Why I'm Compressing Five Pounds Of Spaghetti Into A Handy Mouth-Sized Bar

unleashing food's awesome power

Stumpies! The rarest thing in the world has happened. I managed to pull myself together and self-improve - I am NOT missing another week of The Stump, even though I’m superrrr busy and, like, superrrr tired. I love my Stumpies too much to fail you. If you happened to notice this post is three days late, don’t mention it, don’t harsh my buzz.

But, as a reward to myself for pulling off a herculean effort in making this post, I’m going to write myself a blog that allows me to make a satisfying amount of Simpsons references. Without further ado…

As I mentioned above, I am truly in my Busy Era. Actually, I’ve been in my Busy Era since roughly somewhere in 2015, but the ratchet mechanism on this thing [life] is broken and it’s turning way too fast, so each year is somehow worse than before. Noice!

However, there is a silver lining to the Busy Era - I have rediscovered my love and appreciation for bar form foods. You see, when you concentrate food, you unleash its awesome power, I'm told.

This fascination and tantalization of food in bar form really begins as a child, when I discovered the concept of protein bars. My parents were active cyclists in that era, and with that came an abundance of equipment. A vital part of their equipment, of course, was fast nutrition - the native habit of bar foods. Man, I used to steal the hell out of those protein bars that my parents were very much using during their bike races [mom and dad, if you’re reading this, i owe you a box of cliff bars].

And then my mom discovered the coup de gras of protein bars. The bar that has arguably provided me the greatest number of calories from one type of food in my life: Zone Bars.

Zone Bars yet another in my long list of brands I simp for. I’m pretty sure a day has not gone by in my adult life where my pantry is not stocked with somewhere between 1-6 boxes of Zone Bars. They come in delicious and inspired flavors such as fudge graham and double dark chocolate. But the rat bastards took it a step further. They went where no bar food has gone before. Readers, they put cookie dough in bar form.

Read that again.

They. Put. Cookie. Dough. In. Bar. Form.

their biblical name is literally Zone Perfect bars. because they are perfect.

Gnawing on a tube of raw cookie dough in public used to be so unseemly! Once upon a time people would positively sneer if you were carrying around a mixing bowl and eating fresh dough off the spoon in the middle of swim practice. There was even a time when cookie dough was a product one might expect to eventually spoil if you were just carrying it around in your pocket for several months.

Well, Zone Bar fixed all of those problems. In one convenient bar-sized package, I can take the [seemingly infinitely shelf stable] concentrated power of cookie dough with me anywhere! And boy, have I taken it anywhere. Here is a non-comprehensive list of the places I have brought a cookie dough Zone Bar:

school, work, Japan, doctors’ offices, dentists, the Catacombs of Rome, the ocean, bars, trains, my gym bag for approximately six months at a time, my tennis bag as a teenager for approximately three years [yes, i did eventually eat it], the grocery store while buying more zone bars

And that’s just off the top of my head. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that Zone Bars have accompanied me to most of my life’s most consequential moments. Joe Schlub [me] eats Powersauce Zone Bar, becomes world's mightiest man okayest lady.

I pinky promise I won’t make you read about Zone Bars too much more

This post is not about Zone Bars, readers. This post is about all bar form food, but Zone Bars are an important part of that journey for me, so I needed to share with you before you could understand.

During college, I further experimented with my bar food, as college kids are apt to do. During a particularly deranged semester when I was working for congress and taking an inadvisable amount of credit hours, I discovered a lunch “hack,” which I was quite convinced would solve my nutritional needs forever. I would buy massive packs of Quaker Oaks granola bars [cheap] and dunk them in a jar of peanut butter [cheaper]. That’s it, that was lunch. What else could one possibly need????

Lately, I have been rediscovering that pure love of the bar food game. As I’m sure many of you are aware, Trader Joe’s is the worldwide hub for tasty little treats. My recent find is their dastardly and yummy fruit bars. These bars are, as I understand, just mashed up and spit out fruit. In bar form. They are 99 cents, and I have been crushing the fuck out of them. In some ways, the bar fruit is the best segue to the thesis of my so-far-meandering blog post today, because why would I want to go through the utterly exhausting effort of eating an apple when I could have an apple mashed up and delivered to me in pocket-friendly packaging???

Now, you might be thinking that this is a direct contradiction to the sentiments expressed in my blog about meal prepping [a moderately viral sensation, if you haven’t already read it]. But, if you are thinking that, you have failed to consider two points: 1) this is The Stump, and I’m always allowed to be hypocritical when I feel like it; and 2) I’m actually a genius making a brilliant point here. Meal prepping is a middle ground bullshit option between Real Food and Bar Food. It is neither as good, tasty, and imbued with love as Real Food nor as fast, eatable, and convenient as Bar Food. Meal prepping, in short, is pond scum that the world wants you to believe carries a moral superiority. In contrast, Bar Food is the actual epitome of efficiency.

Sure, the Good And Proper™ solution to my Busy Era problems might be to slow down, savor life, and not rush the handful of beautiful gifts in this world like mealtime. But everyone knows that’s a load of impossible crock advice meant for rich people with butlers. I can thoroughly assure you that I am not busy by choice. My preferred day would involve moving absolutely no more than seven feet total, sleeping twenty hours, and watching Frasier for the four awake hours. That being said, it turns out that I need money to live and also that lifestyle would not be ““““healthy””” in the “““long term.””

Given such constraints, I have to make do. Which means that bar food is a real savior amongst an otherwise impossible existence. Planning and executing three meals per day is frankly exhausting. By the time I finish preparing, cooking, eating, and cleaning the last meal, it’s almost time for the next meal. Don’t forget to add variety! Don’t waste food! Don’t have unbalanced macros [i dunno what the fuck this one means either]! You can’t eat out too much, but if you slack on the dishes even one day it becomes virtually impossible to cook anything more complicated than a grilled cheese.

Feeding yourself demands perfection, but my nutritional needs have failed to consider that I suck tremendously hard. Spoiler alert: I am not going to do the dishes promptly like 60% of the time. I do not have the stamina to figure out gastronomically intriguing dishes more than once a day [more than once a week, arguably]. But you know what takes a little of the stress away? Relieves a little bit of decision fatigue?

Bar food.

For at least one meal per day, I can just shove a little brick of calories and vitamins into my face. It takes me under a minute to consume and less time to prepare. I can easily eat a bar while driving, running, between meetings, you name it! Bar food is an American hero following bravely in the tradition of sausages and MREs.

Writing this next bit after having a cliff bar

Now, imagine a world where more foods are bar form. To the point made in the title of this blog: what if I could compress five pounds of spaghetti into a five-pound bar??? Sandwiches are already decently convenient, but imagine if there was no threat of them falling apart all over your lap, getting mustard on your favorite shirt, because they were compacted into dense mouth-sized rectangles??? Beef stroganoff in bar form is, from what I have been hearing, something the people have been clamoring for.

want, need.

I think the bottom line of this post is that life is hard and seemingly only gets harder. So, the more food that gets smushed into bricks that I can ingest with minimal effort, the better. Is it a ruthless, soul-sucking way to enjoy meals? Sure. Is it alarmingly close to the concept of soylent green? Okay, now you’re just being dramatic; Zone Bars aren’t *people* [probably].

But where else can the corners be cut? In the Busy Era, which, let’s be honest, we are all in right now because the wheel of progress demands blood sacrifice and perpetual motion, there is precious little we can save time on. As the old saying goes: “Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business!” But after you’ve already slayed what can be slain, you still don’t have enough hours in the day! Next up on the unfortunate chopping block must be food.

Bar food is particularly well-suited to eliminate the worst meal of the day: breakfast. Ooooo I just woke up! Let me put a big plate of steaming sugar and carbs in my face! Perhaps some revolting eggs! Surely that won’t make me feel nauseous and uncomfortable! Horseshit. Breakfast is a lie you’re all telling yourselves because either Kelloggs got to you with their fake studies on “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” [if you somehow didn’t already know, they just made that up] or you really like sugar at 8am. Either way, grow the hell up! Unless we’re talking about a sumptuous McGriddle, breakfast is the obvious choice to axe in favor of bar food. All breakfast needs to be is something so that if lunch is late, you don’t die. Bar food fills that niche perfectly like an oxpecker in sub-Saharan Africa.

Now, bar food is not the only convenient foodmaxxing option in the game; however, I consider it to be the best. In the spirit of a recommendation previously made on The Stump, I have decided to gamify this discussion with a clear diagram of where foods fall in terms of ease and taste:

As you can see by this definitive grouping, not only do bar foods exist in the Quadrant of The Future - which emphasizes foods that have the ability to sustain us through the unending torture of the Busy Era - they also exist at the peak of the Quadrant of the Future. Bar foods are a superior form of food for their delirious levels of convenience and addictive flavors. I showed the draft of this post to my editor just now, and he had to have a cookie dough Zone Bar in response. Again, in bar food world, they are able to put the cookie dough in bar form. Until we realize Willy Wonka’s dream of an entire meal condensed into a stick of gum, bar foods are the way forward.

Just to highlight some contrasting examples from our other quadrants, we have Lean Cuisines down in the Quadrant of You Don’t Have To Hate Yourself That Much. You don’t. Let me be clear: I am in no way advising anyone consume a suboptimal level of calories. In fact, I am quite literally suggesting we all start consuming protein-laden chocolate bars as a primary food source. Lean Cuisines are simply too sad to be desirable. At best, you’re going to have the grainiest mac n cheese of your life out of one of those suckers. At worst, you have stooped to eating a slop that once resembled meat. Look at yourself in the mirror after eating a Lean Cuisine and tell me you feel pride.

In the Quadrant of Unrealistic Standards we of course have both Real Food and Real Food prepared by others. You might assume the latter is always easily achievable, but we all know from personal experience that eating two nights in a row at Texas Roadhouse is exhausting in its own right [jk i totally definitely haven’t done that]. Food purchased when dining out is delicious, but it is so delicious it circles back around to being personally unsustainable. I have begged god for my life after eating too many chips and salsa during dinner, and lord help me I won’t ever have to again.

Finally, in the Quadrant of Sadness and Shame, we have sushi catching a possibly unfair stray here, but it is, in fact, gross as hell. All of you are just pretending to like chewing a fishy version of the hunk of fat on a bad steak. Enjoy your heavy metals!!! Anyway, more appropriately, I would say the exemplar of this quadrant is meal prep. As I said, I have already dedicated a whole blog to laying out why meal prep is an atrocious abomination pushed on you by Big Tupperware [though, i am increasingly suspecting this is part of a bigger conspiracy by Big Lifestyle], but it bears repeating: meal prepping is like giving up on the concept of good things. It is neither convenient (requires cooking AND cleaning) nor delicious (taste like ass). Meal prep tries to appropriate convenience culture, but I see right through his scheme.

"Submit yourselves, then, to Bar Food. Resist the meal prep, and he will flee from you. Come near to Bar Food, and he will come near to you." -James 4:7-8, as I recall it.

Wrapping up this post into bar form…

Stumpies, to close this post out, let me lay down the simple math for you.

Bar foods are: yummy + convenient + portable + alarmingly shelf stable + nutritious + yummy^2

All of that adds up to be the only wise option for your own Busy Eras. I am agnostic about what bar you choose; it may even be made of apple cores and Chinese newspapers. What’s important is that you leave your mind freed from burden for at least one meal per day by quickly throwing something down your hungry gullet. How many hours have we collectively wasted attempting to derive pleasure from more sophisticated concoctions?

We have nothing to lose but our chains, Stumpies. We have bar foods to consume. Eaters of all countries, unwrap!

Bringing back questions for you…

1. Best meals that could be compressed into bar form?

2. What would you be doing right now if you didn’t have to waste time on proper food?

3. How many Simpsons references did I make? I genuinely don’t know someone should figure it out.

   Stumpies! I’m introducing a new feature to the blog. Exciting times. I will now feature a section on ‘What The Stump is Reading” to showcase some cool folks here on substack. These blogs are honored (in no particular order except recent memory) with The Stump Seal of Approval.

   What The Stump is Reading:

   JustSomeMustard

   - Being called this generation’s Conan O’Brien of the indie music scene!

   

for $1 you can ensure i get to keep eating trader joe’s fruit bars instead of lunch