Chapter 33 Pull the lights and talk about eating

Chatting is generally considered to be a relaxed but not constructive leisure activity, so it is often called "small talk", because in most cases, the result of small talk is often boring. However, among the endless chat topics such as the number of sands in the Ganges River, I think the only topic that can be called "interesting" and constructive is probably talking about eating and drinking, because this is a chatting that is easy to make people greedy. Talking about the dangerous topic of hunger, when this critical point is reached, the chatter usually can't help but stop the topic automatically, and instead take some practical actions to relieve hunger.

When going to school, the lights in the student dormitory are turned off on time at eleven o'clock in the evening, but turning off the lights only causes going to bed, not sleep.There are six or seven boys "at eight or nine o'clock in the morning" in a room, just chatting with each other in the darkness of the 1980s.The most talked about is eating.These people come from all corners of the country, and the food in their hometowns has their own delicacy.You must know that talking about eating and drinking in the dark is an extremely dangerous kind of chat. Of course, talking about girls is also very exciting, but talking about girls after eleven o'clock at night usually does not have immediate results, and you have to wait until dawn at the earliest.Talking about eating is different. The reason why this topic is not only exciting but also dangerous is that he is more manipulative than girls, because chatting, everyone’s stomachs start to feel hungry, and even in the dark, they can even hear the empty voices. The sound of gurgling in the stomach.As the writer Lao Gui wrote in the novel "Blood and Iron": "The Great Famine of the 1960s hurt me. I was too afraid of being hungry. Once I was hungry, I would completely collapse and have no willpower. I am so contradictory. On the one hand, he is keen on reading heroes’ books, greedily reads articles about anti-revisionism, and his head is full of revolution, and on the other hand, he steals other people’s fruits to eat. Because he is hungry, he cheats the family’s money, eats and steals..."

"Sometimes I really want to cry a lot. How nice it would be if I could be in my mother's womb. I would never have to worry about starvation and doing things like chickens and dogs. The first and second grades of junior high school were spent in such days. The most frequent thoughts in my mind. Of course, I also care about Sino-Soviet relations, the great cause of anti-revisionism, revolution and progress. But the main thing I think about all day long is eating. I have little interest in girls, and almost no hooliganism. .Eating enough food is more important than thinking about girls.”

Although the causes of the nights of gluttony in the 1980s are by no means the same as those of the famine years of forty years ago, the results are highly consistent.The girl is upstairs, and the delicacies at home are thousands of miles away, and only hunger stirs in my heart. Mr. Qian Zhongshu once said: "Generally, learning is something that two or three plain-hearted people in the old house in the wild river discuss and cultivate." As students, we are only cultivated during the day, and we also study and study knowledge after we are full. In the dark night after the lights are turned off, what these hungry "two or three simple-minded people" can discuss in the old house in the wild river far away from the urban area seems to be food and drink.

The ending of talking and eating in bed is often like this: in the dark, one person finally sat up from the bed, and then more people sat up from the bed one after another.As the saying goes, the first thing to do after sitting up is to steal electricity. At this time, someone is in charge of lighting the candles, and someone pulls out the electric stove strictly prohibited by the school from under the bed. It's about to turn into action, and an exciting midnight meal is about to start making. The so-called big meal usually means stealthily cooking a pot of noodles (in those days, fast food was a luxury for us, and we often had to pay for it), and if it was more luxurious, it was nothing more than frying a few eggs (those Eggs are bought at the school gate during the day with food stamps from the country people).When the smell of fried eggs wafts up from the balcony on the second floor to the third and fourth floors of the student dormitory in the humid air, apart from the pleasant "sizzling" sound in the frying pan, you can also hear the Some news came out one after another on the Internet-obviously, the smell of fried eggs is having a chain reaction like an infectious disease.

Next, I began to hear some pots and pans colliding with each other one after another in the surroundings. If it was daytime, I would definitely see a gratifying scene of "heroes everywhere in the evening smoke". In fact, the three meals a day of college students in the early 1980s were basically rationed according to the standards of different regions.Of course, eating and drinking enough is not a problem, but this kind of eating and drinking is only responsible until eleven o'clock in the evening.From this hour to before six o'clock the next morning, according to the school's regulations, it is the time to go to bed collectively. If you don't want to sleep after dark, and even dare to lie on the bed and get together to eat and drink, then everything caused by it The school will naturally not be responsible for the consequences.There were not many students in our class who were promising later on. I guess it has something to do with our collective enthusiasm for eating, drinking and drinking after the lights were turned off.

Regarding Wei Hui's novels, my food and drink friend Xiaobao quoted another friend of mine who doesn't know much about food and drink in his new book "Patriot Games" as saying: "Female college students in the 1980s also competed with foreign countries. People sleep, but never write.This is the difference between a writer in the eighties and a writer in the nineties. With the help of the above medicine introduction, what I want to say is that the universities in the 2000s and the 80s also turned off the lights at 11 o'clock in the evening, but the college students in the 2000s will definitely not go to bed like the 80s ( Some) college students talked about eating and drinking like that.

The reason why such a seemingly arbitrary judgment is made is based on the following three conditions: first, most college students in the 1990s did not experience the era of hunger; second, today’s food supply and the pockets of college students Thirdly, chatting activities, including talking about eating and drinking, have a brand-new medium such as the Internet today, and there is no need to grope in the dark.In fact, whether the topic of eating, drinking and drinking is pleasant to talk about, and whether the writing is good or not—that is to say, whether this activity, which is usually regarded as "boring", can be given some kind of "interesting" constructive, first of all depends on the Depends on the stance taken by the talker and writer at the time.

In this regard, the talker lying in the dark is actually very consistent with the writer hanging on the Internet. I think the scene of lying in bed chatting and eating after the lights are turned off is very similar in style to the Talk about eating on the Internet (of course, the latter is much richer in color and variety).And this common posture determines the following three points: They are very relaxed; Whether prostrate or hidden in optical or cyber darkness, neither of them can see the other; They all began to inadvertently but uncontrollably make themselves and others feel an uncontrollable craving.

Therefore, talking about eating on the Internet or speaking in a certain BBS state has the opportunity to become the most mouth-watering way in food writing.And those posts on the Internet, isn’t it just twenty years ago in the student dormitory that “some pots and pans collided with each other one after another”? To talk about eating and drinking well, whether it is online or in bed, in order to achieve perfection, in addition to posture, you must also maintain a state of hunger or gluttony. Confucius said: "Those who know are not as good as those who are good." The function of small talk is not and cannot be "to know" (except for those of the Beijing school), so "to be good" is naturally the optimal result of small talk.And among all the topics that can be chatted, talking about eating and drinking is the most "beautiful".However, only one word "good" is far from enough. According to the model of "better to steal", we might as well say: "It's better to be able to eat than to be delicious, and it's better to be greedy than to be delicious, and it's better to be greedy than to be greedy. It's better to talk about eating, it's better to talk about eating than to eat it."

Talking about eating, wanting to eat, but not being able to eat is another commonality between bedchatters and online spokespeople, and the basic trigger behind most of the best eating and drinking talk and writing.The same is true of traditional food writing. Zhang Dai is far away, and Liang Shiqiu is close. They all completed the most delicious words that Chinese characters can reproduce and create through the remembrance of colorful food in abjection and poverty. Zhang Dai, a native of Shanyin, whose ancestors were natives of Jianzhou in Shu, is a hometown of delicious food in China.In addition to the delicious hometown, Zhang Dai also has a noble family background, so he has two basic conditions for a gourmet.Life in youth, according to his "Zi Wei Epitaph": "Seldom is a dude, loves prosperity. Loves the house, loves the maid, loves the child, loves the clothes, loves the food, loves the horse, loves the lanterns, Good fireworks, good pear orchards, good propaganda, good antiques, good flowers and birds; also tea obscenity and tangerine abuse, bookworm poetry devil." All in all, a "good man" through and through.However, "at the age of fifty, the country was destroyed and the family was destroyed, and they took refuge in the mountains. Those who survived had broken beds, broken tripods, sick pianos, and a few books, and only one inkstone was missing. Clothing and vegetables were often eaten without cooking."Just in this state of "I want to eat but I can't eat it", all Zhang Dai's words about (Meng Yi) food are so beautiful because of this tension: "When it comes to October, I and my friends Brothers set up a crab meeting, which will arrive in the afternoon, cook crabs and eat them, six people are afraid of the cold, cook them repeatedly, from fatty duck, milk cool, drunk cockles like amber, and duck juice to boil cabbage like jade For fruits and melons, Xie tangerines, chestnuts, and water chestnuts are used, "Yuhu ice" is used for drinking, Bingkeng bamboo shoots are used for vegetables, Xinyu Hangbai is used for rice, and Lanxue tea is used for rinsing. Thinking about it now, it is really like a heavenly chef Immortal offering, drunk and full, ashamed and ashamed." After Tao An, Yashe is the recognized chef of paper cooking in the Chinese world.In addition to the same native place and common "Yimin" identity, the biggest commonality between the two is "can't eat". Regarding the classic "Ya She Tan Eating", the author has clearly expressed his feelings in the preface: "Occasionally, because of nostalgia, I talk about delicious food to express my happiness; chatting for pleasure, I go through Tumen and chew." The so-called "nostalgia" The reason is that since I went to Taiwan in 1949, separated by a river, "the mainland cannot be seen", and the delicacies of my hometown are even more untasteful. There are countless greens outside the building. The past is like smoke and catkins, and lovesickness is the permanent spring." As far as "Ya She Tan Eating" is concerned, instead of saying "the past is like smoke like catkins", it is better to say "food is like smoke like catkins". Eight kinds, most of which are "uneatable".As for the lingering hatred in the author's heart of "painting cakes to satisfy hunger", it permeates between the lines.Therefore, Jinhua ham from his hometown is naturally the best ham. "Taiwan's climate is too hot to make ham, but many people imitate it. The result is not crude, but it is not salted enough to rush to sell, and it smells like dead bodies; The stench of corpses is also blindly dead and salty."And "American ham, the so-called ham, is not bad, it's another thing... It's quite delicious when you eat it in large slices, but it can't be compared with Jinhua ham. "Virginia ham" is It is another kind of product, the color and smell are slightly similar to Jinhua ham, and the boneless one is especially good, and wanderers who often live overseas, this is better than nothing.” Needless to say, the shredded eels that are “available everywhere” are the most authentic products from restaurants in Henan and Huaiyang. The reason why the “northern restaurants” in Taipei can’t do well is because “there are no thick and strong giant eels here. Can't cut a thread."Even the green oysters (i.e. oysters), a specialty product in southern Fujian and Taiwan, are not as delicious as the green oysters purchased from the "Dongdan Pailou Vegetable Market", not to mention that "most of the other shellfish here, such as halibut, gnats, and sea melon seeds, are It is soaked in soy sauce soup, it is salty and loses a lot of umami flavor."Even the extremely delicious blood cockles...but it can only make Mr. Yashe feel very uncomfortable, "Thinking of the people who clean the toilet in the Shanghai alley every morning, using a bamboo broom to stir the cockle shells, looking at the cockles It is even more uncomfortable. As for mussels, a shell vegetable, is also a famous product in Zhejiang and Fujian. After drying, it can be used to stew braised pork. Its shape is very ugly, like a dried cicada. Another kind of thing". Therefore, "Elegant House Talking about Eating" can be read as a virtual delicious feast, and at the same time, it can't be viewed as a one person's sad, indignant and helpless but very restrained control of the desire to saliva. "Recalling sweetness and thinking bitterness" meeting.