I love living in Brooklyn. I also love writing about food. But as much as these two things are major parts of my life, you’ve got to admit people can get pretty over-the-top and ridiculous about both of them. Sometimes you just have to laugh at how seriously people can take food, and the same goes for Brooklyn. If you don’t remember how preposterous it all is, you’ll end up losing your job because you’ve spent too much time protesting outside City Hall against oppressive home beekeeping regulations or the lack of community herb gardens in Bed-Stuy. Of course, you probably didn’t have a job to begin with, because obviously you’re a freelancer/amateur gourmet food producer, like everyone.
Four times a year, we get a chance to laugh at the place where the pomposity of food writing and the pretentiousness of living in Brooklyn collide — Edible Brooklyn, a magazine dedicated to “celebrating the borough’s food culture, season by season.” I’ve picked out the ten most amazing/ridiculous quotes from the current issue of Edible Brooklyn and reproduced them below. Yes, people actually said/wrote all of these things, and they were all completely serious.
PS — Just to make it fun, I included one quote that I made up myself. Can you guess which one is too ridiculous to be real?
1. “The pair wanted to serve a draft beer with their sustainably sourced dogs, of course, but not just any ordinary laissez-faire lager. Like their all-beef, natural casing, custom-made franks, which are crafted in Rochester by an Austrian butcher—they wanted a quaff made with attention to every quirk.”
2. “We make our own sodas using housemade syrups and a seltzer system that has to be seen to be believed—the water gets filtered, then chilled three times, then carbonated—it comes out so fizzy it hurts to drink it.”
3. “There’s a huge fermentation craze going on, so I bought this delicious organic sauerkraut, which has yet to be opened. I bought it like three weeks ago. At some point I should probably eat that.”
4. “Like everyone else in Park Slope, I’m addicted to kombucha.”
5. “His wife—whom he met in a tavern—suggested they open a comic-themed bar serving affordable drinks.”
6. “You can’t get the smell into the camera, that’s a shame. Did you get pictures of the lemons? I have a big Meyer lemon agenda.”
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