a bowl full of mush
in defense of texture
👋 from Hawaii-flavored nowhere! Coming to you from my dad’s childhood home in Honolulu for the next few weeks, where house is perfectly old and the ants are busy. Today: an essay about food.
the real deal
Did you ever attend a birthday party as a kid in one of those surreal, windowless rooms inside a Chuck-E-Cheese? Or maybe it was in a Discovery Zone: empty except for a long, soulless table and walls painted a cartoon-dinosaur shade of purple, it can really only be described as a conference room for children. I went to so many parties in these rooms, and what I remember most is the food that was always, like literally always, served in them. Ah yes, there was the crack and glug of a giant Sprite bottle opening and distributing itself among paper cups from Party City, and the smell of hot, oregano-y cardboard that could only mean one thing: pizza.
In the Chuck-E-Cheese era, I hated pizza. Too polite to hide my disappointment, I’d chew slowly on my blackened, bubbled sheet of “cheese” and wondered why it wasn’t ever anything else … maybe there was a rule that they weren’t allowed to serve bananas (yum), or toast (my fave), or bananas-on-toast (the ultimate) at birthday parties?? This rule persisted beyond birthday parties too: after a freezing morning at ski school practicing my “french fries” (skis parallel) and my “pizza” (skis in a triangle) out on the slopes, I’d tromp into the cafeteria in my ski boots at lunch time, almost and in spite of myself excited at the prospect of a nice hot slice, only to find a piece of pita bread (?) draped in a blanket of white, wet (??) nonsense in my small, painfully-defrosting hands.
So when I arrived in Central New York for college and found myself on a curb on a hot August night, balancing a slice of pizza on one palm and holding a deli cup of ranch in the other, I couldn’t fucking believe it. This is what pizza was supposed to taste like?
Delivered on wax paper, the dough is still cooking when it arrives in your hand, and the tomato sauce bursts its way through schmaltzy pools of just-enough mozzarella in the most perfect, glossy-chewy dance. Add in a dunk of herby, buttermilk-y ranch and you’re no longer residing on planet earth. I mean, ok, yes, everything tastes better when you’re buzzin’ on those first-week-of-college who’s-my-BFF-going-to-be!!! vibes (and six Keystone Lights). But I spent the next four years eating that pizza for (generously low estimation) 60% of my meals, and it was the closest I’d yet been to earthly divinity.
Cut to: me, a few weeks back, emptying a frozen hunk of noodles into a saucepan. I’d stepped away from my desk to prep lunch, a bowl of red curry noodles from the pre-made meal delivery service Splendid Spoon. When I was on leave, work sent me a box of food from Sakara Life in my first few weeks after giving birth. The food was healthful and beautiful, and in my hormonal high, I decided tearfully that pre-made meals were a genius invention and that when I went back to work, I’d gift myself a meal subscription to help ease the transition.
So last week I browsed Splendid Spoon’s meals excitedly, filling my “box” with delicious-looking meals, and eagerly awaited my first shipment.
a long-term relationship with fried chicken et al
After losing my pizza virginity in college, my relationship with deliciousness accelerated. I moved to New York City, and was suddenly surrounded by the best versions of every food I’d ever tried, and the best versions of so many I hadn’t. Like so many New York City apartments, my kitchen was the size of the closet in my suburban childhood bedroom—and why would I cook anyway when I could walk a few blocks for steamed pork wrapped in banana leaf at Jeepney, or an insanely crispy chicken thigh swaddled in a potato bun at Fuku? Pursuing food, picking restaurants, and refining my palate became a hobby, and I loved it.
When I moved to San Francisco in 2018, my kitchen became slightly bigger, and the density of sublime eats slightly smaller. That didn’t stop me from trying laphet thoke from Burma Star, a fermented tea leaf salad rife with crunchy nuts, beans and garlic, or Peruvian spit-roasted chicken with the most vinegar-y, cilantro-y green sauce of my dreams. When I moved to Denver in 2021, my kitchen was bigger than ever, and I was ready to try some cooking myself. I became obsessed with
and swapped my Instagram habit for constant browsing of the NYT cooking app, and spent my evenings frying whole lemon slices to eat with sardines on toast and my weekends attempting to perfect the flakiest, butteriest pie crust.As my own love for cooking blossomed, I started to observe my friends’ relationships with it. I noticed that my friends with kids openly dismissed it; a “ain’t nobody got time for that” vibe. I wondered if becoming a parent would leave me less time or desire to cook, too. I knew I’d have to give up something, so could that thing be cooking? Hence the Splendid Spoon subscription, which drew me in with its gorgeous photos of dishes that looked like the kind of projects I’d try to cook on my own.
space mush
In a capitalistic, Silicon-valley-enabled bid for efficiency, many aspects of culture today have taken on a characteristic smoothness. Perhaps in reaction to the flagrant extravagance of the Victorian era or the mad indulgence of the Dionysus days, we’ve pivoted our way into a state where everything is about “reducing friction.” This concept is so pervasive that I don’t even need to explain to you what I mean (we order everything online to avoid the “friction” of talking to a human being; we wear athleisure all day to avoid the friction of … a belt, I guess? I do hate belts.).
Splendid Spoon has every trapping of this cultural friction allergy. The meals get dropped on your doorstep as if they’ve arrived from space: wrapped in silver marathon-jacket plastic and dry ice, they are totally placeless and decontextualized. As I unwrapped my first box, all I could think about was Amazon boxes, and warehouses, and plastic. Not food. But I powered through and heated my first meal, a red beet quinoa grain bowl with kale and sweet potatoes. I liked all those things! And it sounded so healthy! The bowl came together as a soup and tasted alright, and I felt SO full after eating only half of it. But as I returned to my desk that day, a part of me that wasn’t my stomach felt empty.
The next meal I tried was the dan dan noodles, which I’d been so excited about when I chose it for my box on the website. Crunchy bok choy, crisp scallions, chewy sesame seeds—hell yeah. By the time the frozen rice noodles thawed, heated, and made it to my bowl, gray and flat, the dish that had looked so appetizing in photos had become totally textureless. And the weirdest thing is that it tasted good: tangy and spicy. And it was (once again) so filling! But I couldn’t shake the fact that it was, texturally speaking, a bowl full of mush1.
In her recent essay The contagious visual blandness of Netflix, my writing crush
points out that many movies today lack an animating sense of place, because their backdrops have become “generic and crisp.” She explores reasons why this could be, and ultimately lands on the assertion that culture today values “the idea that imperfection is inhibitive to beauty; an over-emphasis on growth, speed, ease, and innovation; a cynical over-reliance on marketing; a lack of interest in locality and place; the funneling of resources to the top; the focus on content over form, entertainment over art.”She goes on to say that the hollowness we perceive in today’s Netflix blandness “offers, by way of counter-example, a key to what does feel meaningful: texture, substance, imperfection, slowing down, taking the scenic route, natural light, places you can touch, making more considered creative choices, making less.”
This articulation shook something loose for me. How each of these concepts manifest across culture could be their own essays, but together they perfectly captured my uncanny experience with Splendid Spoon. First, content over form: meal services mostly focus (and deliver!) on the promise of nutrition and taste, but forget the thing that makes eating food so fun—color and texture! Next, a cynical over-reliance on marketing: the meals look so good in the photos, and the company knows this is what will sell them.
And of course, a lack of interest in locality and place: rather than make food in your own kitchen, your meals appear in a box at your door, space-wrapped, as if they appeared from some non-place that exists both nowhere and everywhere. As this research brief on meal kits from the University of Texas at El Paso notes, in their attempt to provide variety, meal kits instead “decontextualize food cultures while promoting a consumer sense of cosmopolitanism.” Oof.
Perhaps what most connected it for me was the idea of a terminal over-emphasis on growth, speed, ease and innovation—in this case, the very hypothesis of Splendid Spoon is that convenience matters more than anything else; as long as the food is fast and nutritional, it doesn’t matter if it’s a bowl of mush. Turns out, it really fucking matters.
Put another way: you know that feeling when you sit down to eat and the food looks so good that your first impulse is to take a photo of it? (Guilty—I literally shared a not-good photo I took of a piece of pizza seven paragraphs ago …). Photos of food can look amazing, but I so easily forget that often the purpose of these is marketing (either corporate or personal!), and therefore extra care has been taken to enhance the texture and color. For me, the impulse to photograph my food always ends the same way, like taking a photo of the moon. Sooo much lamer and impossibly less alive than the real thing.
Splendid Spoon, it’s been real—but I’ve decided that it’s definitely a no from me, dawg. You’ve taught me that texture is as critical as taste; I never want food without it!!! Though it will take work, you’ve made me realize how much I want to resist the texturelessness of efficiency; the marketing-enabled, Instagram version of meals. No sad beige toys. Definitely no sad beige food.
I’m willing to give up the convenience of “easy” food not because I need to have a mind-blowing culinary experience at every meal. But because, like that soul-bending pizza on the curb, I want food to remind me that I’m alive: textured, imperfect, present. The anti-smooth. I want food to be something that, like the moon (and all the earth’s corporeal pleasures, really), refuses to be capture-able on film, or reduced to a mushy copy of itself. Something that is desirable because of its singular, fleeting, exists-only-in-this-moment composition—which disappears too quickly to do anything but just enjoy.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what kind of textures you’re eating, or anything else that’s reminding you of being alive 🍕
Love,
Becca
This line, and the title of this essay, is inspired by one of my favorite “characters” in the bizarrely lovable classic Goodnight Moon, which I read to Nova every night before bed and thus echoes around my head all day. A bowl full of mush? In a bedroom at night?! It’s so weird and I love it
Splendid Spoon sounds like the food version of Uggs.