Posted in our local St. Louis Bread Company:
A Note for our Customers:
The cucumber sauce featured in our Garden Veggie Ciabatta sandwich contains gelatin and may not be suitable for some vegetarian diets.
We suggest our pesto mayonnaise as a delicious substitution.
I’m not sure whether to be bothered that a “garden veggie” sandwich isn’t actually vegetarian, or to give the Bread Co. credit for prominently warning customers about a potential problem with their product.
I would be bothered by the fact that you even noticed their warning, much less bothered to copy it verbatim to your log. I’d be further worried that you might actually be a vegatarian. What a long strange trip humanity has taken to arrive at this one depressing place, this log entry about the problems of potentially animal-based gelatins on an overpriced sandwich.
I’m struck more by how depressing it must be to be stuck in your head, if what Alexei wrote inspires this reaction so strongly in you that you feel compelled not only to post about it, but to conceal your identity for the purpose. (Accusing Alexei of vegetarianism is *funny*, not controversial…) I’m all for intelligent cultural criticism, but commenting in a random weblog just to accuse the author of inanity seems futile, to say the least, and a mental state in which it seems worth the effort probably isn’t a healthy one.
Having been in similar places myself from time to time, I’ll offer some unasked-for advice: save your energy for the things that *don’t* seem so pointless to you–or on looking harder for such things, if they’re in short supply. (And, erm, you probably don’t want to start with my weblog–if it really bothers you that someone found a sign in a sandwich shop worth posting about, you definitely don’t want to know what I spend my time thinking about.)