The Food Issue
4 all my foodies out there
I’ve been doing some soul-searching and I’ve realised that if I’m ever gonna make my first milly (2 Million Euros) on Substack, then I’m gonna have to make my content more niche. I also need to make my content ‘good’, but let’s go with niche first, the ‘good’ can come later. Much, much, much, much, much later.
So, I need to pick a genre and stick to it, and then that can be my THING. Perhaps I’ll discuss film or wine, or the various types of clothing people enjoy. I need to decide, and I need to decide quickly. So with that in mind, I am going to spend the next six months writing about different popular topics and see which one sticks.
This week, we talk FOOD.
Hello. Welcome to the food issue.
I like rice. Rice is my favourite food. What’s yours? Pizza perhaps? Baguette maybe? Do you like to eat food sitting down? Lying down? Walking around? Do you like to watch other people eat food? Do you like to watch videos of celebrities eating food and saying relatable things, like ‘You won’t believe this, but I too, like a Sunday Roast.’
What kind of relationship do you have with food?
I used to say that I was an unconfident eater. Most people’s reactions when I told them I was an unconfident eater would be one of shock, surprise and confusion as they’d think to themselves, ‘Oh right, but you look like you are VERY much, a VERY confident eater, maybe too confident.’
But what I actually meant by me being an unconfident eater was that I didn’t like eating in front of people. I couldn’t eat in public places. I hated the thought of someone watching me eat.
As I got older, I stopped caring, and now you’ll be pleased to hear that I can generally eat anywhere in front of anyone. That’s what happens when you get older: you stop caring what people think. This is often portrayed as a good thing; it’s become very trendy to not care what people think, but I’m not so sure. I think you SHOULD care what people think a little bit, ya know, just a little bit. A little bit of caring about what people think is probably a good thing. Especially if caring what people think can make me skinnier.
The Day I Was Caught Eating A Plain White Baguette Alone in My Car
I was caught eating a plain white baguette alone in my car the other day.
I was on my lunch break, and it had been a busy morning.
In Sligo, the Vegan options are limited. Tesco have started doing a Spicy Chickpea wrap, but it’s very disgusting. Actually, it’s not even disgusting. If it was disgusting, I could just pretend to like it and look down on people for not having my superior taste palate, but it is just nothing. It tastes of nothing and has the texture of nothing. An empty experience.
Anyway, I was tired and not thinking straight, and I went into Tesco and I bought a full-size plain, white baguette. I intended to get some hummus, but I saw someone I knew loitering down the hummus aisle, so I couldn’t risk a conversation.
I took the plain white baguette to my car because I didn’t want to eat at work, not because I’m particularly anti social at work, in fact I very much enjoy the company of my work colleagues, but I heard in a podcast that it’s depressing and bad for you to eat your lunch at work, so I took that advice and did the non-depressing thing of eating a plain white baguette alone in my cold car.
I started to eat the baguette. I hadn’t intended to eat the whole thing. I would normally just rip some of it off and eat it in pieces like you’d see someone from Roman times do.
But today I was holding the whole baguette like how you would hold a tennis racket for a backhand shot, or how you would hold a big flag. With the whole baguette in 2 hands, I started munching.
Things were going okay. I had the radio on, and I had a baguette. I forgot to buy a drink, and the baguette was very dry without any condiments or fillings. It was just the bread. The fluffy bread and then the crispy bit surrounding the fluffy bread, the crispy bit, I believe, is also bread.
I was parked in the Church car park, which is a 5-minute walk from my work. A group of teenage boys walked past the car. I watch them. I envy them and their lives. But not their clothes, they all had shit clothes on if I’m being honest.
As the group passed by, one of them stopped right outside my car to check his phone and to concentrate on checking his phone. I wonder what his phone says? I wonder if he knows how lucky he is to have that lovely hair of his?
As I bit into my plain, white baguette, my movement must have caught his eye because he rapidly turned and looked at me. He stared. I stared back. I slowly brought the baguette away from my mouth and down towards my knees. I smiled at him. A pleading smile. A desperate smile.
He didn’t smile. He turned his head away from me and scurried along to catch up with his friends.
I tried to convince myself he hadn’t seen me eating a baguette in my car, but who was I kidding? He’d seen it all. It would probably be the biggest piece of gossip going around the playground by the time lunch was over.
I didn’t eat any more of the baguette. I wrapped it up and put it in my bag. I brushed the crumbs from my lap, and I went back to work.
It’s funny, when I returned to work, I didn’t mention what had happened with the boy and the baguette. I kept it to myself. Bottled it up. Was I ashamed? Yes, Embarrassed? Yes.
The Dancing Girls
Two weeks later and I was arriving at the theatre for my shift. I was pretty much over what had happened with the baguette. I mean, I was still thinking about it 5 or 6 times a day, but it wasn’t making me feel as upset and angry as it had done the previous 13.5 days.
Sometimes, at the theatre where I work, we do school productions. Schools put on musicals and dance performances and shit like that. We had a school doing some sort of musical play.
The foyer, the backstage halls, the green room and the dressing rooms were full of loud, confident teenagers. I dodged and weaved my way around the place and tried to avoid eye contact.
Then… I saw… him
There he was. The boy with the great hair who caught me eating a plain white baguette alone in my car. He was surrounded by other kids his age and younger. He was telling some sort of story, and everyone was engaged and hanging onto every word.
I watched. I positioned myself slightly behind the wall and peeked around, and I kept watching. I imagined I was him for a second. It felt nice. Then I remembered I was still me, and it felt bad.
I went to put my bag down in the small office in the foyer. I had intended to only stay in there for a few seconds, so I didn’t turn the light on.
As I put my bag down, I went to head outside, and I saw the boy again, so I quickly ducked back into the office. I thought I could wait a minute until the coast was clear.
BUT THEN
I heard footsteps. Lots of footsteps and chatter. Lots of chatter. It was a group of teenage girls. The only thing scarier than teenage girls is teenage boys, but since the world leaders of Western society had decided to make it mandatory for schools to show the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ to teach teenage boys not to believe everything they see on the internet and be more like us clever adults. But anyway, it seems to have worked because now teenage boys have finally replaced being violent with being over-the-top, hammy actors in a one-take.
(My management team advised me against leaving this bit in, but I said I’d rather be silent than not be able to make fun of popular things. And then management said, ‘Okay, yeah, just stay silent, literally no one is asking for your opinion on things,’ And I said nothing. I just put one hand over my mouth and another hand on my neck like I was choking myself. What I was trying to say by doing this was, ‘If you silence me, you are literally choking me because if I can’t say my opinions on things, then I may as well be dead.’ They asked me to stop because it was making them uncomfortable, so I did stop because I didn’t like making them feel uncomfortable.)
(Another side note. I actually didn’t dislike the show; I thought it was fine. And nearly everyone I know whose opinions I love and respect seemed to really like it, so I know I am probably wrong. But it’s just how I feel, okay, lemme feel these things I feel.)
Anyway, back to the teenage girls.
I decided to take a seat and wait for them to leave the foyer, so I could make a swift exit.
Then the music started. Some song from some musical. Then I hear the thump and clatter of dance moves being rehearsed.
I was stuck. Stuck in this small, dark office.
The only exit from the office leads into the foyer, you see.
I had left it too long to go out. If I’d gone out straight away, it would have been fine, but I had left it too long. It would have been weird/creepy if I came walking out of the dark room when they were mid-dance. But I wasn’t being weird or creepy, I was just hiding from the boy who caught me eating a plain white baguette in my car.
I didn’t know how long I would be stuck in the office. I went on my phone for a bit and watched videos of people fighting because for some reason I stayed on a video too long of someone getting the shit kicked out of them and now my algorithm is just showing me videos of people fighting each other. It’s horrible and makes me feel very sad, but until another genre of video grabs my attention for more than a few seconds and my algorithm changes, I am stuck with people beating the fucking bollocks out of each other. It was okay at first because often the videos would be ‘Bully gets a taste of their own medicine’ or ‘Person gets revenge on bully’ But now the world celebrates and loves the bullies of the world, the bullies are treated as the good guys now, so the majority of videos are just horrible people beating the shit out of people. It’s weird and makes my stomach hurt. I don’t even like seeing people argue. I get upset if sports stars don’t shake hands after a match. I’m a sensitive person. How did I end up here?
After watching about 50 to 100 videos of people fighting, I started to feel a bit hungry. I reached into my bag and saw what was in there. A baguette. A small baguette, not the same baguette from 2 weeks ago. But a smaller version of that same baguette, but this one was brown and had seeds in it.
I ripped a bit off and ate it. I sat alone, in the dark and ate my baguette..
The light flashed on.
Oh no.
It’s the Front of House manager. My presence startles him.
“Oh, hi Thom. Sorry, I didn’t think anyone was in here because the light was off”
”Oh, yeah, no, yeah, sorry, I was just in here for a second, just hiding from the teenagers.”
I waited for his response. He looked at me. He looked at my baguette.
A beat.
Another beat.
“Oh, yeah, fair enough. It’s chaos out there. Yeah, feel free to hide out in here if ya want?”
I smiled and I nodded. I offered him some of my baguette, and he said, “No thanks.”
So that is the food issue. Thanks for reading. I will explore another topic next week, and then after doing a few different topics, I will choose one to focus my time, love and dedication on for the rest of my life.
Cya soon
Thom
Xxxx