Tofu, the Superfood

 Recently MJ made a seaweed soup, or a miyeokguk in Korean, typically eaten by Koreans on their birthday but also women who are nursing injuries, apparently. The soup was delicious with mushrooms and green onions (or was it scallions? I am rarely able to tell the difference). But then on the SECOND meal as leftovers, we added tofu, a food that is quickly becoming the most consumed food I've ever had (it's definitely risen in the ranks in the last 2 years as a staple). (Fun fact: Illinois's No. 1 crop is not corn, it's the.....soybean). Tofu is such a versatile addition to so many dishes: salty dishes, spicy dishes, soups, fried foods... it doesn't really have much taste in itself, so it mixes well with others, and it has a smooth texture of meat, so much so that at Costco I just move right by the meat aisle and grab the big box of tofus as my protein. Also for soups such as miyeokguk, the tofu sucks in the salt and deliciousness of the soup and spreads out the richness. I never had an answer to the question "if you were a food, what would you be?" (I think most people say like ice cream or something because it's sweet, or a banana for Asian people because they're yellow on the outside, white on the inside?) I'd like to be a tofu because I'm not like a star by myself (even in conversations I need to feed off of other people's conversations to be funny or interesting, I don't tell good stories from scratch!) I mix well with others, and I can enhance a group and be the missing piece to a solid plate of food, without risk of ruining it. I am what I eat, a tofu! 

I've been cramming so many facts in my brain recently that I often find myself forgetting some things I've thought I'd mastered, and I'm worried that there's a toothpaste effect of new knowledge cramming out the new knowledge while the tube (brain in this analogy) doesn't get any bigger. But I'm pretty sure I haven't written about the last complete fiction book I read, "Animal Farm" by George Orwell (aka Eric Blair, one of these fancy guys who needed a code name). I read the whole thing on an overseas trip from Korea back to US (I feel like I was the only one reading a book on the plane, everyone else was either sleeping or watching Top Gun: Maverick, the No. 1 plane movie this year) but I just breezed through the 141-pager (not enough big juicy pages of text, really a quick read). Thoroughly enjoyable knowing now that it was a parody on the Soviet Union's leadership with Stalin, Trotsky, and Karl Marx/ Lenin in the joint role of Old Major, the pig that dies in the end. Orwell certainly has a way of packing a punch right away with the animal metaphors by choosing pigs for the leaders, but so many of the events within Animal Farm remind me of parallels of today's society, even in the free-market and capitalist U.S..... to me Animal Farm is not about the horrors of bad communism, it's about the horrors of bad leadership. The 7 tenants of animals that were set forth almost all get wiped out at the end including "four legs good, two legs bad," the leaders re-writing history and blaming previous administrations for things and turning heroes into villains, those in power constantly wanting more and more and taking from the rest of the people to enrich themselves. Orwell is so masterful at pinpointing the human condition and infusing it into these animals, especially the greed: human beings are all so greedy, myself included, from the drug-addicted people on the streets wanting more drugs to the white-collar executives always craving more money (case in point: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried), people in power wanting more power (Donald Trump seeking more attention and power by declaring his candidacy for the 2024 election). History just keeps re-writing itself over and over again, and it's ironic that people don't read the prophetic books decades ago by Orwell and Huxley but instead focus on all the other distractions in the world, therefore fulfilling the prophecy that those authors envisioned. Oh, and also, it's just a good book reads well, good dialogue, lessons in morality and humanity, heartbreaking ending (spoiler alert) where Boxer the horse dies (Disney's formula of a sad ending when an animal dies).