Michele Humes (I live in New York and I write about food.)

Two Ballads That Could Be Characterized As Overreacting to Manageable Instances Of Food Loss

Herman’s Hermits’ “No Milk Today”:

No milk today, my love has gone away
The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn
No milk today, it seems a common sight
But people passing by, they don’t know the reason why
How could they know just what this message means
The end of all my hopes, the end of all my dreams 

Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park”:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
And I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have the recipe again
Oh no 

I know what you’re going to say: that these are “metaphors.” Well, they are not good ones.

This Is So Postmodern I Can’t Handle It

Well, well…what do we have here?

Why, it’s Lee Kum Kee’s iconic oyster sauce bottle, only redone with a silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.

Apparently Disney is now licensing–and there’s no particularly succinct way of putting this, so prepare yourselves–ready-to-assemble miniature tableaux of our favorite animated characters participating in a range of Hong Kong gastronomic traditions.

I give you…Mickey’s Magical Noodle Shop:

Here it is, still in the package:

Not to be left out, here’s Minnie presiding over a Chinese New Year feast:

Meanwhile, Donald is running a bo dzai faan (clay pot rice) joint:

Can you spot all the Mickey motifs? There’s some serious attention to detail here; check out the Mickey shaped knob on top of the lacquer candy chest:

The play sets are sold by a store in Hong Kong (from which I’ve purchased an embarrassing number of pointless items, though none quite so pointless as these, which go for about US$60) called Mimo, and possibly at Hong Kong Disneyland, too. Honestly, I’d be prepared to blow, say, four bucks, but just for the bottle of oyster sauce.

Not Quite Alice’s “Drink Me” Potion

That concoction, you’ll remember, had “a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.” Alice found it “very nice.”

Well, this, which I recently discovered in my local Pathmark, isn’t that.

This contains “beef extract, iron, caramel, wine and special flavourings to reenergize and remove the dullness from your life.”

Remove the dullness! Oh, I love this. The wording reminds me of those Slap Chop infomercials that were making the rounds a few years back. (The Slap Chop is a kind of domed chopping device aimed at people with no fine motor skills, or something.) “This tuna looks boring. Stop having a boring tuna, stop having a boring life.”

© Michele Humes