United States of Allergies

For about 1 month a couple of months ago, I thought I was allergic to peanuts. Life was hard in the 2-week period I was waiting for my allergy RAST test to come back. Suddenly everything I wanted to eat seemed to have nuts or was cooked in peanut oil. It drove me nuts. I think I lost some weight during that period. I was having lunch with Howie and Howie's British colleague was totally amazed at my nutty allergy. He went, 'You're allergic to peanuts? A peanut?! Well, that's absolutely silly, isn't it? Going by the theory of evolution, you're obviously meant to be wiped out!" Hmm....well, yeah, I guess. Unless I was American. Then I could very well live happily ever after with beautiful children and grandkids who are very healthy except for their special dietary requirements. I like the word 'special'. The Americans use it in a very comforting manner. It makes you feel all warm and well, special.

America is a great place to develop all sorts of weird food affectations. You could develop all the allergies known to modern medicine and more but you wouldn't have to worry about starving. Which is what wld happen to you if you were unlucky enough to be born anywhere but America. But you could not have. It just doesn't happen. America is where all nightmare dinner guests are born. Nowhere else.

I have discovered lots of fascinating stuff here. There's so much you can learn just by being a curious shopper. I am the person who reads the label on everything. All this information is just junk food for my brain if I do not share it with you. So, here it is:

My Top Unusual Food* Finds For Special People
* Term is used very loosely.
In no particular order, but the coffee thingy is at the top for a good reason.

1. The Soy Drink That Thinks It's Coffee

If you are allergic to coffee or just think it's bad or too acidic for you, but you suffer from coffee envy (I know, it doesn't make sense to me either), you could have Rocamojo! Rocamojo is a 'coffee substitute' made from 100% (organic) soy. Its slogan is "Making Coffee Healthy!" It also says that it's caffeine-free. Of course it's caffeine-free! It's soy! It's like having the sugarcane juice seller saying his drinks are caffeine-free! I don't get it. Dude, if you think coffee is bad for you, then drink other stuff! Like decaf. Or water. Or juice. Or soy/rice/cow milk. Did that ever occur to you?

2. Live Pizza

The pizza is alive! Live Food or Raw Food is just that - raw. Raw foodists believe that enzymes are key components of digestion and nutrition and that when food is subjected to heat above 118 Fahrenheit, precious enzymes are lost. So they eat everything raw. It involves a lot of dehydrators and sprouting. Like to make the crust of a live pizza, you use sprouted rye, sprouted buckwheat groats or god knows what else and shape it into a plate for your raw veg toppings. Making a burger requires lots of vegetables and a dehydrator. So you get a ... dehydrated raw burger? That stuff is not supposed to make you gag. It's supposed to make you glow with life.

3. Food For Allergic Pets

Do you have a special dog with special needs? A cat who is allergic to fish? Get it special pet food! There is even vegetarian pet food for very special pets who think consuming the flesh of other animals is terribly inhumane.

4. Treats For Those Who Are Allergic To Everything

If you are allergic to everything, like dairy (duh, of course.), gluten, wheat, the list goes on, you don't have to miss out on sweet treats. Have an allergen-free cookie! It covers the whole riot of allergies. The cookies are made from sorghum flour. I checked. I wanted to see what flour they use to make these cookies bc these days, people are allergic to all sorts of flours. So, they use sorghum. No one is allergic to every type of flour AND sorghum, right? If you are, well, maybe you just don't deserve a cookie. The name of a company that makes these considerate cookies is, appropriately, Enjoy Life. Enjoy Life makes cookies in many exciting flavours like choc chip and oatmeal, except...it's no-oat! Yeah, no-oat oatmeal! Because there are people out there who are allergic to oatmeal but for some reason, enjoy eating oatmeal cookies that have no oatmeal and therefore cannot taste like oatmeal. Don't you just love America?

5. Garb

That's garb as in clothes, not garbage. If you're allergic to many types of clothes, and do not wish to join a nudist colony, you could buy allergy-free clothing. They are usually made from organic cotton. I don't know why it has to be organic. Maybe you are so sensitive your skin reacts to the pesticides used on the cotton plantation 3 years before your T-shirt was made. If you are a vegan who wants to make a statement, you could buy T-shirts that say 'Milk Is Murder', shop in vegan shoe stores and buy recycled bags. No, they are not stolen bags. They're bags creatively made with recycled candy wrappers (allergen-free candy?), discarded cloth and lots of other reusable materials that bags shouldn't be made of. And for every bag that you buy, a tree is planted. That's enough to make Gucci-shoppers green with envy and convert! If you have kids who have problematic food allergies but who are too young to know they are special and therefore like to beg for food from strangers, buy them t-shirts that say "PLEASE DO NOT FEED ME. I HAVE FOOD ALLERGIES." I am not kidding. I have seen it. I think it's copied from hospitals. My brother told me that toddlers in the pediatric dept of his hospital have 'please do not feed' signs on their clothes when they are fasting for an operation. I think these T-shirts do not work outside America though. I mean, people might think it's a joke or not understand it altogether.

Come to the United States of America if you have food allergy concerns or dietary needs that can’t be satisfied in your country where you're treated like a pest or a sad excuse for a human being. The United States of America is the best place in the world for the special people who have allergies or abnormal views about food. Don't be a sufferer. Be special.

I Just Wanted To Buy Some Milk

I woke up at 12 noon last Wed and had to get out of the hotel room so that it cld get cleaned. I decided to go to Union Sq because there's a farmer's market there on that day and I thought I could buy milk and fruit. So I took the subway there and ended up in an anti-Bush demonstration. Or a 'revolution', as the organisers put it. 'The beginning of the end of the Bush regime'. To find out more, check out www.worldcantwait.net



The people of the revolution.














Kingpins of the axis of evil.


If you can't beat them, bowl 'em.

I bought a couple of T-shirts. You know, to support the cause. And then I went to the market.


I think I've never seen a magenta carrot before. And I thought white carrots = daikon. Here's a deep thought, if you eat too much carrots, you get carotenemia and your skin turns orangey yellow, so what happens if you munch on too many magenta carrots? Do you turn mauve? I like the way they sell the chillies - in bouquets. It's so pretty. In Indonesia, they just pile them up in mounds and the chillies are sold to you in plastic bags, stapled shut.


All in all, it was a good, albeit unusual day at the market.

Yale

I went to New Haven last Tuesday. I would not usually go to a place like New Haven on a vacation. I've had enough of ghetto fr West Philly to last me a long while. But I went to New Haven because my good friend, Damien, is a grad student in Yale. And since Yale grad students are very busy, I had to make the trip to New Haven to visit Damien.


Damien doesn't like his photo taken. Esp if the photographer is taking it from his 'bad side'. Damien, I think you look like Takeshi Kaneshiro in this 'bad' picture. Maybe it's the hand...
Yale is really really pretty. It's like a very very rich Cambridge. Cambridge on steroids. You wldn't think New Haven is ghetto at all if you just stuck to the Yale campus like I did. There are dorms in Yale where the food halls serve organic food. Organic food! How about dorm rooms designed by Ian Schrager?



This is the entrance to the library.

I expected to see a choir of angels singing when I walked in and looked at the ceiling. It makes my head spin just to think how privileged these college kids are. The annual funding for this library alone is probably more than what an entire city university in Indonesia uses in a year, even if you included what gets siphoned away by corruption. This is why the best American college education is the best tertiary education in the world, bar none. Everthing else is good but too poor to maximise its potential, quite rich but government-funded or worse, run by religious organisations or just plain rubbish.

The Memorial Gateway of Branford College. Seniors walk though the Gate on Commencement Day. They say if you walk through the gate before then, you will not be able to graduate. That's like the compass on Locust Walk at Penn.

When I saw this building, I said to Damien, "omigod, that's such a dumb design. Why wld anyone build a building with no windows?!" Damien didn't know what building it was so we went to check it out. Turns out it's the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (aha! that's why they don't need windows!) and it's one of the most amazing buildings I've ever seen.


When I entered the building, the beauty of the place made me gasp. There is a glass tower right in the middle of the room. It rises to the ceiling, filled with rows and rows of books. Even the Gutenberg Bible is here. And then there's the light. It's hard to believe that the marble panels that glow with soft rose light and make the room feel luminous and otherwordly are the same formidable slabs that made the building look like a mausoleum from the outside.

Halloween

I was in the Upper West Side on Monday afternoon. It was a gorgeous fall day, perfect for a long walk up Riverside Park. People were jogging, walking their dogs and just enjoying the unbelievably good weather.


79th St Boat Basin.
You've Got Mail was largely set in Upper West Side and the Boat Basin was where Tom Hanks' boat was moored. The movie is one of my favourite chick flicks ever. It also made Gotham look almost pretty.



Getting the plush toys ready for the camera.

There were many kids all dressed up in the Park, ready for their little Halloween parade. The narcissistic bumblebee was so cute.


There was a street in the neighbourhood that was very well decked out.











I went to grab a bagel at the famous H&H bagel before going downtown for the big Village Halloween Parade. V good, better than Daniel's.


The Village Halloween Parade is the biggest Halloween event in the country. Everyone in costume can participate and walk up Sixth Ave with the Parade. And everyone loves having his picture taken. That's why they are in costume.

And, I saw Jesus that night. Yeah, in NYC. In front of a NYPD van. When I was taking this picture, someone said, 'oh man, Jesus is getting fucked again?!"





I know one of them is either chicken or tuna but what is the other one?! wedding cake?