Bringing a Community Together

Well, DC Central Kitchen just made me feel feelings. The opening shots will make you hungry. The rest will give you goosebumps.

Healthy Corners from DC Central Kitchen on Vimeo.

Food deserts. We hear about them often. We hardly ever see them. We certainly never think that they could be plunked down in the middle of some of the most metropolitan cities in America.

There are a few amazing things about this video: 1) It's gorgeous. 2) It highlights a community helping itself in a powerful, practical and simple way to profound effect. 3) Not nearly enough people have watched it. Please help me spread what DC Central Kitchen and Healthy Corners are doing like wildfire.

For the One-Hundredth Time

Today marks 100 posts on Chronicles of a Stomach Grumble. If you are saying to yourself, "wow, you've had this for a long time and should really have more than 100 posts," you are right. But here we are.

A sign of nerdy things to come.

To commemorate, I wanted to share a tweet of my dad's I stumbled across from 2006 (yes, my dad was on twitter before I knew how it worked). My dad never got to read this blog, but he definitely knew where I was headed all along. And, just in case anyone is wondering, I have the ingredients to make the above-mentioned soup in my fridge as we speak.

Grumpiness, Meat and Gratitude

Sometimes you have bad days. Sometimes, you have bad days that follow other bad days, that have probably been piggy-backed by other bad days. Sometimes you are in a funk cloud that you can't get out of. If you are lucky, from this final, funky, cloudy, grumpy, bad day, you come home like a ravenous monster to your husband (or Sidekick) standing over this.

And then you feel pretty insanely lucky. Lucky to have him. Lucky to have the giant porterhouse he brought home searing in the cast iron skillet. Lucky to have two Manhattans waiting. Lucky to have a tried and true old MacBook in the background to write on, especially upon hearing the news about Steve Jobs. Lucky to been have brought up as a Mac nerd from the get-go. Just lucky, all around. So, from one lucky jerk to another, go do something awesome. And maybe eat a fucking steak. It will definitely make you feel better.

The Rhythm of Lunch

I often find myself having the conversation about how hard it is to make adult friends. No one is ever totally sure why it feels creepy to ask someone out on a friend-date for the first time, but everyone is sure that it does. I have a few theories, the most sentient one so far being that as a kid and a teenager, you are unburdened by self-consciousness and only have to know that you like the same things as that person likes. There's no question of how your overture will be received or if the resulting friend-date will be awkward as hell. When you are kids, if someone doesn't want to be friends with you, they will probably either not talk to you in the first place or just throw rocks at you when you walk down the street. Our carefully cultivated ability to smile-and-nod, something we work on to set others at ease even when we are not, ultimately serves only to foster doubt about whether or not a potential new friend is genuinely interested in getting to know us.

via Flickr

Sometimes I'm afraid I'm the only one who thinks things like this. I suspect, however, that I am not alone. Luckily, we've found the salve: meals. And when the adult friends in question also happen to be co-workers, the salve, more specifically, is lunch.