The Food Cycle

The Food Cycle

I am certain that you have all heard of this natural cycle by which various nutrients, calories and those toxic poisons which are essential for life in small doses endlessly cycle through plant and animal life.

But there is another, lesser known food cycle.
I call it, the Joseph Food Cycle.

The Joseph Food Cycle is driven by certain fundamental forces of nature, the first being a Small Budget. This factor limits and directs the Endless Hunger and Insatiable Appetite, which are the two motivating forces of the cycle, and determine its intensity and period. A predilection towards experimentation allows a intense variety and range of combinations within the cycle.

It begins with Grocery Shopping day. You have just gone to the store, and have purchased your food in bulk so as to maximize your pound per dollar ratio. Now that you are in possession of numerous calorie-laden goods, you think to yourself: I have tons of stuff. What do I want to eat first? The answer, of course, is obvious. TACOS!




You want to eat tacos. Thus begins the cycle.



You make enough taco meat for 5-8 days, and dice up several tomatoes, onions, and a head of lettuce. Then open a bottle of salsa, sour cream, package of tortillas, and shred a pound of sharp cheddar cheese. Add refried beans and season to taste, and viola:

Stage 1, the Taco Consumption, is now in motion.

You now eat tacos for 5-8 days. Lunch and dinner. Breakfast could have some cornflakes or toast (if you really want it), but for the most part, it's tacos and burritos there too.

After 5-8 days, you now have a problem.

No, you're not sick of tacos. That is a stupid idea.

The real problem is Oh dear, I'm running out of taco supplies, I should switch to something else to conserve some of the tacos for later when I'll crave them even more.

Enter Stage 2 of the food cycle.

Stage 2 is the Sandwich Stage. It begins when the loaf of bread is first cut, and ends when you run out of bread. The sandwich stage actually envelopes a plethora of varied and exotic foods. Each meal consists of two pieces of bread with a [sandwich filling] between them.

Sandwich fillings may include but are not limited to:
Ham
Egg
Lettuce
Peanut Butter (crunchy, of course)
Tomato
Cheese
Hummus (another name for bean paste)
Potatoes
Sauerkraut
Turkey
Onions
Bananas
Vegemite
Steak
Honey
Tuna
Bean Paste (another name for hummus)
Chicken
French Fries
Gravy
Cucumbers
Chocolate Chips
Mashed Potatoes
Bacon
Corned beef


As well as:
Any and all leftovers, side dishes, or edibles which can fit between two pieces of bread.

My personal favorite sandwiches include BLTs, PB&J, Ham sandwiches, Rubens, Turkey mashed potatoes and gravy. Banana with peanut butter and chocolate chips isn't bad either, if you want something sweet.

We don't even have time here to go into the vast realms of condiments such as Mayo, Ranch dressing, Mustard, salsa and the like. Nor, as much as I desire to, can I make room here for the volumes that should be written on the varieties of breads, both homemade and store-bought, toasted and soft, that could be described. Let me just say that experimentation and ingenuity provide endless opportunities for entertainment and discovery.

The Sandwich Stage ends for reasons similar to the Taco Consumption. You run out of bread, and need to make something else. (Running out of ingredients is a recurring pattern in almost every stage of the cycle).


Stage three: the Infinite Soup.

After two stages have depleted your initial grocery reserves, you can now see the cans stored in the back of your tiny cabinet. Pull them out, open them up, and pour them into a pot. Then throw any vegetables you have in as well. Toss some chunks of meat and some flavory plants in too, if you feel like it. Over time, whichever ingredient ends up being most prevalent in your soup gets to determine the soup's name. That's how you know whether you have potato soup, tomato soup, chicken noodle, or anything else. Oh! Make sure you use a lot of cilantro too. Cilantro is always good!

As you eat your soup, keep throwing in new ingredients, and adjust the seasoning whenever you feel like it. This is a great idea, because you can get dozens of flavors and textures out of the same (broad interpretation of "same") dish.

And if you feel like it, you can adopt the Ecuadorian tradition of adding olive oil, ketchup, mustard, and/or lemon juice to your soup once it's in your bowl. And more cilantro, of course.

Stage Four: The Baker aka Oh, I have an oven?

As novel as the infinite soup can be, you inevitably start to crave solids again after a while, and start to wish you had maybe saved some bread during the Sandwich Stage. Then it hits you. You have an oven! Bread is made out of flour, right? So you can make some bread, and then you'll have it. You pull out your grandma's amazing bread and roll recipes, and start mixing and kneading. You watch as the dough rises. And rises. And continues to rise. Then you start to worry. As the dough rises like the Russian proletariat to Karl Marx's Manifesto, you realize that your grandma was not cooking for one person. Reflecting on that realization, you wonder if she had ever cooked for one person in her life. Sure enough, a quick check of the recipe reveals a "yields 48 rolls". Well, you wanted bread, right?

You fill your small roll pan, and your roommate's small roll pan, and his bread pan, and then you freeze some of the dough, and put the rest of the dough in the fridge only to bake more when the pans are empty.

You then inhale fresh bread by the pound.

Stage Five: Leftovers, Scavenging and Barter System

The time to return to the grocery store for another shopping run has come. But you don't go. You only have a bike, and there's that ginormous hill in front of your apartment. Then, when it becomes absolutely necessary to go shopping again, you get a flat tire. And then it rains so hard that if you did go shopping, your ingredients would just skip the start of the cycle and enter the Infinite Soup stage.

So what do you eat in the meantime?

Answer: Anything you can find.

Now is where resourcefulness and ingenuity really pay off. First, you go for the leftovers. Search through the fridge, open tupperwares, and ignore expiration dates. That's just the start. Make sure you scrape off fuzzies, (unless you're trying to find some penicillin) and no matter how desperate you get, don't drink the fermented stuff (unless you want to go blind). Hit the food storage if things get really desperate. If that makes you feel guilty, just remember that food storage is for exactly this kind of emergency (i.e. the emergency of no food). Crackers, pretzels, and dry ramen noodles that you opened a week ago to get the seasoning packets will now form the majority of your nutrients. Make them last as long as you can. Mooch off of friends. Personal food reserves can be augmented by finding free food in various places, such as club-sponsored social events, random neighborhood children's birthday parties, and soup kitchens. Certain restaurants will secretly give- err- "throw" expired food away at closing time by putting it in your hands if you are friendly and look sufficiently emaciated. Alternatively, animals living in residential areas with a Bodos Bagels are surprisingly trusting (and plump), due to a steady diet of bagels people throw at them because they are "just too cute". You are not cute enough to have bagels thrown at you, but eating the animals themselves is almost as good. Squirrels, groundhogs, rabbits, ducks and geese are only a few of your friendly fuzzy neighborhood edibles.


Grocery Day

Hooray! You bought groceries! Restock those shelves! Fill up that fridge! Rebuild your fat reserves!

You now have groceries, and you know what that means. It's time for Tacos again!!




Welp, now you know how to feed yourself. Or maybe how you shouldn't, but already do.