It seems like there's finally an end to the dreariness for us introverted extremists who keep frozen veggie chix patties in our freezers all the live long day. This is good because those things were like forgotten glue you didn't fry them up in a frying pan with olive oil or something, and if I had a pan and olive oil, why would I make a chick patty?

I'll be honest, I'm such a crazy dude these days I can't even get it together to get a plate and a pan and the oil in one room on the same day. I'm busy. I'm a city-livn' son of a gun.  I just put the veggie burger on a plate and microwave it (uncovered) for 90 seconds, then put some mustard on it and eat it like a pie, or a small thin round meatloaf. In other words, I don't pick it up at all. I use the fork to cut it and then left it to my mouth, tenderly, I don't even get hummus anymore, because it goes bad all the time before I can finish it.

All the other bloggers on this site praise the lastest breakthrough in food porn technology and I'm all for that, but for me food isn't porn, it's a drug, it's a consciousness raising tool. It helps ease the panic attacks and keeps the world in focus. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy instead of disoriented and hostile. I like it in small doses, in bar sizes, in easy to prepare portions. I'd be right at home in a future like the one portrayed in Soylent Green, or with K-rations like Saving Private Ryan. The spreads in films like Babette's Feast cause me anxiety, as if I'm going to end up being the one who does all the dishes, or worse-- made to feel guilty the whole ride home by my mom, "That nice French lady made that huge feast and killed a sea turtle and evrything and you couldn't even volunteer to do the dishes." Such guilt! Who needs it?
Even worse is how as a kid I was often forced to eat pot roast and drink warm milk at the home of my best friend Alan. Alan's mom had this twisted idea that kids needed to drink warm milk after getting dehydrated all day out in the sun running around like maniacs.  As if that wasn't agonizing enough, there was the uncomfortable silences as a result of her thinking almost any topic of conversation was not correct for the dinner table. So everyone just kept quiet, eating as hurriedly as possible so they could slip away, though this was hard due to the intense dryness and chewiness of all the foods on the table. These agonized silences were marked by his mom saying "everyone must be hungry" or "it's a compliment to my food, I guess, that no one's talking, because everyone's eating."

 I wanted to throw the stringy, dried pot roast at her and shriek with animal rage, but of course, a mere lad of 9, I was too shy even to ask for water.

 Needless to say, I'm still traumatized. Veggie burgers are my way of getting revenge. When people make a huge production of roasts and so forth I understand why, maybe they have more pleasant memories of family events.  But one mention of pot roast around me and I fall to the ground, paralyzed with boredom. The words "I guess everyone must be hungry since no one's talking." echo through my head and I start clawing at my throat, begging for sweet, sweet soda in a gagging croak no one but my analyst or the very drunk can understand.

Luckily, Morningstar Farms has changed all that. Their Chik Patties aint your gramma's chik patties, or my childhood friend Alan's mom's chix patties, no sire Morning Star Farm's are Paremsan Ranch Chik Patties.

Of course the hardcore vegans amongst us should now begin the suspicious nose wrinkling in the knowledge that Morningstar Farms is just the Kelloggs Corporation hiding under a wide brimmed straw hat. Still, the health conscious consumer is getting a voice heard in the corporate ubermarket, which proves that corportions aren't evil so much as just plain profit conscious. When we wise up and all stop buying stuff just cause it tastes good, then the megoliths will reverse engineer their death machines in order to make us healthy, just as long as we promise to give them the same dollars. Thus, where privately owned holistic organizations who may be nameless let their burgers and fake chicken patties taste like cardboard because that's the righteous way (that's the way this stuff tastes after all, if you dont chemicalize it), the corporations find ingenious ways to stay within the guidelines of current co-op mandates while keeping their preservatives on, and their xanthan gum on, and their flavors on.

Anyway, there's milk in these Morningstar farms chick patties, too... paremesan cheese to be precise, and there's xanthan gum and sodium alginate, but the sucker is damned good despite of or because of all that. Hell, I've even stopped using bread to eat them, because bread now depresses me.  It loafs around the digestion like a slacker promising to get a job as soon as he gets the money to get his car fixed. It goes stale unless you freeze it, and if you freeze it you have to hack the slices apart with a knife and end up cutting your cuticles off. Now I just add some mustard in a lovely little uzumaki pattern on the top and serve with fork and glass of well-iced sugary... soda...

Biting a forkfull of one of these golden sunshine discs, one's first impression is "Holy Cats! What elegant texture!" The paremsan is cunningly interwoven into the overall structure of the patty so that it seems to be made of some trans-cheese-chicken substance. Of course for some of us the presence of animal produce in a soy patty defeats the whole purpose of soy in the first place. For some of us, though, it's about a little dab will do you. The cow isn't asked to give up it's life, just a little bit of its milk. I'm into the idea of re-introducing animal proteins into soy products... it's progressive. It's almost punk rock. I personally think shunning animal products altogether is too extreme. The human body was meant to have some flesh of other animals coarsing through it on occasion. This the nature of our horrible dog eat dog universe!! We can evolve, we can enter new realms of consciousness, but if we refuse to acknowledge the existance of our baser selves, it will always return tenfold in nightmarish form, reaching its giant claw up from the unconscious, yelling "you could have at least offered to do the dishes!" No thanks. I don't want stringy pot roast, but I don't want cardboard flavored gluten either. I'm casting my middle of the road, baby step vote with Morningstar!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Next week I'll be introducing to this blog my special guest, the lovely Yukari Rymar, who will be giving us the insider scoop on her grandmother's "down home" recipes from Osaka, Japan!