In Defense of Slop

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If you scroll through Instagram right now, you will be inundated with hot people socially distancing next to beautiful food. The bowls are framed just so, the shapes of perfectly julienned vegetables are contrasted alongside other shapes, perhaps of sliced meat. The colors are bright and vivid. Home, these posts scream at us, is their sanctuary to make beautifully plated food. They also contain inanely long captions that truly nobody is going to read entirely.

Not I, reader. Case in point: two nights ago, I ate a Japanese Curry that was truly great. It came from bricks of congealed spices I had luckily made months ago (from this wonderful Tejal Rao recipe). I sautéed some onions and garlic, then added some broccoli, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Then came water and the bricks, which simmered for a while to cook everything through.

The final product was beige-ish yellowy grey. There were imperfect chops fo various vegetables. It was clumsily ladled into a bowl that I slurped up along side my housemates as if I were Oliver Twist. But the aesthetic felt right. The next night we ate rice and beans, which had a different flavor profile but a similar strain of gloop—both meals used the same bowls.



Gloop and slop may be the defining features of my brain right now, and I will happily eat anything that mirrors it. My thoughts feel muddled and unshapely, only sometimes vaguely comfortable and soothing when properly mixed up.

I'm not an oatmeal person, but I think this current predilection is an offshoot of that. It's about comfort with only a few surprises. You want to just sit and stick your spoon into a mass of varying thickness that all tastes properly salted and good. It's like baby food for adults, but don't tell yourself that when you're eating it.

This isn't to say there isn't a place for beautiful food. Everyone on my social media feed is currently making focaccia: something tailor-made for hot-food-person-Instagram. And, fuck it, so am I because I have so much time on my hands. But it's just as important that we appreciate the less aesthetically pleasing things right now that bring us just as much joy. A bowl of slop is sometimes the only way to properly connect your physical and psychological states.

P.S. I am so bored that I put my hair up into small strands with bobby pins and I currently look like Nancy Silverton, so anything I say about food is correct. I didn't make the rules, sorry. 

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