do not eat department store food. ever.

Department stores are where you buy things like cleaning supplies, clothes, laundry detergent and so on. It should never be a place where you buy prepared food.

I first have to explain what "prepared food" actually is. It may sound obvious, but it actually isn't.

There are two types of prepared food in a department store.

The first kind is what's known as a hot bar. This is a small freestanding thing usually placed fairly close to the checkout lanes. In the hot bar is ready-to-eat hot food, such as fried chicken, egg rolls, and so on.

The second kind is a dedicated area where you walk up and order your hot food directly. Walk up, someone takes your order, you pay, you sit and wait while it's prepared, get the food when it's ready, eat.

I made the mistake of ordering food from the second kind recently. I was invited to go this place, so I said sure, I'll give it a try as it wasn't some major national food chain brand. My thought was that since it was atypical of what I'd normally see in a department store, maybe the food would be decent.

Nope.

What I ordered was some pastry/pocket thing. What I got was trash that was put in a microwave for 2 minutes. After literally two bites, I noped right out of that and tossed it in the trash. I would have been better off if I had bought a small sleeve of peanuts instead.

This was a loud reminder of why I don't eat department store food. Regardless of whether it's major brand or not, if it's made in the department store, it sucks.

Sad but true: Most restaurants do the same damned thing.

I've lived long enough to where I can tell instantly if food served to me was actually cooked or just microwaved.

Make no mistake, microwaving is not cooking. "Food" designed to be microwaved regardless of what it is all has a very recognizable look, non-scent and blandness to it. Or at least recognizable to me. The colors aren't natural and obviously fake, barely any scent or no scent exists, and flavor is nonexistent.

It's that last one that really messes with my head. I see this "food", bite into it and literally taste nothing. It's just hot texture, as if I were eating hot soft styrofoam. It may look like pizza, chicken, a roll or whatever it is, but once in the mouth there's just nothing going on at all other than a hot nothing.

Remember that movie Demolition Man? There's a scene in that flick that still sticks out in my mind to this day. It's the "rat burger" scene.

John Spartan (lead character) lives in a world where the regular population eats nothing but ultra-processed fake food. At one point he's in the underground where the dregs of society live and away from all the fake stuff. He smells food nearby and finds somebody making burgers for sale. He orders one, receives it and starts wolfing it down because it tastes so good. Then he finds out what the burger is made of. Rat meat. He keeps eating it anyway because it's actual real meat that was cooked.

Well, guess what. We're really not that far off from that reality now. In the year the movie was released (1993) it was laughable and unthinkable to live off fake food, so much to the point where you'd genuinely enjoy a burger made from rat meat just because it was real.

We're not at the point of frying rats just to get real cooked meat, but we absolutely ARE at the point where the overwhelming majority of places that "cook" hot food are just reheating fake garbage in a microwave.

Get cooking tools and cook at home.

Finding any place that actually cooks real food is becoming increasingly difficult. This being true, you're just better off cooking for yourself.

Got pots and pans? Get some butter or oil, chop an onion and fry it up. Or boil some water and make rice or potatoes or whatever. Want to get fancy? Use a steamer basket.

And speaking of steaming, get a steam pot. Steam your potatoes, steam your asparagus, steam your green beans, steam whatever. It works and it's good.

Is your tap water garbage? Boil for 10 minutes first before using. Or distill it first, then boil. Anything you cook with it will taste better. Thank me later.

All bread in the store is awful because it's full of preservative trash. Learn how to bake bread yourself. You've got an oven. Use it.

Need better meat? You'll have to do some research to find that, but chances are you'll be able to find a farm or farmers market relatively close so you can get the good stuff.

Trust me, it's worth it. Learn how to cook and don't eat the fake garbage. Life is too short to eat pseudo-food trash.

Published 2024 Sep 26