Final Countdown

As the year comes to a close once again, I'm stuck with boxes of food from various social gatherings as well as a pile of largely expired (but unopened) food items that I should probably get around to eating before it starts posing more of a threat to my health. Because it won't a pandemic that gets me, it'll be that pack of Ghost Pepper Mamee Noodles I've been saving for... something.

FOMO

Little known fact about life: Whenever people you know eat at a certain place, they often experience the most delicious, life-changing food they've ever eaten. But whenever you go to the same place (and perhaps even eat the same food items), the food is just average. Either your standard for food is really high, your peers are exaggerating middling food or the restaurateur hates you for no reason.

Delegation

This is probably the reason why I tend not to do food buying favours for people anymore. Even worse, when you're in a group at a restaurant and have to painstakingly recall what food and item combinations everyone ordered. Look, I go to a restaurant to eat, not play "Dr Kawashima's Brain Training".

Food Alchemy

A reference to that all-time classic anime series revolving around moral ambiguities and The Law of Equivalent Exchange. Also a reference to the massively complicated list of ingredients you normally find on the labels of your favourite canned foods, I suppose. Like, what the heck is "partially defatted peanut flour" anyway?!

Endless Appetite

You know those days when you suddenly have the capacity to eat three platefuls of meat, and then other days you can barely finish a couple of garlic bread slices? Even worse, these fluctuations in appetite never seem to play into your favour, so you're often either not very hungry at an all-you-can-eat buffet, or very hungry when you're trying to diet. Darn stomach, I would punch you if it wasn't such a critical internal organ!

Price-cream

Inspired mostly by my general malaise at how ridiculously expensive places like Ben & Jerry's can charge you for a few measly scoops of sugary gold. Yes, I admit their ice-cream is actually some top-notch stuff, though it wold be more enjoyable if it didn't cost me an arm and a leg... Whether I mean that literally is up to you, pal.

Pill Popper

While you could somewhat consider this as a canonical sequel to last week's comic, this comic was inspired more from a mini-argument I had with someone about using natural herbs vs. modern medicines to maintain one's health. Needless to say, I'd rather stick a bundle of thyme down my throat as opposed to a handful of vitamin supplements.

Transitive Meat Eater

Based on the haphazard logic that eating anything in general is technically consuming meat, in the sense that one would be eating germs and other bacteria. I've heard the argument that organisms on a microscopic level don't constitute as meat, so the natural counter-argument would be that a leg of ham shrunk down to a microscopic level is, by that definition, "not meat".

Fresh Meat

I suppose this now canonically makes Dante a murderer, or just a person with a terrible taste in jokes. Either way, it's pretty much Halloween, so anything goes whether it's spooky, scary or downright morally questionable.

Worth a Thousand Words

There's a profound proverb that's manifested in this age of superfluous photography: "The camera eats first". To an extent, it makes some sense - you pay a stupid amount of money for food, so you may as well remember it as much as you can. Or keep the photo as a reminder of food you shouldn't eat again.

And for anyone wondering, I did get that coffee image from Tumblr (somewhere).

Potluck Dinner

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that people want to willingly eat whatever abomination you've cooked up, but now you can pull out all the stops to get people to take your edible filth. Pretend that it tastes good! Tell people it's a recipe from a famous chef! When they try to leave, force them to take some home with them! But this assumes that you even have a social circle of friends willing to dine with you to begin with...

Drumstick

Did you even know there's a legal definition for what constitutes as ice-cream? Now you can put your mind at ease now that the law's on your side when trying to distinguish between this drumstick, that drumstick, the music-related drum stick, the other music-related Drumstick and The Drumstick.

Baking Bad

Next time you read the list of ingredients of your second favourite snack, and tell me you fully understand what you're putting into your mouth. That's a challenge, reader! And the prize is the eye-opening wisdom gained from such a painstaking exercise. But even with this knowledge, the fact that your favourite snacks still contain mysterious yet verbose ingredients still stands... Sigh.

The Key Ingredient

Based on a true story when I was eating a pack of these bad boys. I don't use that word lightly - that was certainly a bad snack. And who in the right mind even includes the product itself on the list of included ingredients?! Unless someone's trying to be all fancy with recursive ingredients, in which case, congratulations on confusing pretty much everyone.

Special Delivery

Largely inspired from that $10 general purpose gift card I happened to obtain, but the selection of vendors was abhorrent (who's even heard of "Endota Spa" anyway?) and all the good vendors usually have things costing $10+ anyway due to shipping costs and GST. Like, I'd have better luck trading that with some bloke off the streets for a chicken skewer! Actually, that's not a bad idea...

Worcestershire Sauce

Inspired by all those times I keep mispronouncing the name of this sauce in a public setting.
It's as if its creator couldn't just call it "Salty Sauce" or "Fermented Vinegar" but instead had to go for some obscure name that only they could pronounce just so they could feel special. But the question still remains: How do you correctly pronounce "Worcestershire sauce"?

Expiration Date

It's been a while since I've tried out a new comic format, which is kind of reminiscent of those dialogue speech bubbles you sometimes see in certain video games. And remember kids, always check the expiry date on your food stuffs! Because, believe me, very few things taste OK past the expiry date, and milk is not one of them.

Food + Wine

Probably inspired by my deep disdain for practically all wine, or alcohol in general for that matter. The smell, taste and sometimes its appearance -- enough to make a man lose his sanity! I think cider is the only thing I can stomach these days, but even so, that was only because it turned out to be fermented apple juice...

Done and Dusted

Some things you have to eat not because its delicious or nutritious in any way, but because you have to appease some external party. You know what I mean - Someone puts their heart and soul into cooking something, but you don't have the guts to say "I really don't want to eat that..." and so you end up having to joylessly eat it anyway.

An Unsatisfied Customer

To quote the Guarantee of Satisfaction found on the wrapper of a Snickers bar here in Australia: "IF YOU ARE NOT SATISFIED IN ANY WAY, GIVE US A CALL 1800 245 455 IN AUSTRALIA OR 0800 444 433 IN NEW ZEALAND. OR IF YOU LIKE, JUST RETURN THE BIT YOU HAVEN'T EATEN AND THE PACK AND TELL US WHERE AND WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT." Not sure if Australia Post will let you send half-eaten food items in the mail though.

Everything is Chicken

"Tastes like chicken" - A phrase by your standard bloke to describe any food item in particular, even if it's not even savoury... But what if the taste is chicken is actually personalized according to each person's individual taste-buds? Just a thought.

Fortune Cookies

I'll be honest with you, lads: Drawing a fortune cookie is unusually difficult, largely because of unconventional shape it has, which doesn't lend itself nicely to the way I'd normally draw custom objects (i.e. draw a couple of shapes on paper, scan it and hope that it looks OK in Paint). So I'd imagine this is would be the first and last comic to spotlight that food item, until my drawing skills improve... whenever that might be.

Endangered Eating

To be honest, food containing an endangered animal probably tastes terrible, but people think it's high-class to be eating such things anyway and therefore pay exorbitant amounts of money to do so. And then it turns out it's actually just a low-end cut of mystery meat with a soy sauce marinade. Hopefully this doesn't make eating endangered animals more appealing...