Click, Click, click

by Cyndi O’Leary

Fried Bologna Sandwiches

submitted by Tim.

This is for people who think a regular bologna sandwich is just too healthy...

Ingredients:

• 1 or 2 slices of bologna
• 2 slices white bread
• 1 slice cheese
• 1 TB oil/Crisco/lard
• ketchup
• salt/pepper

Directions: Fry up the bologna in the oil. Add salt, pepper, and any other spice you wish. While still in the frying pan, add cheese. Allow cheese to melt. Put ketchup on bread, put bologna on bread, enjoy! Good with beer and potato chips.

Source: http://yumfood.net/recipes/categ/whitetrash.html

Outside Reading: The “Food Bank” Food Pyramid

By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)

The American food pyramid is not the only food pyramid available. There are Asian, Indian, Mexican, Mediterranean, and Arabic food pyramids available online (http://www.semda.org/info/). There are also vegetarian food pyramids, vegan pyramids, special variations for diabetics and young children. There are pyramids based on body types; it seems there is a pyramid for every twist and turn. But what I am not seeing is income-based food pyramids. Thus I present to you…the American “food bank” and “dumpster diving“ food pyramids.

The rest of this article is located at resist!ca. You can receive Kirsten’s articles, and other activist news, via an email list called “Eat the Press.” Join the list here.

You may have seen the food pyramid that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) put together and distributes, suggesting their view of a healthy diet.After decades of encouraging people to eat lots of meat and dairy, the USDA now recommends greatly limiting consumption of both. (The USDA is also charged with helping the meat and dairy industries to profit and flourish—which is an obvious conflict of interest—and the consumer's health has always lost out at the USDA, and continues to lose out today.)

The USDA hasn't been very effective in getting their present view of health across to the American people.The average American eats nothing resembling the USDA recommended dietary guidelines.According to the USDA itself, in 1994 the average American ate the following:

• 586 pounds of milk and dairy products
• 394 pounds of vegetables
• 199 pounds of meat
• 193 pounds of products containing flour and cereal
• 121 pounds of fresh fruit.

That totals over four pounds of food per day per person—and nearly forty percent of that is milk and dairy—which makes one very lopsided food pyramid!

(from: www.vegsource.com)

SPAM Haiku

From the SPAM-ku Archive

#128.

#2037.

#2693.

#3625.

#7291.

#5707.

#6153.

send your spam haiku to wtchronicles -at- hotmail -dot- com. we’ll put it on the website and then you’ll be famous.

Poor Man's Barbecue Sauce

Submitted by Bill.

I put this together in my office one day when I needed some sauce, but didn't have anything but a bunch of fast-food packets.

Servings: 2

Time: 3 minutes

Ingredients:

• 5-6 packets ketchup
• 2-3 packets hot sauce
• 1 packet soy sauce
• 1 packet of sugar
• 1 packet of mustard
• 1 packet of salt
• 1 packet of pepper

Directions: Mix all ingredients together and let stand for approximately 15 minutes or longer. This can also be used for basting or marinating beef, chicken, pork or cooked sausage.

Source: http://yumfood.net/recipes/categ/whitetrash.html

Out Back

By WonderBred

Revolution and Government Cheese

by Bob Bergeron

You are what you eat
—Unknown

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see…
… There’s room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like those folks on the hill… a working class hero is something to be…
—John Lennon

Humans need three basic components in order to survive, shelter, (protection from the elements and from wild animals), time to procreate and rear our young. And in order to do the first two, we need to eat. Our survival depends on food. Our tendency towards socialization developed around this need.

Today food is still at the core of our socialization. We are born to food and we die to food. Baby showers and funerals and a whole lot of eating in between.

Ben Franklin said, “There are only two sureties in this life; Death and taxes….” It seems he left food out of the equation. A good meal is a given, or should be, and since mankind dwelled in caves the quality of ones life was measured by the quality of the food one was able to provide. It softens the grim eventualities of Mr. Franklin’s assessment on the living condition.

There are no shortage of signs that the gulf between the upper and the lower class is increasing exponentially. Adult Americans work wage slave jobs in the service industry while American manufacturers contract the types of jobs that used to be the back bone of the middle class out to foreign nations. The current right wing religious regime clouds the pro-choice issue under the guise of morality while reaping the benefits of a larger proletariat population with which to bolster the ranks of its labor and military forces. Incarceration rates rise while alcoholism and drug addiction are still treated as a moral lapse by the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Interest rates rise, along with gasoline and home heating costs while petroleum companies with powerful influence squash alternate energy proposals through the purchase of patents and propaganda. All the while the majority of us buy on credit to compensate for our lack of ability to make a living wage in the great state of Maine.

I shop at the Save A Lot at St. Johns Street. It’s part shopping trip, part sociological study. Rows of almost-too-old-to-purchase produce (you’ll find the same situation at Paul’s Food Store on Congress, but Paul’s caters to a more elitist food stamp set. When you’re eating on the dole, there’s no reason to worry about cost. Or quality. Antique sour cream? You can find it at Paul’s.) I purchase my clothes at the Good Cause Thrift Store and the Salvation Army Warehouse and I still have to dress down to go to Save A Lot. The folks who used to make up the working class are now the great unwashed. Overweight and underpaid. Soft onions, pig’s feet and sliced sandwich meat in packets that sell for $.33.

Turkey. Ham. Bologna. It’s all here. And edible, too. Just don’t read the label.

Around this time last year I was dating this gal. Real uppity. You know the type. Used to money, (even if it was the bank’s money…). One afternoon I was making spaghetti sauce. She needed to go to Maine Hardware, (right next to the aforementioned Save A Lot). When we got there I asked her if she wanted to go into the grocery store with me and her eyes filled with fear at the prospect of entering the premises of the Cosmo-demonic grocery store. Not the fear one associates with the prospect of impending doom. It was more the type one would associate with a young teen concerned that they might be spotted in the Christmas sweater grandma knitted for them. Her eyes said, “I can’t go in there. What would people think?”

And all I was thinking was, “Tomato paste is tomato paste…”

She needn’t have worried. Her friends didn’t shop there. All the credit card hippies and art gallery lemmings shop at Wild Oats, where a ten pound bag of the gourmet dog-food costs a quarter of my entire grocery bill some weeks. (Ever notice that the parking lot of Wild Oats is filled with BMWs and SUVs? “We’re health conscious yoga enthusiasts with our big gas guzzling fashion trucks. We support our troops! Fill’er up! Buy ART!” Nice people, good docile Americans… signing away freedom and selling their souls for the trappings of the bourgeois.)

We live in the wealthiest nation in the world and yet hard-working Americans are actually considering the potted meat product. There’s something wrong here. One can’t fish or hunt without paying the state. One can’t raise a family on a retail wage unless you want to watch your kids get fat and sick off of government cheese.

Refined sugar. Bleached flour. Processed rice. The natural order states that the best competitors will eat best, and be the best competitors.

“Let the proletariat build the railroads and while they’re working we’ll wrap up the biggest piece of the pie and put it in the back of the ice-box…” Look at the man above the strings and that’s his message…

Sound too dramatic? Let me put it another way. Your body is a machine. Put the cheap gas in your hypothetical Corvette and over time, what happens to the engine? Right. That hypothetical Corvette doesn’t run so well anymore, does it? Well, the best quality produce and meats are at the very foundation of a human’s potentiality.

The gulf between the upper and the lower class is increasing exponentially. Food is another social control silently employed by moral high grinders talking out of the sides of their mouths about freedom and equality and Santa Claus and kittens and puppies while they fuck you in the ass.

“Let them eat cake…” Was Marie Antionette’s dismissal of the concerns of the peasantry on the eve of the French Revolution.

“Let them eat McDonalds…” George Bush’s administration is saying, and this time the proletariat is too lulled by conspicuous consumerism and its own vapid narcissism to storm the Bastille.

Bon Appetit!

Thanksgiving Lament

by mamaspitfire

LUNCHTIME

by branded

Bologna and Cheese Sandwiches on White Bread with Mayo. The kind of bologna in the canary yellow plastic package, the red nylon string you pull to break the uniform thick soggy slices out of their hard clear shell. The cheese, Crayola Orange, the word cheese on this square of dyed vegetable oil is spelled with two E's and a Z. It's individually tucked inside flimsy clear stuff, a hybrid between real plastic and generic saran wrap. You peel carefully, so carefully, so that the cheesy square comes out whole and doesn't crumble, clinging desperately to the shrink-wrap. Then the White Bread. Only in your wet dreams can your Ma afford Wonder Bread, with it's chipper rainbow circles dancing on the bag, perfect white squares of fleshy dough waiting to be eaten. This bread comes in a package with all the fanfare of a Wake. White plastic black letters, bread so flimsy it tears at the thought of peanut butter on a knife. Last, globs of mayo, the genera-cheese's wicked sister, some vague mixture of vegetable oil, mystery paste, and Poor. Finally, The Sandwich. The bread turns to thick paste, the mayo glues each bite to the roof of your mouth, a strange Elmer's school paste reaction native only to the mix of this exact combination of ingredients with saliva. Bologna and Cheese on White Bread with Mayo.

Even Better. Peanut Butter and Jelly. On the same white bread because Bologna and Cheese won't keep in your lunch box until noon and your Ma doesn't have those cute little blue ice packs that the Clean Girls bring to school with their lunches that come straight out of a fifties sitcom. And let's be honest, just skip the lunch box fantasy too. Replace it with a brown paper bag, wrinkled, stained from yesterday's lunch, big hole in the corner threatening to give way in your locker. PB and J. From an overgrown Vat of Peanut Butter from the food pantry, bold black letters on white paper, lasts forever, the same giant tub of sorry excuse for peanut butter taunting you season after season, refusing to empty no matter how many sandwiches it makes, sitting smug on your momma's kitchen shelf. The Jelly. Grape. Family Size. Won't spread smooth and slick like sweet sweet strawberry jam reserved for the lucky. This jelly is the bastard lovechild of jello and vaseline. Globs fall off the knife refusing to float evenly over the bread's surface, which is threatening to dissolve under the weight. This jelly makes a miracle transformation in the two and a half hours from when it is made on the kitchen counter in the morning to when the school lunch bell rings. It undergoes a chemical reaction, transforming into something akin to sour battery acid. It eats through the bread so when you pull it out of your used lunch bag it smells like laundry and has stained the lifeless bread grey, the color of white canvas sneakers that desperately need replacement, gaping holes in the toes, gaping holes in the bread. No snack, no side dish. Maybe on a good month an apple. Not Red Delicious, not plump and juicy, but the hateful cousin of the apple fed to Snow White by a spiteful witch's hand. Small. Shriveled. Brown mush in the bruised spots. Small, the size of a baby's fist, the kind that comes in the Assorted Fruit Bag on sale for 3.99. Watching with envy as the Popular Girls unpack jello puddings, sandwiches with real meat in them, wheat bread, crusts cut off, hot thermoses of soup or pasta, the steam hitting your nose from across the table. The smell of hot lunch on pizza day, the red squares of cheese and sauce, a fifth grade celebration. No money for hot lunch, not even the yellow strips of Free Lunch tickets that color your schoolgirl cheeks red but fill your belly. Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches. Maybe you choke down the food, trying like fuck to convince yourself that it tastes OK, trying to ignore the mounds of food pouring out of trays and lunchboxes around you. Or maybe you just throw the bag into the diesel grey garbage bins in the corner of the cafeteria and hide against cool green tile on the bathroom wall until the bell rings.

Maine Dandelion Greens

by Marjorie Standish, from Cooking Downeast

Along in May when you notice men, women and children out in our fields, you know it is dandelion green time. Digging dandelion greens in Maine has been going on for generations. Everyone uses a case knife, a flat-type kitchen knife for digging. You can spot the old-timers, they carry bushel baskets.

Once the digging, cleaning and washing is over, the cooking is important. Salt pork is a necessity and many Maine families make a dinner of salt pork, boiled potatoes and dandelion greens.

If yours is a big “mess” of greens, then you will use 1 pound of salt pork. Try to get pork with layers of lean, it adds such flavor. Slice pork into four thick pieces, score them.

Put the pork to cook in a good-sized pan with about a quart of water. Cover kettle, bring to steaming point, lower heat and cook slowly about one hour.

It is a good idea to start cooking the salt pork about 2 ½ to 3 hours before dinner is to be ready.

About 1 ½ hours before dinnertime, drain the well washed greens and place them in the kettle with the salt pork. Cover and bring back to boil. I like to stir the greens for good flavor. Make certain the greens do not stick to the pan. Allow greens and pork to cook for one hour.

It is now a half-hour before dinnertime and the pared potatoes should be added. Place pared potatoes down into the greens. This insures their turning green and taking on the delicious flavor of pork and greens. I like to pepper the pototes, usually there is enogh salt from the pork so they do not need more added, but that can come later if you do need it.

Cover kettle, bring back to steaming point, lower heat and cook until potatoes are tender which takes about one-half hour.

Have a large platter ready, heap the drained dandelion greens on it. Surround the greens with boiled potatoes. Sprinkle paprika on the potatoes. Lay the tender strips of salt pork on the greens. Use a dash of paprika on these, too.

It’s now time to call the family to dinner!

Mamma’s Potato Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1c. Butter or margarine, softened
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 c. crushed potato chips
• 1/2 c. chopped pecans
• 2 c. flour

Directions: Cream margarine, sugar, and vanilla. Add potato chips and pecans. Stir in flour and form into balls. Place on ungreased pan; press balls flat with a flat-bottomed saucer dipped into sugar. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 15 minutes. Makes approximately three dozen small cookies.

Quarters

by goatgirl

*quote from Sherman Alexie

Memere’s Quick Spaghetti

submitted by Bob Bergeron

My little French Canadian Grandmother had a lot of mouths to feed… and she had to stretch a buck back in the day. This is a messy variation on traditional Americanized spaghetti that will feed an army. Make sure you have some good bread on hand.

You will need:

• (4) Four Cans of Tomato Soup
• (1) lbs. of Hamburger
• (1) One Onion
• (2) Two Boxes of Spaghetti
• Italian Seasoning
• Oregano
• Salt & Pepper

Mince the onion. Brown the hamburger and the onion together. Heat the soup with equal parts water in a large pot. Use Italian seasoning, Oregano, salt and pepper to taste. When soup is hot and the hamburger is browned put them together and let them simmer while the spaghetti is cooking. When the spaghetti is done, strain it and combine it with the other ingredients. The result should be a thin sauced but flavorful and filling meal. But don’t forget the bread!

Art is by nature revolutionary… a vital function of the artist is to produce and publish “virtual realities” of social change. Certainly the inverse is true: no radical change can ever occur until a believable and seductive new vision is made public. Professors and politicians may seduce, but only artists can create belief in the new vision—the new myth.

—Judith Merrill, writer