Monday, July 31, 2006

Beef Jerky

One of the football guys came in for tutoring today and consumed an entire pouch of beef jerky in the first five minutes of our discussion about the media portrayal of organized crime. As he spewed chunks of dehydrated cow hide, I thought how similar he was to Corey.

He would rip a chunk of the leather with his teeth and say "Oh man, Tony Soprano is the top dog." I could just picture Corey sprawled out in the green leather chair, bag of turkey jerkey on his lap, squealing with delight that Tony Soprano is the shit.

Why do people eat jerkey? It smells so bad and hurts your teeth to bite into it. Worse, why do jerkey eaters talk with their mouths full? They generally seem to be watching or discussing something exciting to them when they partake in jerkey eating. I think they are living vicariously through their mob obsessions. I think they are gnashing their teeth through rawhide as if to say "I could have killed this beast myself. I'm a big strong man. Now please scratch my back so I can fall asleep more easily."

Worst of all, the student left his crumbs and jerkey pouch sitting on the table. I want to put it in his folder with a note that says "Please discuss, in 500 words (double spaced) your fascination with this product and the reasons you left the empty container for me to throw away."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your a girl, you wont understand.

east side girl said...

Jerky is so weird. My mom's coworker has a food dehydrator and he makes his own.

Strange.

Very strange.

kk said...

the males in my family kill the deer and then make jerky, and try to show me the pictures of the dead animal then offer me a peice of it. i wonder how they would like it if i would make jerky out of "the body" and offer them a slab of her!!!!!

Anonymous said...

as a female who's eaten and liked it, I think I have to sort-of defend beef jerky. It's not actually cow hide -- it is indeed honest-to-goodness meat, it's just been marinated and dried.

so, there's good jerky, and there's bad jerky. I'm thinking that Football Guy was eating the mass-marketed supermarket variety, which is really hard and actually pretty gross. That kind's been processed and formed and is crap.

Real beef jerky can be found at smokehouses and butcher-type shops -- a favorite of the men in my family being Willie's Smokehouse in Harrisville, PA. It's very low in fat and high in protein. The stuff in stores is usually treated with chemicals because they don't take all of the fat out and therefore have to preserve it -- which can account for some of the bad taste.

as for the mob associations and obsessions... I have no idea. =]

ninny said...

i had to write masticate 100 times when i was caught chewing gum....he should have to write for you!