Instructions
I try to eat a sensible lunch when I’m at work during the week. Back when I was in my 20’s and immortal, I used to eat all kinds of crap because I was only eating it to soak up the alcohol anyway, and besides, burritos with pork, sour cream, and guacamole wrapped in a flour tortilla have damn near all the food groups in them, right? Unfortunately, when I got a little older, eating from this bastardized food pyramid made me start to look like a pyramid, and I knew I needed to change things up a bit. I remember that eating spicy Italian sandwiches at Subways made be blow up like a goddamn balloon, causing me to think to myself, “Jared, you dogfucker, you are a lying sack of shit.”
Lately, my lunch consists of cherry tomatoes, an apple, and some sort of Oriental noodles. I like eating the noodles because they’re cheap, and I don’t really feel like I’ve eaten lunch unless I’ve eaten something hot. I used to buy those Cup O’ Noodles until I looked at the label and realized that they could more accurately be called Cup O’ Sodium. So instead, I try to find the kind of noodles they sell in the section my supermarket labels as “Asian”, and don’t contain as much sodium. (More likely. though, they contain twice as much sodium but the Chinese forced prison labor camps that crank them out by the metric fuckton flat out lie on the label so as to more quickly reduce this great country of ours to a quivering blob of arteriosclerotic fat which can be more easily overcome in the pending Chinese Invasion, even if they are kind of difficult to clean out of tank treads.)
Today, I found a bowl of something called Pho Bó, Vietnamese-Style Instant Rice Noodles which had a wonderful picture on the lid depicting a meal containing fresh green onions, a thin slice of beef, spouts, and noodles. In fact, the interior of the package contained something that looked like it had been stamped out of condensed cardboard. But what really caught my attention were the instructions, which included these two steps:
- Cook in microwave for 3 minutes
- Take the bowl out
Thanks, Vietnam. You just saved me from an embarrassing situation in which coworkers would have to unwedge my head from the fucking microwave. You should be put in charge of other products, because I’m the kind of guy that needs to be told that I shouldn’t dry my hair while sleeping…
…and that the eggs I just purchased may contain eggs…
Give your Asian noodles a rinse before you cook them. While not as salt-laden as the flavour packet in “Cup of-nothing-good”, they do have lots of saturated fat for some reason. I throw in some chili sauce or curry paste, still very salt-laden, but I only use a tiny bit.
Years ago, a friend gave a dinner party for which she made everything except the dessert from scratch. After getting the frozen apple pie from the freezer, she told us that the first line of instructions was “remove pie from box”. When did it become necessary to write cooking instructions as though everyone who reads them has had a severe brain injury? It is best not to read cooking instructions at all.
I read a book by Paul Krassner, the indefatigable put-on artist, and he claimed to have known a person who had a life-changing realization and dropped out of society when she saw instructions on a jar of mayonnaise that began with “Open lid”.
Maybe there’s some sort of legal reason that they have to pander to the brain-damaged during the process of instruction-writing.
Yeah, that legal reason is that we’ve got too many lawyers in this country, and they keep themselves occupied by encouraging everyone to sue over the stupidest shit imaginable.
“You didn’t warn me that driving a car while wearing an E-Z Sleep eye mask might be dangerous! I demand $42 million!”
Morons.