Excerpt From the forthcoming Penguin classic paperback
"What's wrong with Alan?" by Adam Phillips.
On Microwave Meals
It surely is the refuge of the poorly educated. Consider the war, famine and
pestilence that despoils the face of this unfertile planet every single day
of our lives. Nothing could possibly compare with the scourge that is the
'microwave meal for one'.
Lean cuisine. I bought one, once.
To say it was terrible would be to undersell the hand of Satan.
I have seen things, terrible things. I have viewed material that would set
not only hair on end but teeth on edge and rectums clenching.
I prefer real food.
Consider this meal. Lemon peppered fish steaks, boiled new potatoes and
garden peas. The fish was placed under the grill and allowed to gently cook
to a crisp golden brown, the smell infusing the kitchen. The peas, simmering
slowly with green vegetable intent. The tight skin of the potatoes covering
soft flesh soon to be smothered with butter. All of it moves me to bigger
and better feats of culinary wizardry.
Alan's 'meal' is rancid. Alan offsets taste and expense against convenience.
Therefore, his meal is miniscule and tasteless. He eats his meal not out of
delightful intent but out of necessity. Much as a dog will eat grass to rid
itself of poisons, Alan will eat Lean Cuisine to rid himself of the need to
expend energy. In Alan's world expending energy is just as poisonous as the
deadliest deadly nightshade.
The meal - if it can be called that - arrives, freshly delivered from it's
four minute microwave warning as if a speeding warhead, looking much more
innocent, but just as dangerous. Resting on a black tray should give Alan
plenty of warning about the dark content within. A plastic film covering
which smartly frosts on heating obscuring Alan's view of the content. Upon
removing the cover Alan finds two nicely molded blobs of sustenance, one
meat, one potato. The blobs are separated by a partition, alienated from
each other, almost as if, in the maker's eyes, they were never meant to be
together, like two convicts in neighboring cells.
Alan consumes this anti-ambrosia directly from the black tray, in front of,
as ever, the television. This arrangement suits him just fine. He pauses his
incessant observing only twice during this whole process. Once to put the
item in the microwave oven, once to remove it. He need not look at the meal
thereafter.
Microwave meals. Just the look of one will send the digestive system into a
gassy, acidic, spastic overdrive.
And Alan likes them.
