Currently I am amazingly poor. How poor? No internet, rationing phone use, no social life, eating noodle bowls five or six times a week level of poor.
Now, if a person eats the same thing as much as five or six times a week a rational person could come to the conclusion that the eater really, really loves that food. However, my experience with noodle bowls is not like that at all. Mine is one of both the most wondrous love ever imagined and a hatred that borders on perverse.
As amazing as this sounds, before last winter I had never, not even once, had even thought of consuming a soup that comes in a dried form held in a Styrofoam cup. However, one fateful week in December of 2009 all of that changed and I was hooked on that whore of a meal that is called a Kim Chi Noodle Bowl.
The week before Christmas I had a guest staying in my shoebox of an apartment. She stayed for the entire week while I was in and out of Toronto visiting my family in Hamilton. This friend was quite the busy person. She worked North of Toronto but lived downtown, she's a vegan, she hates cooking because she doesn't believe she's good at it (not entirely true.)
Now I'm sure you can guess who introduced me to this devil's spawn of a meal.
That first night she stayed at my apartment she suggested that we have the Kim Chi bowls she had brought for dinner.
I couldn't believe this suggestion at first. For the longest time I had thought that all noodle bowls were eaten by the poor and those with no taste in foods. This girl was not that at all. She enjoyed finer things. When we went out for dinner she wasn't in the habit to order the shittiest meals on the menu. She was not the demographic for such a food item.
Needless to say I had my doubts about the whole thing, but she seemed to know what she was doing and was confident.
“Don't worry, after that first taste you'll be in love. You'll also wonder how you survived this long without them.”
Holy Hell was this woman right.
Soon enough the week was over and she left my apartment and moved out of the country, but the Kim Chi Noodle Bowl love remained with me.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Soon enough I wasn't able to afford things like meats, or bread, or fruits, or vegetables. However noodle bowls cost about $0.99 per bowl. Have one of them for lunch, one for dinner, and nothing but black coffee (hey, cream and sugar aren't free) and you had my diet for over two months.
For the longest time I had absolutely no problem eating nothing but various brands of noodle bowls. Every single brand and flavour I tried tasted delicious. It became not a punishment, but a pleasure to eat nothing but noodle bowls.
People who knew me started to talk about the fact that my diet consisted of nothing but shitty noodles and powder soup mix – fuck them! They don't know what love is!
You know how everyone thinks that Kraft Dinner is the ultimate lazy person meal? Well noodle bowls top the shit out of them.
Stirring? Gone!
Extra ingredients? No sir!
Paying attention to the cooking process? No dice!
Dishes? Go fuck yourself!
Seriously, all you do is boil water and add it to the Styrofoam bowl that the ingredients come in, mix and you're done. How can you get lazier than that?
The meal only needs two dishes; something to eat the food with (spoon or fork. I always pick fork) and a pot to boil the water. When you're done you don't even really need to clean the pot. After all, the only thing you used it for was boiling water. How dirty could it have gotten?
Another added bonus presented itself. Since I ate nothing but noodle bowls the malnutrition that I have gone through by not eating properly has caused me to lose two belt sizes without lifting a finger or taking one single run.
Eating poorly; the easiest way to lose weight imaginable!
So it's cheap, delicious, uses no dishes, and caused me to lose weight with absolutely no effort. How could I possibly grow to hate this food item?
The first reason would have to be the fact that eating nothing but noodle soup really makes me miss real fucking food.
In all seriousness, if someone told me that they would give me a Thanksgiving Day meal today if I pushed six old women down some stairs I would consider it greatly.
I miss having to chew. I miss actual texture of food. I miss fresh fruit and vegetables. Goddamn you, poverty.
You don't even want to know what I'd do for homemade lasagna; it's beyond criminal.
Do you know what else ruins noodle bowls for me? It's the stigma of poverty that comes with the food item.
I kid you not, I go to the Price Chopper on Sherbourne and Howard St. and I still feel crazy poor when I go to the cash with nothing but noodle bowls, coffee and tea (that's a treat for me.)
People who know what Sherbourne is all about will know my extra shame when I tell them that I have, easily, the poorest grocery bill of the entire store every time I'm there.
The stigma does not end at the grocery store though, it continues right into my own apartment every time I have guests.
Visitors come in and look in my kitchen to see what I've got in my fridge (even after I promise them I've got nothing to eat) and see nothing but a jar of mustard in the fridge and a can of coffee in the freezer (that's for freshness!)
Soon, after the open my cabinets to find them stocked with bowls of noodles, they always reply “Jesus fuckin' Christ, Durkin! Get some fuckin' food in here. How do you live?” Not proudly, I can assure you that.
So what's a self-conscious, lazy, poor person to do? Try and find real foods that are just as cheap? That's impossible. Eat less than I already do and eat real adult food? Probably not a good idea either.
I'll probably just keep eating the noodle bowls until I'm thin enough to attract the eye of one of the rich, older women who live where I work.
Oh, to be young, poor and resourceful in the city.
