Thicker than juice
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 177
FOOD FRIDAY DEP'T.
FOOD FRIDAY: Foraging for Mango Nectar
THE YOUNGER BOY was having friends sleep over, and that meant we needed snacks and beverages. By the time I'd filled my shopping basket at H Mart with spicy crab potato chips and cucumber potato chips and lemon chicken-foot potato chips and assorted rice crackers and a bag of oranges and a quarter of a watermelon, there was no way to add drinks to the pile, much less carry that extra cargo back with m. So after I dumped the grocery bags at home, I went over to the neighborhood market.
I wasn't sure what to get. We don't buy a lot of sodas, usually—a pack of Mexican Cokes once or twice a year, and root beer for floats—and who knows what other people's kids are even conditioned to drink anymore. I was counting on the neighborhood market to help me narrow the soft-drink question. It's not exactly a Latin specialty market but it's not not one, either; the inventory and the layout follow their own particular logic, within the tight constraints of a Manhattan retail footprint. Why are the snack cakes next to the dried beans, which are across from the spaghetti sauces? Someone had a reason!
Right inside the door was a case of tallboy cans of coconut water, the kind with little coconut lumps floating in it, 5 for $4. Five was too many but four was almost five. A display of one-liter sodas had ginger ale buried too deeply to dislodge, but a bottle of pink soda near the top was labeled as raspberry ginger ale. Done. Gatorades in a few colors, because the younger boy likes to get Gatorade. And then—eyes now attuned to the merchandise they'd been ignoring—I got to the fruit nectars.
There are things I enjoy eating and drinking that for some reason it never occurs to me to go out and buy to eat or drink. I thought about writing "certain things" there but I realized the point is that these things are uncertain: I don't really know what they are because I fail to think about them.
The grocery delivery company was giving out a free box of Chipwiches last time around. I don't have any particular loyalty to or interest in Chipwiches themselves—to the point that the younger boy was completely unfamiliar with them and baffled by the whole concept of using cookies to make an ice cream sandwich—but it reminded me I like regular ice cream sandwiches. There was a period earlyish in my adult life when I would just buy a box of ice cream sandwiches and eat them. Eventually I stopped doing that and forgot it was a thing I used to do.
So here, now, were cartons of mango nectar. Mango nectar is a well balanced beverage: fragrant and delicious, but thick and rich enough that you don't gulp a whole cup of it down all at once. I grabbed two cartons of the mango and one carton of pear. I got the Iberia brand instead of Goya because I still begrudge the Goya guy for his pro-Trump nonsense, though it's hard to be absolute about avoiding Goya at the neighborhood market.
With that, I figured, I had a presentable beverage array. Nectars are not fruit juice—"sugar" outranked "concentrated mango pulp" in the ingredients on the Iberia carton, and "artificial mango flavor" was there to bring up the rear—but they were plausibly juicelike. They bore some connection to nature; they would convey that the spirit of wholesomeness had at least been considered.
The kids drank the pink raspberry ginger ale dry. Some of the mango nectar got poured and consumed, and maybe a little of the pear. I finished all the rest over the following days, at my own pace.
FOLLOWUP DEP'T.
Food Friday Followup: Cheez, Look at This!
OVER ON BLUESKY, Indignity follower Doug, provides photographic evidence supporting the conspiracy theory that the Cheez-Its are different.
An investigation launched by Indignity's own Joe MacLeod (he looked at the Cheez-It® web site) reveals further unconfirmed confirmation that the Cheez-It® is different.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast, a Special Edition, in which we discuss some recent attempts at improvements of the sound.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE WOULD LIKE to present instructions in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 'Please, M'm, The Butcher!': A Complete Guide To Catering For The Housewife Of Moderate Means, With Menus Of All Meals For A Year, Numerous Recipes, And Fifty-Two Additional Menus Of Dinners Without Meat, by Beatrice Guarracino, published in 1903, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all; however, availability-wise, the Internet Archive reports:
Latest update on the DDOS attack from Brewster Kahle (Oct 11 @ 10:22am PT):
"The data is safe.
Services are offline as we examine and strengthen them. Sorry, but needed. @internetarchive staff is working hard.
Estimated Timeline: days, not weeks.
Thank you for the offers of pizza (we are set)."
Indignity enthusiastically depends upon, and supports the mission of, the Internet Archive and wishes all the best and good pizza to the staff.
MARKETING DEP'T.
We are down to the last 19 copies of the second printing of 19 Folktales, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! The nights are getting chilly and longer, but the stories are each concise enough to read before your bedtime tea cools off.
A Word from FLAMING HYDRA: The SWAG Fundraiser and ARCHIVE PROJECT
A FIERY COOPERATIVE for press freedom, NOW with gorgeous SWAG. Plus, help preserve THE AWL and THE HAIRPIN archives!! Now it is time for our PHASE TWO Kickstarter, to raise more daily operating funds while we reach even more subscribers—and also to underwrite some exciting new projects.
Many of the Flaming Hydras once wrote and/or edited at The Awl and The Hairpin, and we want these sites to have the posterity they deserve. So we’re getting started on the work of online scholarship. With your help, and the advice and help of the editors of The Awl and The Hairpin, we’re designing an online literary refuge for a handpicked selection of the best work these sites produced, presented with care in a well-designed archival setting, with captioning, commentary, essays, and comment sections available for Hydra subscribers. If we reach our GOAL, we’ll design and develop a living sanctuary for these important landmarks in the history of web publishing (so they don’t wind up in some gross AI chum farm where they steal bylines and wreck everything!!!)
SPECIAL BONUS KICKSTARTER EXCLUSIVE: THE AWL BOOK
This collection of top-shelf pieces from The Awl, edited by Carrie Frye and published and produced by Flaming Hydra in consultation with The Awl’s original editors and contributors, will also include ALL NEW commentary and original essays from contributors and readers.
