I have a lot to say on the topic of nutrition.
I'm a big guy. It takes a lot of food to keep me full throughout the day, and that's nothing compared to what I guzzled in my youth. In those days, we were walking the streets day and night, we were brawling for our dinner, we were chasing hound dogs off our property at 3 am- I was always hungry, and a salmon onigiri from Lawson wasn't going to cut it.
I didn't always have access to a kitchen. I had my parents' house up until around high school, but once I lost that, it was bouncing around juvie (rice, oshinko, and cardboard chicken. Every day.), shelters, abandoned sites, all places without access to cooking utensils. I ate a lot of trash, and I don't just mean garbage, I mean half-petrified oven meals from konbinis. It kept me alive, but it wasn't nourishing.
When I joined up with the Awakusu-kai, I got my very first apartment. I got my very first kitchen. And that was the place I really learned how to eat. My mom taught me how to spruce up rice from a rice cooker, so I got to keep that one taste from home, but other than that it was all new all the time. I used my fancy new "salary" to purchase delicious-looking packs of meat, fresh pork cutlets, my own shelf of mirin, vinegars, soy sauces. I felt like king of the world. I felt like I owned my own castle.
That was twenty-five years ago. I'm not the rail-thin monster I was in my twenties. A lot of the fruits of my labor are still with me, in my face, my rear, my thighs, and that's alright. I like folks knowing that I'm a powerful man who eats well. But I still enjoy a good home-packed bento lunch every day, and that's where I have a bone to pick with these fuckers Shiki and Akabayashi.
I don't know wHAT is keeping Akabayashi alive. I think he eats once a day and it's always either McDonalds or a bowl of ramen. He's like a horse or something. He eats the absolute worst shit and lives through it smiling. As for Shiki, I've never seen him eat. I've personally cooked for both of these idiots and I know that they'd still prefer either not eating or eating trash from a store.
So my point is, enjoy the food you have. Learn how to cook something your body will thank you for. And don't be like Shiki or Akabayashi. I'm going to outlive them.
