A rudimentary paste

roboslop

Hi, clowns!

By this time next week, I’ll be recovering from another eye surgery, so the newsletter’ll be off while I go to my follow-up appointments and such. I’ve mentioned this on the newsletter before, but I have an incurable condition in my right eye (called Coat’s Disease), which causes all sorts of fun stuff for me, like blindness and high eye pressure. I’ll be getting an implant in the bad eye that’s supposed to relieve some of the pesky excess pressure in it. Oh, the marvels of medical technology never cease to amaze me.

What’s cool is that I already have an artificial lens in that eye, thanks to an earlier cataract replacement, and at this rate, I’ll soon be part man, all machine. Just like humanity’s best friend, RoboCop.

This is a screenshot of RoboCop: Rogue City from my actual Xbox. I wish you could customize him with a Hawaiian shirt or something.

What’s funny is Davida and I have actually been playing a Robocop game on our Xbox, called RoboCop: Rogue City.

We have this somewhat adorable couple’s habit of playing a video game together at the end of the night to unwind for the day, taking turns on the controller. This RoboCop game is actually kind of hilarious, and so far we have learned exactly two things: One, RoboCop can’t duck, and two, this graceful PEZ dispenser of justice also cannot peek around corners, so he has to run straight into a hail of bullets every time he gets into a fight. That seems like some sort of design flaw, but what do I know?

Because of RoboCop’s physical limitations, he is also not allowed to sit down during police meetings.

I won’t go through the entire plot of the original movie, but if any of you RoboCop fans recall his origin story, it’s not exactly explained how RoboCop eats, just that he sort of does.

Supposedly our boy Robo enjoys what’s described as “a rudimentary paste that sustains his organic system.”

A character describes that this nasty-looking paste, which comes out of some kind of slushie dispenser, “tastes like baby food.” The ingredients in it are never explained, and the movie never ends up showing RoboCop ever consuming it. Now, considering I’m well on my way to becoming RoboCop, I figured that I must also design myself a “rudimentary paste” in order to heal, containing all the important food groups to ensure that I, too, cannot duck or peek around corners while barging into a firefight.

So I did some serious thinking about what type of food I would need to keep me fueled.

First of all, it would have to be a well-rounded form of sustenance, and second of all, I would obviously prefer for my rudimentary paste to be based off a food I enjoy. My immediate thought landed on a burrito, because clearly a burrito is a perfect food. There’s a carby flour tortilla, protein in the form of meat, fibrous beans, veggies like lettuce and tomato, and healthy fats from the avocado I always happily pay extra for. You cannot argue with my logic here, burritos are clearly the world’s most nutritious food.

So I bought a steak burrito from my favorite local taco stand, let it cool off slightly in the fridge for a while, and sliced it neatly for processing.

I have to say, this was oddly satisfying, yet somehow disturbing.

It reminded me of Body Worlds, that graphic museum display I went to go see once, the one with the human cadaver cross-sections in it. Burrito Worlds. Maybe I should turn this into a traveling museum display with various styles of burritos, charge a ton per ticket, and pay for my surgery this way. If any of you steal this idea I will sue the junk off of you.

I put the slices of burrito in my food processor and laughed, because who does this?

After running the food processor, I realized that I should probably use a liquid to loosen things up, because the machine was starting to struggle a bit.

Good thing I’d thought ahead and purchased some horchata, which is the sweet cinnamon-flavored rice milk of the gods.

I realized that pouring the horchata straight from a plastic cup into the top of the food processor was going to be difficult, so I transferred it to my Pyrex measuring cup, which has a spout.

Now, one thing I don’t really talk about regarding my vision problem is that when you’re blind in one eye, you have a hard time judging depth perception.

Since Coat’s disease is a progressive one, this hasn’t actually been an issue for most of my life, but it’s been getting a little more challenging lately. I’ll do things like knock stuff over, which is extremely frustrating, but then I’ll do something hilarious like completely misjudge where the hole in the food processor is. Then I’ll pour horchata all over the lid. (I was infuriated with this entire situation until I realized I’d captured this photo, by the way.)

Take two was much more successful.

After running the food processor on high for a while, it looked as if the ground-up burrito wasn’t going to transform much more beyond that.

So I transferred the burrito paste into a Tupperware container, and let it set up in the fridge for a while.

As I was doing this, Davida came into the kitchen and looked at it. “That looks like cat food,” she said. Jeez, you’re saying I could have skipped all this and just eaten cat food?

Later, once I deemed the rudimentary paste had been in the fridge for long enough, it was time to serve it up.

But I would have to do this using the right vessel. In the RoboCop movie, the character sampling the paste eats it out of what appears to be a Dixie cup. So I dug one out of our cabinet for maximum accuracy.

Davida might have been onto something when she compared my rudimentary burrito paste to cat food, however.

Sub-Zero immediately ran over while I was messing with it and insisted on trying to sample some. She failed in her endeavor, but succeeded in being adorably persistent about it. I’ve never seen a cat go crazy over a burrito before, but Davida was right — this burrito paste did look kinda like the wet cat food we feed them sometimes.

Well, it’s not much to look at, but it turns out a completely blitzed burrito is just sort of beige, like pâté or tuna salad.

There was something about this idea that really grossed me out, though. Like, I’ve already eaten all sorts of disgusting shit for this newsletter, but somehow the concept of tasting a chewed-up burrito was turning my stomach. I feel like there’s gotta be a few of you who are getting upset at this idea too.

But, of course, I had no choice but to try it, because I need to embrace my fate as a crime-fighting machine.

With some reluctance, I put a tiny spoonful in my mouth. And shockingly, it wasn’t bad at all. It just tasted mostly like smoky grilled steak, with sort of the stringiness you get from well-cooked meat. Is it dirty if I say I kind of liked it? I wasn’t about to hoover down a whole boatload of this stuff, but I didn’t mind the rudimentary paste as much as I thought I would. It did occur to me that this would be pretty funny to put in a sandwich, since it looked so much like tuna salad — maybe I’ll write another edition of the newsletter featuring a burrito salad sandwich someday.

But a burrito isn’t truly complete without some salsa, and so I added some of the red and green salsa that comes with each order of food.

Now that’s more like it. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that despite being able to deflect bullets with his armor, RoboCop doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy spicy food. This is only a hunch, because again, we don’t see the guy actually eat anything in the movie. Maybe the spicy red stuff would short his circuits, or perhaps it would tug on the human side of him and remind him what joy is like. Burritos tend to do that, after all. Then he would lament the fact that he was a human in a metal casing, and teach himself useful things like how to duck behind cover.

But sitting here, thinking about my recovery process, something did dawn on me. My doctor is going to be operating on my eye, not my mouth. I don’t need to eat a paste to recover. Also, RoboCop died in order to become RoboCop, so maybe I don’t want that either. I think I’ll stick to eating burritos like a grateful human being.

Although a laser in my eye would be a pretty cool party trick…

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“I now know why you cry, but it is something I can never do,” I say, in my Arnold voice, as I descent into the molten metal, with my thumb up. Wait. Wrong movie.

If you liked today’s edition of Food is Stupid, don’t forget to share it since today’s is a free one — we can always use more friends here:

And yeah, paid subscriptions do support us — I’m here to spread human joy when the robots currently threaten to take over. Ain’t nothin’ artificial about me, except for my cataract. Please consider upgrading today if you haven’t already:

Okay, wish me luck! If you can’t tell, I’m just a touch nervous, which is normal. That’s how you know I’m a real person. As always, I love you guys, and I’ll start back up when the healing’s begun.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, we did find the rudimentary paste dispenser in the game.