I ate too many TV dinners in my youth, and especially the one I regret now is Stouffer's Chicken Fettucine Alfredo with Broccoli. This used to be my staple when I went to Ralph's by myself to "stock up" on food for the week, and I was very unoriginal in what I wanted, basically anything edible and quick, which translated to fattening and low-quality. I regret those times because I suspect all those plastic containers and Parmesan cheese mixed in with the fettucine alfredo was probably filled with microplastics, not to mention the alfredo sauce being filled with fattening foods and consisting of 55% of daily intake of cholestrol and 35% daily fat, roughly, plus who knows how much the noodles were doused in butter, etc. Who knows if all of that consumed microplastic content has contributed to infertility. My diet is totally different now and the stores I buy food from vastly different........still some frozen foods, but from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods, and my first top on any trip is the vegetable/ produce aisle, something I avoided like the plague back in my bachelor days, probably why I still have trouble with chicory, endive, arugula, fennel, all good trivia material. I went to a Buffalo Wild Wing's recently with a friend and was just shocked at how salty everything tasted, almost unbearably dripping with fat and rich material. (That's the biggest problem with American food: how rich it is). The wings themselves dripping with buffalo sauce, plus what looked like a triple layer of cheese, plus potatoes..... no wonder I had weight problems! I'm glad MJ converted me to the world of healthy eating and vegetables, and what I realized is there's a hedonic treadmill with food too: if you always eat salty or fatty food, you keep craving those kinds of foods, and healthy food tastes bland. But if you eat bland (likely not tasting as good but good for your body) all the time, the really fatty stuff just explodes with flavor and you realize how much sodium + general badness there needs to be to make it have all that taste. Even BCD Tofu, one of the favorite restaurants MJ frequented all the time, has to be a once-or-twice-a-year thing now because I realize in that food is MSG up the wazoo, and it's not an exaggeration that I could be taking a few hours off the tail end of my life each time I consume one. Like fettucine alfredo, it's good but not worth it.
TIL that Alfredo sauce was created by an Italian chef to satisfy his wife in the early 1900's, a man by the name of Alfredo di Lelio, and adding it to pasta was just a natural combination, especially fettucine, Italian for "ribbons." For a lot of food names like "pizza," Chinese and Japanese don't even have equivalent terms because they're from Italian specific names, so the Asian languages just do an approximate translation of them, especially the -o and -i words ending in vowels are hard to get just right in Chinese. It's lucky for Alfredo and most Italians that his name was so melodious, because I think a lot of food is marketed through names, and in that way French and Italian dishes have such an advantage because you just want to have escargot, or vichyssoise, or bouillabaisse, or pizza, lasagna, mostaccioli, mascarpone cheese, etc, whereas in Chinese we just have "Mu shu pork," "mapo tofu," Chow mein," not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing words that you want to put in your mouth upon first listen, not to mention the Chinese/Hawaiian dish "pu pu platter." I also think Asians don't have a word for fettucine alfredo because it's just too rich; Asians can't deal with all that cheese and lactate, we just have soy sauce for that. Sorry Alfredo but your food is killing America.
