#124 - eat!drink!man!woman!

true confession: up until this weekend, i'd never actually sat down & watched eat drink man woman, by director ang lee. regardless, for some reason, when i was trying to come up with a name for this here blog, a variation on the title stuck in my head & eventually won the brainstorm competition. the rest is history. overall, other than his masterpiece, crouching tiger, hidden dragon, i've sort of avoided his films. i blame sense & sensibilty & the ice storm, two movies that i've judged as "pretentious" without even watching. i mean, sure there isn't an outside chance i'd see the incredible hulk, but my unfounded feelings on his films have definitely kept me away from brokeback mountain, lust, caution & eat drink man woman. after seeing eat drink..., i've decided to go back & take a trip through his filmography, maybe even go see taking woodstock.

the story focuses on a taiwanese family that's made up of a widowed father & his three daughters, one who's an old maid school teacher type, one who's an outgoing airline executive & the youngest one, who works at a fast food joint. the father's an aging/semi-retired master chef, who despite the fact that his sense of taste is diminishing, still loves cooking large, gourmet chinese meals. the opening sequence shows him preparing the weekly sunday meal for his family, a ritual that involves hours of cooking with crazy old timey chinese steamers & methods & whatnot. the shit looks AMAZING. about forty-five minutes in, i had to pause the movie when i found myself with my tongue pressed up against the screen.

it's an interesting film with some cool twists & a totally unexpected ending. the plot's driven by the three daughters' changing relationships & feelings about love, but as the title implies, a lot of the story revolves around food. as for that title, it comes from a line in the film, where the father is talking to old wen, his fellow chef & business partner. as they stumble drunk down the hall after closing down an enormous kitchen for the night, the father says to old wen, "eat, drink, man, woman. basic human desires. can't avoid them." it's so true. unfortunately, it means that as far as the name of this blog goes, i've changed that philosophy by replacing sex with snacks. no nookie. just food. that's so not representative of my feelings on life, but oh well.

i like what lee & his co-writer james schamus (who's cowritten every single one of lee's films) have done with the story. we get to see enough of the characters' everyday lives outside of the family that when they're together as a family, we're able to put the way they act in the context of their everyday lives. it speaks to an inherent quality of human relationships: how we act when we're with & not with our families are two separate things, but they still influence each other. it's one of the reasons why tv shows with characters like mad men's don draper & breaking bad's walter white are so damn appealing. they represent extreme versions of our desire to have our own personal experiences & feelings & secrets & whatnot, ones that others aren't privy to. maybe it's the whole "knowledge is power" thing, maybe it isn't. regardless, in this film, the consequences of that desire are profound. eat!drink!secrets!

#124 - eat!drink!man!woman!
snack: barbecue popchips
drink: inko's cherry vanilla white tea



a few months back, i tried out popchips for the first time & then gave em the ol razzing a few weeks later in a column about a ny times article describing their $1.3 million ad campaign. part of the campaign was "an outreach to trend-setters that seeks to generate positive buzz." as an obvious trend-setter, i implored them to reach out to me...& they did. unfortunately, the other residents of my building have sticky fingers & my mailperson tends to just leave stuff sitting out if it doesn't fit in the mailbox, so if they sent me a package in the mail, i never received it. thanks for everything, shoddy brooklyn postal service. you too, grabby neighbors. sorry, popchick.

since i was planning on trying out more of their chips anyhow, i picked up a big bag of barbecue popchips the other night & broke them open during the film. popchips has seven flavors & i've only tried the sea salt & vinegar flavor, so i decided to expand my horizons into bbq territory. like the sea salt & vinegar ones (& i assume the rest of them), since they're popped, they're light & fluffy, like a thinner, crisper rice cake. the bag claims that they're "the tangiest barbecue taste this side of the mason dixon," which is odd. last i checked, they're based out of san fran and the mason-dixon line only runs as far west as the far southwest corner of pennsylvania, so i'm pretty sure they're not even on a side of it. whatever though. it's a somewhat tangy barbecue flavor. they were worthy of me totally popping them into my mouth one after another. it was a puntastic eating experience.

i grabbed a bottle of inko's cherry vanilla white tea to go along with the popchips. inko's is based right across the river in jersey. the company got its start because there weren't any white teas on the market & the founders loved drinking white tea so much that they just had to start their own company. they also discovered that white tea leaves may have cancer-fighting properties, so proceeds from every bottle go to white tea cancer research. here's the science behind it...apparently there are these things in white tea leaves called polyphenols, chemicals that some believe have cancer-fighting properties. since white tea leaves are processed less than other types, they have more polyphenols in them. i can get behind that.

gotta be honest...i couldn't even taste the polyphenols. it's made with all natural ingredients, so what i did taste was a tea flavored with an acceptable amount of cherry & vanilla extracts. the prevalence of the cherry extracts made me think of cherry coke, where the cherry flavor's there, but it's not overwhelming the beverage itself. as far as sweetness goes, on a scale of one to ten, it's "not too sweet." it's sweetened with fructose crystals, an ingredient that the label makes sure to note is "not corn syrup." it's true. fructose crystals are basically the same thing as cane sugar (sucrose) crystals, but without as much of an insulin surge. sounds ok to me. anything that aids my ongoing quest to lower my HFCS consumption is good in my book...doubly so if the whole white tea cancer prevention thing pans out. eat!drink!snack!health!