oldpoxbox.com

STUFF TO BUY:

GOOD vs EVIL poster

Shirts!

Pixel Posters 4 pack

The Alphabet of Manliness

FRIENDS:

YOU ARE NOT A SOMMELIER, A GOURMAND OR A PICKY EATER, SHUT THE HELL UP.

by:Pox

2012/12/10

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is people who insist such and such foods have special properties or a better than others. Example, Pepsi and Coke. Some mouth-breathers will SWEAR they just can't drink Pepsi because it's no good, they HAVE to have Coke.

If you're one of those people, SHUT THE FUCK UP, seriously.

Because of you, waiters constantly have to ask me "Is Coke alright?" when I ask for a Pepsi at random and vice-versa.

1. The PepsiCoke Fallacy

The Coke vs Pepsi blind taste tests have been done AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. The verdict is in: YOUR TONGUE DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK. You do NOT have special powers that make you only able to enjoy Coke. You are just a crybaby bitch who's brain was scrambled by marketing.

Listen to this cola-tasting moron: "Pepsi is an overly sweet soda, so the whole brand colors the taste," said North Landesman, a middle school history teacher and self-proclaimed soda aficionado. "It's so sweet that the first sip is always really good. But the more you drink, the worse it tastes."

Or maybe you have fabricated a story in your head about what Pepsi tastes like based on unrelated crap like movies, commercials and your favourite color instead of things that are actually relevant like ingredients, calories and price.

Guess what else? You hate diet coke? WRONG. You can't tell if you're drinking it or not. You know why? Because artificial sweeteners activate the same taste buds as regular refined sugar and corn syrup.

Then there is the whole Mexican coke deal, whereby Mexican Coke, which uses "real" sugar, supposedly tastes better. First of all, refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup are both the nutritional equivalent of punching your health in the dick, so quit it with the blind hatred for the slightly more processed version of what we use to make sure documentaries about bed bound fatties never cease. Second, if you look at the caloric content of the two cokes, you'll find that a can of Mexican coke has 150 calories while a can of regular Coke has 140. Since the calories come strictly from sugar... guess what? MEXICAN COKE TASTES BETTER BECAUSE IT'S 7% SWEETER.

I love diet store brand Cola, it's badass. Tastes awesome and has no calories. You know what else is badass? It costs a dollar less for a big bottle than name brands. If you buy Pepsi instead, congratulations, you have just thrown a dollar away. Since you read this and will undoubtedly change your ways, why not Paypal me that dollar? Or just 50 cents. Yes.

2. The Sommelier Fallacy

Speaking of wasting money, please stop buying expensive food items. No bottle of wine is worth over 50$. You can't even tell the god damned difference. Again and again and again people are tricked into buying high-priced cheeses, beers, wines, olive oils, chocolates etc. by the high price tag and a fancy story about how exclusive and fancy it is.

" The Judgment of Princeton didn�t quite end with a Jersey victory�a French wine was on top in both the red and white categories�but, in terms of the reassurance for those with valuable wine collections, it might as well have. Clos des Mouches only narrowly beat out Unionville Single Vineyard and two other Jersey whites, while Ch�teau Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion topped Heritage�s BDX. The wines from New Jersey cost, on average, about five per cent as much as their French counterparts. And then there�s the inconsistency of the judges: the scores for that Mouton Rothschild, for instance, ranged from 11 to 19.5. On the excellent blog Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen highlights the analysis of the Princeton professor Richard Quandt3, who found that almost of all the wines were �statistically undistinguishable� from each other. This suggests that, if the blind tasting were held again, a Jersey wine might very well win."

This isn't cherry-picking, this has been done hundreds of times. The foremost WINE EXPERTS can't tell the difference between the most legendary vintages on earth and some third-grade convenience-store swill. You know what else this means?

They can't even tell red from white apart.. That's right, the difference is so slim that simple food coloring took it away.

Now, I've tasted hundreds of beers in my life and I can assure you that THEY DON'T TASTE THAT DIFFERENT. Unless you start putting a bunch of weird shit in them like smoke and blueberries, there's a limited number of tastes you can produce with water, barley and hops. I doubt you could split the hundreds of beers into more than maybe 10-15 categories of taste. That's for CRAFT beers too. The big brands are just about the exact same as well: Miller, Coors, Bud. Heck even the big brand from other countries are the same; Sapporo, Corona, TsingTao...

SOMEONE PLEASE TAKE MORE OF THESE PEOPLE'S MONEY! THANKS.

3. The Rich Assholes Fallacy

You know who else this pisses off? Rich people. Rich people buy stupid shit like
25 000$ Sundaes

"Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a blend of 28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe.

Wow, listen you morons, you can't even tell apart TWO cocoas, let alone 28. I guarantee you that none of these chefs can taste the difference between their fancy expensive blend and what I can find in a giant vat at Costco for a thousandth of the price. But rich people love the idea that they can buy superior experiences. Somehow, out there, there is a magical food that is MUCH BETTER than anything you COMMON FOOLS could ever put together. Oh, BUTTER? That doesn't even come from a wild Oryx's tits? I bet you're still eating plain old boring non-cassowary eggs LIKE THE PITIFUL COMMONER THAT YOU ARE! GUFFAW!

YOU EATING MY EGGS, BRA?

4. The MYTHIC EXPERTISE Fallacy

Hey, did you know it takes 10 years to learn how to make this:

Yes, what seems like simple 3-4 ingredient pieces of food are actually extremely complicated ritualistic culinary masterpieces that only a trained chef with years of schooling and practice can accomplish. Can you taste the fucking difference? Definitely not, but you can pay 10 times more to eat at his restaurant! They only take the highest quality of fish, which is about 1% better than the shittiest quality of fish! Learn all about it, at one of the many newly founded Sushi Academies!

"Generally speaking, it takes you more than ten years to get the difficult skills. In this class, however, you can get it for a short term."

Here's a list of things that could take ten years to learn:

-
-
-
-
-

END OF LIST

Their 8 week class costs over 10 000$! This is what happens when you mix bullshit with food. There's no hamburger school. Why not? Because Japanese people are fucking crazy and Westerners are dumb. Remember before the UFC existed and everyone thought Asian people were hot shit at Martial Arts because they'd been doing it forever and they had a bunch of grand masters over there? Well the second they actually had to fight real opponents they got crushed.

Gee I wonder if there's a lesson to be learned here.

Watch Gordon Ramsay learn how to make Sushi in one afternoon:

Can the costumers tell the difference between his sushi and what a chef with 10 years of experience can do? Fuck no they can't. You might argue that it's not a fair test since Gordon is a trained chef with years of experience. I say that's exactly the point. You don't need 10 years of sushi school. You just need any cooking school. Fuck, probably not since anyone can open a restaurant. You think all those immigrants open restaurants after graduating from their country's equivalent of the sushi school?

5. The DELICACY Fallacy

Some of you may know the show "BIZARRE FOODS" with Andrew Zimmern. In it, he goes around the globe sampling various local delicacies. Watching the show, you learn this: "Delicacy" means "VOMIT" in most other languages. You'd be amazed at how often even a food show host, who's entire purpose in life is to eat things and say they are good, can't contain his disgust at some of the garbage he has to eat.

What do you expect from a poor country? You think they don't like McDonald's and Pizza in Thailand or Ethiopia? You think they have some magic foods over there that we haven't discovered yet, after hundreds of years of imperialism, trade and cultural theft? A general rule with food is that if you haven't heard of it yet, it's probably for a good reason. Either it tastes like crap or it's doesn't taste any different than a million other foods you've already eaten.

An Alabaman delicacy.

As a general rule, the poorer the country, the more horrible their delicacies are. We're talking about people for whom eating a goat is a national holiday, you think they're eating something better the rest of the time? No they feast on dirt, root vegetables and raw cricket buttholes. Here's a prediction: You can travel all over the world your entire life but you will never find anything that tastes as good as a stale greasy 7-11 donut. If you live in North America or Europe, you're literally always about 10 minutes away from the world's tastiest foods, and yet people spend fortunes traveling to "discover cultures", which is another way of saying "Get time off work to watch tv in hotels, eat out every day and get drunk with strangers".

other people had good stuff, we'd have stolen it by now. The best part is that what people generally like most from other cultures isn't their diet's staples, it's the special foods which they can only eat on special occasions. Those foods are typically meaty, sugary or greasy. The only variation is spices, which you are free to buy in grocery stores at any time without polluting the planet by taking a plane.

I love trying new foods now. Why? Because then I get to say: "Yes I have tried it, it's not better than pizza." You know what's a good ethnic food? Sushi. You know how I know this? THERE'S SUSHI SHOPS FUCKING EVERYWHERE. The best part of all this is that we make ethnic foods BETTER. The most popular sushi in America is the California Roll. It was invented in the 60s or 70s in Los Angeles. The most popular Indian food, Butter Chicken, is a British invention. Chocolate? Europeans. General Tso's Chicken? New York. Maple Syrup? Europeans.

IT'S LIKE I'M CONFUCIUS!

If you have to go into a deep jungle shrine to try something, that thing probably sucks. We've spent milenia selecting animals and plants so they taste better than they did when we found them in nature, you really think that somewhere in the world there's a really tasty fruit no one's ever heard of? The next apple or banana? Or a food so good it can't be made better by deep-frying it or coating it in sugar?

This is what bananas used to look like before we owned them with artificial selection. Can't even eat them raw.

6. The ACQUIRED TASTE Fallacy

This one is probably the worst offender of them all. We all know what this means: "This is bad, but if you eat enough of it, it's not SO bad anymore!". I have drunk countless beers and they still don't taste better than coke. That's because Coke has sugar in it while beer is poisonous rotten grain juice. You mostly form your tastes based on evolution and what you were fed as a kid. It's basically the same with movies. Remember Thundercats? Wasn't that great? If you watched it today, you'd probably still enjoy it. If someone told you "Wow that is fucktastic" you would get defensive and, depending on how pretentious / dumb you are, go on about how cartoons used to be better and other tripe. Fact is, Thundercats is a shitty cartoon with loose plot lines, questionable animation and was basically a 22 minute Christmas commercial that ran year-long.

Food works the same way. One you have your tastes in adulthood, you're stuck. If you were fed crappy food as a kid, you will like it because evolutionarily-speaking you have to adapt your tastes to whatever your parents feed you and then you become wary of new potentially harmful foods and tastes.

So if you're 25 when you eat something for the first time and it's not good, STOP PUTTING IT IN YOUR MOUTH. Unless it makes you drunk. Then you should absolutely continue ingesting it.

I strongly invite you and your friends to do blind taste tests. In fact I will organize one myself in the future! Can people taste the difference between different kinds of wines, beers, colas and whatever else? How much money are we wasting every year on this empty pursuit of mythic amazing foods when, in reality, the experience of trying something new is the reward?

I leave you with a wise quote:

"Wow, this new food only one Zimbabwean tribe knows of is way better than hot dogs!"
- No one, ever.

Follow My Stuff ( cause it's rad, and you are rad, therefore must do this):