My Patriotic Potatoes

We have a 4th of July cookout later, and I have just started my food prep:



I'm making roasted fingerling potatoes, and as you can see they are red, white, and purple. I'm going to pretend the purple ones are blue, and force all the guests at the cookout to pretend that they are blue as well. If I were really cynical, I'd say that forcing other people to believe what you believe is kind of what America is really all about given the passage of things like Proposition 8 in California or the Defense of Marriage Act, but I'm going to ignore my somewhat cynical nature for the day and embrace patriotism instead. After all, as much as America is about the tyranny of the majority, it's also about the protection of the minority and their freedoms, like my freedom to write something critical about America on my blog and then go make potatoes.

Enjoy my red, white, and (almost) blue potatoes, friends. I swear they're just a side dish, not a metaphor.

And also, thanks for the day off tomorrow, America. I have about two weeks worth of photos and adventures to sort through.

innovation

What's that, you say?



I can tilt my head back and just pour donut holes into my mouth?

God bless America.

They're very American!

I was walking through Target when I spotted a wall of these, enough to cover an entire endcap in the Pantry section:



Good God, I thought. Is there nothing people won’t slap a flag on? And what kind of people buy these out of all the other cupcakes in boxes? Is there really someone who’s going to look at these and think, “I like Ho-Ho’s and all, but they’re not very, you know, AMERICAN. I better get these instead.”

On the other hand, perhaps they’re not so absurd after all. What could be more American than driving to a big box store in walking distance to buy 3000 calories, utterly devoid of a single vitamin and individually wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic, for a dollar and change?

I don’t know about the other nationalistic shoppers at Target, but that argument was enough to sway me. And there is something more American than buying them:



Eating them.

So many people have written over the years that America is a sham, an empty dream, all flash and no substance, an oddly tasteless snack cake with waxy frosting that looks interesting but leaves your mouth dry. Could it be that Little Debbie, far from being a jingoistic Americentric flag-waving baker is actually a subversive metaphorist? Is she making her own comment on the “Spirit of America” by embodying it in the form of empty calories in a pretty wrapper?

Probably not.

Sometimes a snack cake is just a snack cake.