Cook Suck

Thursday 22 March 2018

“Internet food police” Cook Suck is good fun. I’ll keenly defend people’s right to eat whatever sub-diarrhoea terrible food they like, and even to publish photographic evidence inexplicably on Facebook – but Cook Suck writes very well about it when they do.

A quirk – well, apparently, a long-standing feature – of Unix graphical environments is being able to copy and paste text by some surprising combination of selecting text and clicking the middle mouse button. If you ever mindlessly select text while reading, are a fan of scrolling with a scroll wheel (who isn’t?), and are generally some kind of neophyte, this makes it all to easy to do accidentally. And so it was that I accidentally pasted one of Cook Suck’s profane outbursts into a collaborative Google Doc a few years ago.

Cool story.

Loyd Grossman follows me on Instagram, which is my one interesting fact about Instagram. (“Loyd Grossman” here means the actual former Masterchef and Jet Bronx & The Forbidden frontman, and not the brand of cooking sauces named in his honour.) More to the point, I follow him, and the steady mixture of art and gastronomy is excellent value. When the subject is edible, the captions inevitably contain adjectives like exemplary, superb, outstanding, and sensational. There’s an opportunity, there, for some data science (well, maybe just a Wordle) and/or some machine learning (well, maybe just a Markov chain).

The adjectives are well-warranted, as Grossman goes to some nice restaurants, and the pictures – like frankly everything I’m shown by Instagram’s algorithmic timeline – look delicious. Curiously, there’s never any sauce from a jar – and that’s OK! I can actually look at a picture of some sorrel dressing without my own life seeming bland by comparison. Even though it is.

For maximal self-esteem, it’s definitely good to laugh at people – presumably privileged people – who do silly things. American Exchange Students in Italy Start Fire by Cooking Pasta Without Water:

Due to an error in translation, a previous version of this article erroneously stated that the firefighters comforted the students by claiming that they didn’t know how to make pasta, either. This was not the case and we regret the error.