Operation: Enduring Tofu – Intermission

This is simply an intermission for my not-so-regular series where I will be exploring the shallow origins not only of my vegetarianism, but my journey to follow up nineteen years later and re-evaluate whether or not I should continue being one. If you’d like to catch up, you can do so by reading:

Chapter I: The Legend of Shiny – An Introduction
Chapter II: Acquired Memories
Chapter III: The Celery Stalk

Today is just a reminder that I’ll be restarting this series quite soon — and, along with it, my quest for Robin, the girl I pretty much became vegetarian for nineteen summers ago. Exciting, no?

A few days ago I included a video clip from an amazing film called Wet Hot American Summer. Released in 2001 as a project from former members of The State and Stella David Wain and Michael Showalter, the movie parodies summer camp movies of the 1980s in a smart, sassy way on the opposite side of the scale from the Scary Movie series. The film stars, among many others, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Michael Ian Black, Ken Marino, Bradley Cooper, Molly Shannon, Marguerite Moreau and, in possibly his best film role ever, Christopher Meloni as the Vietnam vet turned camp chef.

It’s a brilliant film which is incredibly crude and inappropriate, but in a smart way. The deleted scenes reel shows quite a few takes that didn’t make it in because the material was just too raw and involved the child actors portraying real campers. The following video is a two-scene montage which depicts exactly that.  It answers a question likely asked of all camp kitchen staff by the annoying vegan kid who won’t eat the burgers at the camp cookout, and Chris Meloni speaks for cooks everywhere who grin, bear it, and serve the kids with love and affection.

(NSFW for language.)

Have a wonderful Friday. For those of you who are traveling, travel safely. Looking forward to meeting some of you on Saturday! And remember to eat the @$^&! corn!