The Mini-Whippet #9: Breakfast Edition

I'm still in Indonesia, where the standard hotel breakfast is a banana pancake. You could do worse.

Anyway there's this high-end media imprint that just does breakfast content. It's called Extra Crispy, and it's amazing.

They interview celebrities but it's wholly breakfast-centric.

Brad Neely (Wizard People, Dear Reader, that comedy song about Washington):
"The only way I can get my kid to eat scrambled eggs is to put a little drop of food coloring in them, like pink or purple, and call it “Princess eggs.”

Fabio. Fabio.

It sounds like you keep a pretty healthy diet. Do you have any breakfast foods you like to indulge in sometimes?
Most of the time, I'm very consistent. It's always oatmeal. It's always an egg white omelet with a protein shake and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, and that's normally what my breakfast is.

Do you work out before or after breakfast?
No, I work out late afternoon. I'm not a morning person. I get up at 11. I need my beauty sleep.

Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong)

You once served a nine-month stint in prison, and I’m curious what prison food was like in your experience. What did you eat for breakfast while inside?
I was very lucky because I only ate in the mess hall just for the experience, just so I could try it. You know the movie Goodfellas and how they had their cooking club? I had the same thing in prison, and the people I cooked with were high up in the hierarchy and also some of the most intelligent people in the whole prison. We grew our own food and cooked our own meals, usually one big meal in the afternoon. Cooking breakfast together wasn’t as common.

I ate so healthy in prison. We had a garden with fresh vegetables, and there was a ton of dandelion growing all over the place, so I would go pick flowers to make a salad.

## New York art critic Jerry Saltz
I don't actually know who this guy is, but what I love is how terrible his coffee routine is, and how angry it makes people.

"My wife and I don’t know how to cook. Neither of us were trained by anybody to cook anything. So today I had what we have every morning. Last night I went to the deli on the corner and I bought four cups of coffee. I put the four cups of coffee in the fridge, and then in the morning I unload them into big 7-11 Double Gulp cups, with ice. I make us iced coffee out of the deli coffee.

Do you add milk and sugar?
I have Sweet’N Low.

My favourite of the bunch:

Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket

What music are you playing?
Well, if I get to the kitchen first, it’s the music I like. But if my 12-year-old son gets to the kitchen first, then it’s the music he likes. So, I try to move quickly.

What does your son play?
He likes Imagine Dragons, which I told him we cannot listen to in the morning.

Why?
It’s too much for the morning. I can’t. I don’t mean any disrespect to Imagine Dragons, who I’m sure are very nice people. I just cannot hear that first thing in the morning.

Where do you usually write?
At my desk or in a cafe. The best cafes for working usually have terrible food, because then you can’t distract yourself with food. Where I go, if you get really hungry, you might order something, but you won’t think it’s delicious. So, I like strong coffee and terrible food.

What are your thoughts on avocado toast?
You can’t make it at home because avocados are not reliable. You have to have many, many avocados in your house to make avocado toast. Life is not fair. I do think it’s overrated, but it’s also delicious. It just isn’t quite as delicious as everyone says.

[Sidenote: as an Australian, it's weird to think of avocado toast (or smashed avocado, we would call it) as overrated or underrated. It's just standard breakfast fare. It's like making a fad out of bacon and eggs or something. Americans, you're being weird about this,]

There are also more broader cultural breakfast issues, beyond the food itself. For example:

Against getting dressed

“But why?” asked my friend’s young son. “I think it should be an all-day pajama day!” It was hard to explain why it shouldn’t be an all-day pajama day, because the truth is, there is no answer. Why shouldn’t we be comfortable, as comfortable as we are when we sleep in our beds, all day long? Why do we waste so much time changing from one outfit to the next, like astronauts gearing up for a moon landing and then coming home again, when none of us are astronauts and none of us are landing on the moon?"

---

"Pajamas are egalitarian. Pajamas are for everyone. By refusing to get properly dressed in the morning, we fight the good fight; in the jettisoning of standards that confine rather expand the waistbands of our realities, we may aspire to more. We wear what makes us feel good, not them. Fuzzy pants past noon are a radical act."

Read the whole article, it's very important.

I feel like you could easily do a full Whippet on breakfast. Taken from a broader range of sources, obviously. We haven't even touched on brinner, and then there's the Waffle House Index. There's a lot to cover. To be continued... (not like, next issue though).