I consider myself something of a food snob. Sometimes. Or maybe it's more of a food poseur. (Note pretentious spelling.) I like duck confit and good dark chocolate and Niman Ranch pork and restaurants that only foodies have ever heard of. I know how to pronounce "amuse bouche," "prix fixe," and "roux," and I know what they are, too. I spent more money on two knives than I've spent on any single item of clothing in my closet. I do that swirly thing with the wine glass and then smell the wine before I taste it, even if I secretly suspect I won't be able to tell the difference either way.
And yet. There is another side to my food psyche, and that's the downmarket side. It's really far down there. Like, Baby Jessica in the well down there. And it's not a recent thing, either, despite the fact that my parents were always big on square meals and sitting down at the table together; it was the kind of household in which neither chocolate milk nor sugared cereal would ever grace our breakfast table. (Honey Nut Cheerios didn't count, since that was honey. It's natural! It comes from bees!) But I guess my mom must've slipped occasionally, because the very first disgusting food craving I can recall having was for pork rinds. Maybe my mom let us have it once or twice and then regretted it ever afterward. All I remember is that every time we went to the grocery store, I would beg to get the pork rinds. I wanted 'em, bad. They would probably make me vomit now—what is even in those things, I don't want to know—but I still have a fond recollection of pork rinds, my gateway trash food.
These days, my number-one guilty pleasure food is Cheetos. Crunchy Cheetos, to be precise. I have no patience for people who think they're disgusting just because the orange color is fake. I mean, c'mon. The color of everything is fake these days. What, you think your fuschia Birkin bag was made from a fuschia-colored cow? (Side note: If anyone reading this actually owns a Birkin bag, I have severely underestimated either my friends or the readership of this blog.) When I was working nights and the vending machine had been freshly stocked with Cheetos, I would stare at the machine for several minutes, tortured, then slink back an hour later and put my money in the slot. Every time. I also love hot dogs off the street, McDonald's McNuggets and Quarter Pounders (hell, Big Macs, too), Bugles, the biscuits from Church's Fried Chicken, Taco Bell chalupas, pepperoni pizza, Krispy Kremes, ramen, the tortilla chips at Chevy's, bacon, and Kraft Easy Mac (because it's easy, duh). My all-time favorite comfort food—one of my favorite dishes, period, I'd venture to say—is made with Campbell's cream of celery soup. Thomas Keller would not approve.
But there is one comfort-food craving I sometimes have that makes me feel guiltiest of all, guiltier even than a big bag of Cheetos. I don't like to admit it, even to myself, because it goes against not only my normal food sensibilities but also whatever meager cultural heritage I still retain. It's a dish that I never tasted until after I'd graduated from college and was working at my first job, hanging out with a bunch of work friends with whom I'd go out to lunch almost every day. Occasionally we'd go to a nearby Chinese restaurant. This wasn't the Chinese restaurant of my youth, the kind with roast duck hanging in the window and live fish that you got to pick out of the tank before you ate it. It was the Chinese restaurant everyone else knows, the kind where you actually have to ask if you want chopsticks. And this was where I first tasted the dish my friend Sean dubbed "candy chicken," which is more commonly known as sesame chicken. Deep-fried chicken parts (or should I say, "parts") covered in the gloppiest, fakest, reddest sauce you've ever seen. No self-respecting Chinese person should ever be caught dead within ten yards of this sorry excuse for Chinese food. And usually I don't give it a moment's thought. But once in a while, out of the blue, I get that awful urge, and it just won't let go of me, like when you can't stop yourself from drunk-dialing that hot, smarmy Republican bastard you hooked up with on a couch at Beauty Bar one night.
And that is how, tonight, pissed off after a long, irritating day of work, I found myself sitting on my couch eating sesame chicken, drinking beer, and watching American Idol. It felt bad. And oh, so good.