a new kid’s cooking show on Netflix. Waffles and Mochi are puppets, so you KNOW we’re into it. Apparently celeb chefs will pop in, kids will learn how to cook well and adults who love weed will also probably watch.
-We’re actually thrilled by this crispy tofu recipe from Bon Appétit-dot-com, because we love crispy tofu and have never been able to make it at home because it’s hard! If it turns out we aren’t too lazy to get it together and try it out, we’ll let you know.
-PSA: Brown Cow yogurt is the best yogurt in the world. Case closed.
-Lastly in food news from around the not-just-here, HuffPost has an interesting Q&A with New York caterer Monique Dorsey, who wonders what it’s going to take for people to support Black-owned restaurants/food companies/businesses in general.
Finally
In the print edition of SFR, learn about fish, chips and new beers from the folks at Hidden Mountain, plus about a DIY cookie biz with straight-up adorable cookies.
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
Number of Letters Received 20 *Super Bowl, probably.
Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader) Sorry but “you ain’t in the know” obviously about Necco wafers. A New England sweetheart— live a li’l. *It’s true because we asked our Boston friends...turns out they like Necco up there. Gross.
Actually Helpful Tip Nothin’ *C’mon, buds!
Can’t get enough of that Sugar Bear, The Fork
