Pancake Day

The move is over and done with and my car has now been towed to a local garage after I finally admitted to myself that a week’s worth of DIY attempts to diagnose and fix its problems were about as effective and well-informed as me trying to treat a tuberculosis patient by pouring Pepto Bismal on his feet. My part time summer work has shrank to about 2.5 hours per day, at least for the moment. Consequently, I have time to spend again and that's a good thing because I have oh so many important things to discuss here on Adult Concerns: death, sex, God, law, war, love, breakfast, power, despair, community, liberty, technology, beauty, etc. I'll use a random number generator to decide which of the above topics to discuss. And it looks like it's going to be...breakfast.

For many years, I had this preferred breakfast that was defined very rigidly. No matter how many times I made it for myself, it never failed to be a delicious treat that I enjoyed to the utmost. I didn’t eat it every day or even most days, and there was still plenty of room in my life for other breakfasts, but this was definitely my breakfast. Though I never named it, I grew to think of it as a small part of my identity. I believe the habit started sometime around 2005 and continued until well into 2009, after which I abruptly started to find it uninteresting.

I was reminded of my breakfast recently when I read AZ's post about "Egg Horn Muffins". My breakfast was very similar, though much less classy. I'll call it English Muffins South Sudan in honor of the world's newest nation as of last weekend:

English Muffins South Sudan

• 2 large eggs
• One split English muffin
• 1 T Butter (or olive oil)
• Sharp cheddar cheese
• Ketchup, vinegar based hot sauce (like Tabasco), coarse ground black pepper, salt

Top the muffin halves with a medium slice of cheddar cheese and toast in a toaster oven until the muffin is just beginning to brown and the cheese is thoroughly melted but not seared. Meanwhile, fry the eggs over medium (in the oil). This is the crucial part -- they need to be truly over medium, meaning the white is entirely cooked through and is beginning to crisp slightly around the edges while the yolk is just beginning to solidify but is not broken. The key is having the pan at the right medium-hot temperature and keeping it there throughout the cooking process, and it takes some practice.

Slide one egg on top of each muffin half and drizzle with disgusting tendrils of gloppy ketchup (preferably from a ¾ empty plastic bottle with lots of crusty crimson residue around the spout), pallid spurts of cheap hot sauce, and a pinch of hypertension-inducing salt. Coarsely grind plenty of black pepper over the whole thing and there you are.

Eggs, cheese, English muffins, and the kind of debased, blunt-edged seasonings that bars use to stimulate the cigarette-seared palates of drunks. It’s barely even a recipe, but oh I loved it. In texture and taste, it was perfect -- the egg and cheese and muffin rich and creamy yet toothsome, the ketchup and hot sauce and pepper spiking it through with just enough tang and heat…delicious. I made it for myself wherever I went, and then one day it became boring to me.


Where did I get English Muffins South Sudan? No particular place. It evolved out of endless breakfast experiments, but once it achieved its ideal form it remained static for years. Like the cockroach, it simply had no need to evolve further past a certain point. Oh, mutations did occur -- I'd add onions and herbs, experiment with the cheeses and sauces, but nothing did the trick like the precise formula above. So why did it captivate me for such a long time and then suddenly lose its appeal? This I don’t know. Why do you sometimes listen to an album forty times in the space of a few months, after which it falls by the wayside? I think it's interesting to think about the idea of taste and preference using the language of memes. The word "meme" has in recent years been popularized to mean something like what this very sad website says -- "ideas that people can’t help sharing with their friends" -- but it's worth remembering the pre-cat-macro conceptualization of what a meme is, because it's much broader and more interesting. Memes are defined (by Wikipedia (of course)) as ideas, behaviors, and styles that spread from person to person. We can think of such intangibles as analogous to organisms, because like organisms they are subject to Darwinian pressures that will cause them to either change or go extinct based on their ability to adapt to their environment (meaning society). A meme can be as large as "democracy" or "Christianity" or as small as "track lighting" or "flat cap".

But what about how an idea, opinion, or taste evolves within the internal mental environment of your own head? If we conceptualize the individual mind (rather than society) as an ecosystem, we can imagine how there would also be evolutionary forces at work between different mental and emotional objects within the diverse biomes of our consciousness and subconscious. Everything from “human beings are inherently vested with certain rights because they are human” to "I want Rick Santorum to be the President of the United States”, from "I realize my husband is cheating on me with the mail lady" to "delicious English Muffins topped with melted cheese and fried eggs!", could be seen as such. Of course, some of these organisms play a more visible role in their ecosystems than others but maybe their endlessly diverse forms and functions abide by universal rules. After all, it’s the discovery and description of such rules that allows us to conceptualize elephants and mushrooms and extremophiles as part of the same vast system of life. (Note: When I was first writing this, I thought it was an original idea, but Wikipedia makes mention of some researchers classifying memes as "i-memes" and "e-memes", meaning internal and external, though it doesn't explain further.)

In the biological world, evolutionary pressures are largely driven by shifts in dependencies between species. For example, an evolved resistance to an intestinal parasite might give a species of beetle an edge over its competitors, thus expanding the size of its population and killing a larger number of the plants on which it feeds while also providing increased nutrition for certain species of birds well suited to feed on the insects, and so on. Over enough time, countless numbers of small shifts transform entire ecosystems into an unrecognizably altered world with a wholly different set of pressures. No matter how well-adapted, no species is capable of surviving in an unchanged form forever, and revolutionary collapses frequently take place on all scales of the biological world. The stock of the trilobites or the dinosaurs soars high for millions and millions of years, and then one day crashes. Sometimes it’s a Permian or K-T style catastrophe, but sometimes it’s just…obsolescence.

I believe this is what happened with my breakfast. Whatever combination of qualities precipitated its rise within the mysterious internal swamps of personal taste and sensory preference – whatever gave it its evolutionary edge – the environment it lived within shifted in a way that eventually rendered it less well adapted. I don’t know if there’s more than can be said on the explicability of taste than just that – that change happens from enigmatic quarters. There is a mechanism in there somewhere, but can it be examined? I do know that around the same time I lost interest in English Muffins South Sudan, I picked up an entirely different breakfast habit – a bowl of plain rolled oats microwaved with a pinch of salt and a generous handful of raisins. Quick, easy, and pennies to make, its straight-faced blandness always makes me feel like I’m going to try to get something accomplished today, no matter how many countless times I’ve proven myself wrong in the hours that follow. This is my default breakfast today. Meaning? I don’t know, but I think I’m out of steam with this idea.

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This morning, I am trying a new breakfast cereal that is tailor made for an adult such as myself. I found it at Hong Kong Market yesterday and felt immediately drawn to it. Instant Cereal for Adults contains the following ingredients: barley, oats, whole wheat, black sesame, buckwheat, wheat germ, black bean, green bean, black rice, wheat flake, cowpea, lotus seed, green pea, fox nut, pine nut, yam, red bean, lily bulb, almond, pupkin seed, fructus lycii, carrot, colza seed, creamer, shugar, gingko nuts, black dates, and oligofructose (inulin). Cereal don't get any more Adult than that, folks. I'm going to make some right now.

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Ok, I made some and ate it! It wasn't bad at all and was remarkably filling. It comes in these little self-contained sachets, so if you'd like some let me know and I'll send you one. The back says that, "it is the best nutritious supplement for adult or vegetarian."

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Perhaps from the subject line of this post you might have thought that I was going to talk about pancakes. Well, you were wrong (but that's ok -- we all are sometimes). In the course of my research, I discovered that Fat Tuesday -- Mardi Gras -- is also sometimes called Pancake Day! You can read about it here. All I have to say is, while I share Alex's enthusiasm for Newfoundland, nobody better put a nail in my damn pancake if and when I visit.

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Now then. What do YOU like for breakfast?