So I’ve had this new obsession lately (in support of my quasi-vegan diet) to see how many different combinations of beans and rice (there’s thousands of different combinations, and various fixing you can add). The goal is to get the most out of my food out of a meal that will cost less then $2.50.

But this led me to doing a bit of research and a lot of senseless browsing on the “nutritionfacts” website. I highly recommend visiting the site, it’s level of meticulousness is utterly obscene. You find out that a grapefruit from California and Florida, have almost nothing in common. Then you can find out more specifics on onions then you’d ever wanted to know, like nutritional difference between a boiled, sautéed, and raw onion.

What’s interesting about this, is that much of the food has non of the substantive qualities of their appearance. There’s nothing new about that observation, in fact it’s a classic trope of much of what was (wrongly) dubbed post-modern. We keep encountering objects/desires that are deprived of their substantive nature. The clear example is decaf-coffee – why? It tastes like coffee, it feels like coffee, it smells like coffee, but it’s deprived of the essential element that makes most people drink coffee. So why drink decaf? You enjoy the taste, but don’t want anything of what makes it desirable?

Well this goes beyond decaf coffee. We also have similar problems with fruit (and fruit juice). The orange has been stripped of what would make it an orange, and instead things are done to make it simulate an orange. You get added die for color, flavoring to make it taste good, and even a vitamin/mineral mix to simulate the nutritious effects of an orange (however, there’ll obviously be a surplus, and in this case surplus = death).

This is the funny things about food labels, we’re under the impression that they’re there for maintaining good health and finding out what’s in our food. That’s ass backwards. Food labels only appear in those parts of the world, where the food appears to be the opposite of what it’s advertising to be (so if you buy store-bought beans and rice, you might notice that it’s more expensive, and that the nutrients magically disappeared). The ‘nutrition facts’ label half the time tell you that there’s nothing nutritious in the food that you’re eating (hence the disclaimer: this food is not a significant source of ______). The label is there specifically to tell you what you won’t be getting. The organic salsa I just had is a great example: while the ingredients do include tomatoes, onions, some spices, peppers, etc., it contains no nutrients. So I guess at that point you just have to wonder, why bother even putting them in.

You get the same paradox at many sub-par and suburban Asian eateries. Your dish will contain a small list of vegetables, which are only present for the sake of texture. They don’t have the taste of the vegetables, the nutrients were cooked out, and they’re mainly there for texture and satisfying a certain impulse that may have lead you the Asian eatery.

(Fuck! No, I mean it – really!)

This isn’t some illusion, from which there’s some form of return to/from. The problem ain’t hubris, actually the problem maybe a lack of hubris. It’s just a point of simple level of facticity; when you pick up something that’s referred to as “strawberry and cream” flavored, it’s a clear indicator that neither of those ingredients are present in what you bought. A mild lack of indignation and calling bullshit, is clearly absent – it’s just taken as the natural way of the world. You will eat, you won’t be satisfied, then it’ll kill you, the only actually disappointing part is that someone turns a profit on this.