I'm sitting here eating a huge steak tip salad full of feta-y goodness, with pita bread on the side, and thinking about what it represents.
First of all, it represents my complete moral weakness and lack of strength of character, since it's drug company swag, and I know that the fact that our [name deleted] rep has the advertising budget to casually and spontaneously drop by with a $75 lunch for eight people, only three of whom can actually write prescriptions, is part of the reason that meds cost so much and little old ladies eat cat food and families with no insurance lose their houses trying to pay for their drugs. Some little old woman is probably eating Friskies right now just because I'm chowing down a free salad. When, god knows, I could afford to buy my own lunch. And I don't need this huge mess of 800-calorie feta-y goodness at noon anyway.
But, damn, who passes up free food? Especially when it's free yummy food. A person with much stronger moral fiber than me, apparently.
Secondly, it represents what I would miss most, culinarily-speaking, were I ever to move away. Which I won't. But if I ever did--like say if I ever became fabulously rich and was able to buy property on some Caribbean island, or better yet, an island, and spend 11 months a year there, coming back to New England only in October so I could hike in the foliage--I would need to send my staff on my private jet back to eastern Massachusetts at least once a month to procure me a steak tip or chicken kabob salad. Because I don't think if you venture beyond the Land of the Greek Sub Shop, such things really exist.
Which is a shame. Feta-y goodness should belong to all the world's citizens. As long as, like, they pay for it themselves.
xoxo
4 comments:
I think you should give up on your plan for a Carribean island and start working on buying a Greek island instead.
Cause, you know, one of the standard appetizers is just a big block of feta with a little olive oil and herbs sprinkled on it. And a real Greek salad is tomatoes (and onions and cucumbers) with a big block of feta on top.
And, of course, there's no shortage of kebob type things around, though probably more lamb than steak... but I bet noone would stop you from putting the kabob and the feta together on the same plate. Or you could get takeaway, and put them together in your own home under cover of darkness.
I think your love of feta just goes to prove my long held theory that you're adopted and your biological parents are Greek.
Do you ever find yourself with an unnatural attraction to sheep?
No, that's *you*. :-)
Shouldn't you be UNIXing something right now?
Hey, I have a natural attraction to sheep, that's very different. :)
I wanted to add, though, that the Greeks manage to have both a large feta consumption and universal healthcare, so they're not, apparently, mutually exclusive.
As for Unix-ing, I was blog-responing while in a session, but there's a break at the moment until the evening BOFs. Sadly, this conference is kind of dead,compared to previous years, which may have something to do with how dead this town is. Millions of people and none of them seem to ever be on a sidewalk, or in a restaurant, or in this hotel (who's restaurants suck, so that's not such a surprise).
P.S. The real Greek feta at Costco, the one that says on the smaller-than-Costco size container is the best selling feta in Greece, really kicks ass. If you're Greek, it's probably lame--like MickeyD's feta or something--but compared to most of the fetas I've paid a lot more for, it's really good.
It's probably due to the unfiltered, unpurified, unpasteurized real Greek brine it's packed in, but, hey, I'm trying to take your approach to microbial immunity.
The catch is "best SELLING feta in Greece," which is like the best selling haggis in Scotland. The best feta is probably 10 km up a donkey track and still made by someone's grandmother. With microbes.
Now about the swag that started it all. No guilt: always remember that free food has no calories.
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