Wikipedia Microwave

The hilarity of Wikipedia's food pictures, documented meticulously by a fan with a warped sense of humour. My other, better blog is Little Things DO NOT follow or like my posts if you run a blog which contains short, nonsensical moving clips from American TV programmes or similar because I will look at it for a nanosecond and think you are a cretin. N.B. This is not a food blog. The pictures in question are deliberately unappetising. If you would like to eat them, you are clearly an idiot and should fuck off. If you are an anorexic who wants to be 'inspired' by the food then while you have interpreted the awfulness of the food correctly, you are also gratuitously unwelcome here and should fuck off and get some professional help. There goes my whole audience.

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You know those pictures of pizza that you see in the takeaway? The ones that look super appealing and make you buy one even though you know the actual product will look nothing like it. The ones with deceptive lighting or a shrewd photographer or even a team of experts doctoring it by injecting stuff into it to make it look nicer. Well, this looks just like one of them. I swear I've seen this pizza millions of times before, crowning the menus of myriad takeaways across Britain.

Don't believe the menu hype, folks. They never actually look like this and what's to say even this imaginary pizza would taste as nice as it may seem?

Don't believe the hyperstringiness of the cheese. It would have to have been made by Heston Blumenthal in his 'longest bit of stringy cheese stuff ever' episode to actually reach these limits. No normal cheese has this stringiness in the way that no normal person ever has the suppleness or hypermobility of an olympic gymnast.

There will not be mushrooms, tomatoes or green peppers in the background if you buy this pizza unless you go to the shop in person to pick it up and stare intently at the back of the (probably faded and not quite as appetising) version of this picture on the board.

The olives will not have the perfect washer-like appearance of the photo. They will be the typical round pits of bitter death that Liberal Democrats pretend to like.

The lighting will be poor in your pathetic little bedsit, which will fade the colours of your pizza to the colour of the sun-damaged sign in the shop. Your table looks much shitter than the one in the picture as well, and you will just be depressed as you sit there eating your disappointing pizza in your disappointing room on your own.

Don't believe the hype. This pizza will ruin your life.

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Ah, Heston Blumenthal. How I love thee. Heston the experimental chef, culinary innovator with the scientific mind and creative brilliance. Heston the weird bald man off Eastenders who looks uncannily like a startled frog with thyroid problems. Heston the thirty-fourth President of the United States (when he takes his glasses off, which is never).

This 'perfect' spaghetti bolognese is just a little bit too perfect for my liking, but then again I don't think it's actually cooked by Heston at all, regardless of what the Wikipedia page says. It's missing the cheeky joie de vivre of his pornographic neo-Victorian jelly or the gleeful brutality of his blackbird pie (with actual live blackbirds). It's too clinical, not humorous or playful enough to be a real Blumenthal original. Not that I care; I'd still gladly eat it.

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A Non-Wikimicrowave Blog; Some Ground Rules

I don't understand the contemporary world. Everything is a flash, a paroxysm, a disaster flare. Instant gratification is everything and everywhere. It's all me, me, me, me, me, me. ME AND NOBODY ELSE. Culture is eroding, everything sharpened straight to the point, everything pared down to the signifier without a thought for the signified. Nothing has any meaning or depth any more and I don't understand it. I am twenty one years of age and grew up in a globalised world, surrounded by mass media, but I do not understand things any more. There is something sad about reading today when reading is unfashionable. Given the proliferation of pictures and moving images, you could even say that we are entering a post-literate age. Did I mention that reading is my favourite thing to do and that reading, interpreting, enjoying, studying, and writing about literature is my life's work?

So, a few ground rules. This is my blog (there we have it: a concession to the narcissicism of the age) and I make the rules (ooh! Touchy!). By dissecting the ridiculous misrepresentations of food on Wikipedia, I am attempting to do two things:

1. Convey a sense of absurdity and amusement from the depiction of unconventional (or hyper-conventional, for that matter) or unappealing foodstuffs.

2. Satirise the excessive seriousness and ensuing unintentional frivolity of Wikipedia as an information source, especially as Wikipedia's unreliability and subjectivity marks it out as an obvious bastion of the internet age's arrogant attitude towards knowledge.

The first rule is to appreciate this. As I say in the text at the side of the page, this is not a food blog. The pictures in question are deliberately unappetising. If you would like to eat them, you are clearly an idiot and should fuck off. If you are an anorexic who wants to be 'inspired' by the food then while you have interpreted the awfulness of the food correctly, you are also gratuitously unwelcome here and should fuck off and get some professional help.

The second rule is to read the writing. If you do this, you will be fighting back against the anti-literature literature of the electronic hyperrealist world.

The third rule is to spend some time and look around if you enjoy it (or quickly close the page if you don't; this blog isn't everyone's cup of tea). But please, have an opinion and do not meander through the masses of uninformative information of our 'world' without thinking or blinking.

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What the fuck is going on here? It's hard to tell, as this picture is more crowded than a Singaporean block of flats. In lieu of giving enough of a shit to bother with a vaguely amusing write-up, I'll list a few key points.

Meat, probably some kind of ham but possibly anything.

Some laughable cheese in the background. The cheese is so stupid that it hasn't even allowed itself to be properly spread on the piece of bread, leaving a half-melted mess that looks like it's been run over by a pick-up truck.

Sloppy stuff of various colours. The one in the foreground looks like vomit; the one at the back looks like beetroot mixed with pepto-bismol.

Glass of booze. This is fair enough, really.

Sausages which look as though they could be nice or horrible, but which I can't imagine being simply indifferent.

Things that look like a bizarre genetic fuck-up which left turkeys spliced with potatoes.

Round things which are somehow like stuffing but not stuffing.

Having seen Hitchcock's classic Rope recently, I've developed a strange suspicion of buffets. While this one doesn't look like it was thrown by a murderer, you can never be too sure and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the unidentified elements was meat from someone's thumb or something (not that the murderers in Rope served their victim up at the buffet, though probably only because The Code would have stopped Hitchcock from making that film).

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As an explorer of some of the odder foods pictured on Wikipedia, I am proud to present a new invention: pizzaghetti. As I can't possibly take credit for an invention which wasn't my idea, I will let the originator of pizzaghetti carry on to explain what led to this momentous step in the culinary arts.

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I suppose pizzaghetti came to me as something of an epiphany. I was making spaghetti for lunch one day when I felt a sudden craving for two slices of margherita pizza. This was very distressing, as the spaghetti was getting nice and soft and was almost ready to serve, so I didn't have the heart to chuck it away. Instead, I sat down and ate a whole plate of faintly-sauced spaghetti, my tears merging with the slight residue of hot water that I hadn't poured away properly. Realising that I would have to wait until tea to order a pizza and be able to eat it without risking digestive discomfort broke my heart.

I spent weeks racking my brains to find a solution to the spaghetti/pizza problem. After a hard day of trying to resolve the problem, I fell asleep on my desk. There was something about the poor ergonomics and strange lighting that made me have strange dreams that night; the first involved a courtesy car and a missing log book. In the second, I was eating a plate of pizza and spaghetti. Like Paul McCartney's somnolent composing of Yesterday, one of my great epiphanies came in my sleep.

The next day, I devised a cunning experiment to test my new theory. I would order a pizza for lunch but, rather than waiting, I would cook a smaller amount of spaghetti than usual. If the timings worked out right, I could serve them on the same plate. The experiment worked a dream (see the picture) and I'm now working on getting pre-packaged pizzaghetti in the shops by the autumn.

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Hmm...this is a strange one, because it's looks perfectly fine at first. The bacon is lovely. It's ages since I've eaten bacon and now I've got a real craving for that lovely saltiness. I can take or leave the eggs and toast but they're perfectly understandable accompaniments to the bacon.

What makes far less sense is the little red package on the right, which turns out to be a tiny little package of jam. Jam. With bacon. Jam. Jam with bacon. Admittedly, there's a chance that the person who took the picture intended to eat the toast separately and put the jam on it, but even then it would have become incredibly greasy and unmistakably animal-like with the fatty residues it would have picked up. Therefore, I'm inclined to think that somebody is actually smearing jam all over their meat. While this may explain the French name for ham ('jambon'), it defies every other logical convention of human existence. It either takes an immense amount of courage or idiocy to break rules of basic flavour, and so the person who has concocted this bizarre breakfast is either a lunatic or a genius. Maybe they're both.

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This pathetic middle-class variation of the classic fry-up really irks me. It's the sort of fried breakfast that the hipster cunts I described on Friday would eat. I spent much of the last year living with a total shithead who, while not wearing 'ironic' clothing and listening to bad female folk singers who try too hard to seem 'weird', had a friend who was a Japanese hipster. I went to the kitchen one afternoon to make lunch when this cunt friend of my awful neighbour nearly smashed the door into my face. He has an idiotically geometrically non-geometric haircut and was wearing a pair of those massive fucking geek glasses THAT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE FUCKING LENSES (I went shopping for glasses the other day and am happy to note that the woman who worked in the opticians thought they were ridiculous too). He was such a vile specimen that a less passive person than myself would have killed or at least maimed him, but alas I just walked off. This cunt, probably the stupidest looking twatwipe I've ever seen, almost certainly invented this breakfast, or at least eats it in a dreadful café while talking about BIG FLASHING ANIMATED PICTURES being better than actual words and bemoaning the fact that life was more than a series of jerky video snippets edited by an American child with attention deficit disorder.

Seriously, this breakfast really is food of the twats. I like a good fry-up but this is just so...self-conscious. The whole plate seems to be screaming "look at me! I'm so postmodern, taking a traditional dish and turning it into something kooky that stupid people will find amusing and endearing". I can imagine it being served by a dickwipe who looks like a T4 presenter, with a long-sleeved multicoloured American Apparel shirt tucked into shorts, and wearing fucking braces while the Dirty Projectors play in the background, drowning out a million bad conversations about American TV programmes that are "only good in an ironic way".

If you want a fry-up, just get a fucking fry-up you stupid hipster duodenums. It may kill you but I'd rather die than know I'd eaten an oh-so-clever sausage that looks like it's fashioned out of Play-Doh, and oh-so-clever but extremely unexceptional bacon, and oh-so-clever eggs that have been shaped so a spastic child won't hate them any more, and oh-so-clever fried tomatoes that are in stupid fucking slices that have got many an idiot expelled from culinary college.

But the thing I hate the most is the bubble and squeak. It's oh-so-oh-so-ironic-and-postmodern-and-clever-especially-if-you-don't-know-the-meaning-of-any-of-these-words-any-more-because-your-brain-has-been-addled-by-fucking-GIFs-and-awful-American-bands. It makes me so angry that I don't care that I opened a sentence with a pivotal conjunction. It doesn't belong in a fucking full breakfast unless you are a thick American shithead who had heard the terms 'bubble and squeak' and 'full breakfast', looked them up on Wikipedia and still conflated them.

This is working class food for middle class people. If you want something sanitised then don't order a fucking full English breakfast.

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There's an episode of the wonderful chat show parody Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge where Alan moves his show to Paris for a week to present a French special. He runs through a number of idiotic stereotypes and clichés about French people, meets a dirty pierrot and a mono-Francophone lorry driver, and talks about Peter Ustinov and Jacques Derrida with an attractive French woman, but the highlight of the programme is his meeting with a French chef. Playing with Partridge's phillistine tendencies, the chef cooks him a plate of hors d'oeuvres with a twist: the innocent-looking vol au vents contain bull's testicles. Unaware, Partridge chomps on the vol au vents while his guests carry on a serious (and oh-so-witty) conversation about philosophy and food. He finally stops to ask the chef what is in his lovely little appetisers. The totally deadpan reply is "it's a gland". Needless to say, the scene doesn't end well.

This dish looks similarly innocuous, and I'm sure Alan would love it. Things only take on a sinister turn when you read the image description, which reveals our nice if obscure meat is actually sliced and sautéed bull's penis. If you have just eaten a plate of sliced and sautéed bull's penis, then I'm sorry for letting you know. Happy eating!

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We've covered some pretty depressing food pictures but this takes the prize for wrist-slitting bleakness by a country mile. This picture is an illustration of what dinner would look like in a Threads-style post-apocalyptic wasteland, where contaminated meat of uncertain origin is the main dish, served under the watchful eye of deceased relatives who lie in the corner of the dining room.

The food in question is hangikjöt, an Icelandic dish of sliced mutton. In the picture, it is served with bechamel sauce, odd potatoes, decaying pea matter and something else which I can't determine. It looks like the sort of meal that might be eaten by the protagonist of Halldor Laxness' novel Independent People, an unremittingly grim tale of an impoverished farmer in rural Iceland. The most memorable scene illustrates what happens when animal feed becomes so scarce that sheep farmers have to give their animals coffee instead; the results are about as pretty as you might expect.

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Dear hipster cunts,

This is not a cooking blog. Your fake plastic glasses look fucking stupid and they're obviously so crap that they have stopped your eyes from working properly and noticing the often humorously scathing text in which I dissect the awfulness of the food I post. You might cream your American Apparel 'Postmodern Lumberjack' ironically chequerboarded skinny jeans in disgust to hear this but regurgitating pictures of crap food on your blogs as a consequence of a tiny glimpse caught in the process of your eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy (to try to etch out the image of your stupid face in the mirror) is not actual communication. Stay in Brooklyn, or Hoxton or whichever part of London is en vogue with crap bands at the moment and leave me to wallow in my provincial humanness untouched by your misuse of the concept of irony, by your annoying twee bands and by your espadrilles, fake glasses and 'ironic' pyjama suits that show you up for the infantile cunt you are. Please stick them up your disgusting hameorrhoid-ridden arse along with this plate of charred dog meat.

Regards,

The Blogmaster

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I have a lot of time for pepperoni pizza, often eating at least one a week. This one looks really nice too, and props to the person who actually made it themself rather than buying a ready made one like the rest of us.

Now for the weird little problem: the colours. I'm so used to the slightly-too-perfect perfection of the chemicals that presumably go into ready made pizzas, taking their potentially carcinogenic properties with them that seeing a pizza that doesn't look too pizza-like freaks me out. If I ever eat 'real' pizza, it's in a restaurant where presentation is an obsessively huge part of the appeal, and I never have pepperoni then anyway (quattro formaggi al fresco in Rome was one of my best ever dining out experiences, but food in Italy is always brilliant, the only caveat being that it ruins all Italian food eaten back at home by comparison). While I'm sure this pizza tasted fantastic, it looks somewhat...rusted. The pepperoni pueces have merged with the cheese and somehow oxidised in the process, so they look like delicious pieces of ancient plumbing pipes, long corroded to Timbuktu by tonnes of Toilet Duck-infused water and shit. Such a nice image for when you're eating pizza.

The other strange visual element to the pizza is how much it looks like some kind of military camouflage pattern. This isn't so much down to the colours (in what environment would this blend in with the landscape, beyond a siege at a pizza parlour?) as the rustic asymmetry of the dish. The empty strip in the middle looks so odd that it's hard to conceive it as the end of a cooking process and not as the result of a computer-aided attempt to confuse some kind of pizza-based enemy into baffled submission.

Years of succumbing to generic ideas about aesthetic perfection have prevented me from appreciating the classic appeal of a plate of home-cooked food. How sad.

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And now for perhaps the strangest piece of cropping I've ever seen. Cropping is meant to remove superfluous details from photographs, recalibrating the viewer's perspective. This just looks like a mad close-up, and I only know it has been 'cropped' because the image file name says so.

Even more bizarre is the actual content of the picture. It's a delicious looking array of heavily-coated Kansas City barbecue stuff. I'm going to have to plead ignorance on what differentiates Kansas City barbecue from ordinary barbecue but it looks great. I get on very well with barbecue food (though not necessarily barbecues, especially as I had a panic attack at my last one because the worst people to have ever walked the Earth were there) but the general set-up of this is just odd.

In the front is the edge of a piece of bread, which hasn't been eliminated by the haphazard cropping. Admittedly, I couldn't do a better job, but then again, I'd have just left the photo as it was or even taken a proper close-up of the fucking plate in the first place.

The oddest thing here is the faint object in the far left of the picture. Basic logic tells me that it's some of device to take the temperature of the meat, but my mind is anything but logical. Therefore, I'm definitely sticking to my guns that it's a Ventolin inhaler. This raises a few more questions. Is it a straightforward matter of the photographer being asthmatic or is it a more complicated gesture, hinting at something about the food? This could even be an elaborate symbolic suggestion that the effect of eating meat decimates the food chain, depleting it of metaphorical 'oxygen'.

So, this could easily just be a badly-cropped photo of a delicious plate of barbecued food, but it could just as easily be an awe-inspiring example of conceptual art.

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Hearing that Martin McGuinness is going to meet the British Queen and shake her hand (possibly while wearing a novelty electric buzzer) got me thinking about the differences and similarities between Britain and Ireland. As a Celt from the bigger island, I feel in a strange position regarding Ireland; though I'm British, I have an inherent sympathy with and affinity for Irish people. It helps that attend university in a city with a massive Irish influence, where I've met lots of Irish folk and been able to successfully pronounce their names, earning many accolades in the process.

On a trivial level, one of our shared cultural traits is the full breakfast (called a 'British Isles breakfast' by Alan Partridge in an attempt to avoid offending two Irish TV executives, oblivious to the dubious political connotations of the phrase 'British Isles'). Far be it from me to cheapen Celtic identities, but these breakfasts barely differ from nation to nation. The last full breakfast I profiled was a Scottish one, which had little Caledonian influence beyond the inclusion of some haggis. This dish is even more bereft of identity, with the only 'Irish' inclusion being some white pudding (me neither, but it's the stuff that looks like mushrooms apparently). Indeed, it would be impossible to know that this was an Irish breakfast were it not for the Wikipedia title of the picture: 'Irish breakfast'.

Perhaps worse for Ireland than the generic soullessness of the dish is its sheer crapness. The black pudding is shrivelled up, the sausages are pale and undercooked, the bacon looks lifelessly industrial and the eggs are downright weird, with two of the biggest, runniest yolks I've ever seen, ready to run all over the plate and render the other food even less edible if possible. The orange juice, meanwhile, looks like it comes from freshly squeezed Irish oranges.

I'll get round to posting a Welsh breakfast one day, but not until I feel ready enough to inflict the shame on my nation.

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As a Brit, I'm used to facing ridiculous stereotypes. It probably doesn't help that I'm so insanely polite as to live up to one of the more bizarre perceived elements of Britishness (try living here and see how polite we are...) but different perceptions of the British never fail to amuse me. I've often met Aussies overseas, and they almost always compliment me on my meekness and queueing ability while knowing nothing about me. The last time I went abroad, some very odd elderly Australians made a point of espousing their love of Britain and Britishness in front of me, but I heard them calling British kids 'feral' in the restaurant and blaming all of the world's ills on Britain's supposedly excessive 'tolerance'. Tolerance to what is anyone's guess. Tolerance to moaning bastards in hotel restaurants perhaps.

These ageing Aussies had evidently been to London before I met them, as they must have taken this picture. There are so many signifiers of Britishness in it that looking at it makes me feel faint (did I mention that the accompanying text on Wikipedia says it was taken at Kensington Palace?).

Here, we have afternoon tea. I have afternoon tea too, but it's nothing like this. My afternoon tea consists of a cup (or three) of tea, usually made with cheap teabags but sometimes with proper loose leaf tea in a pot if I fancy doing something a bit more 'special'. On the other hand, this is just a ridiculous charade. We have tea, which is fair enough, but the cucumber sandwiches are such a ridiculous cliché that I half expected the photo to have been taken at 'Britain World' in a mall in Dubai or somewhere. The sandwiches look awful (certainly not worth the extraordinary price presumably charged by the palace's Orangery), dry and probably flavourless. It says a lot that cucumber sandwiches were originally designed as an ostentatious show of wealth at a time when nutritionally bereft food was an opulent luxury that few could afford. Any foodstuff designed with irritating poor people in mind is bound to forsake flavour, and cucumber sandwiches are no exception. The poor bastards shelling out on this would be better off eating the stamps that are so sweetly placed on the table. Good old British stamps.

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While my love of spaghetti bolognaise and its many variations usually knows no bounds, I had to take a step back here.

True, the texture of the spaghetti looks nice and the sauce is okay, if a little thin, but there is something about the bizarre mound of powdery ersatz cheese that ruins the whole thing. The little mountain it forms looks horrible enough but, if you have the stomach to cast your eyes down to the valley around it, you will see disgusting little flecks of cheese substitute semi-submerged in the sauce. This description sounds benign enough but if you look at them closely, you will see that these flecks aren't just powdery cheesy dots; they uncannily resemble tiny particles of vomit, making it look as though parts of the dish have already been eaten.

My mind is far less set on the paper plate. Part of me thinks it's cute and endearing but the other half thinks that half of me has turned into a twee wanker, and it's a ridiculous thing to do. If you can be bothered to make food then why can't you be bothered to use a proper fucking plate?

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Whaling is a thoroughly abhorrant practice, and it's something that I find completely repulsive. This is the first time I have ever seen a picture of whale meat, so it's understandable that this is one of the more sober posts on this blog, though it also raises the disgust factor through the roof.

Here, we have a Faroese dish of two kinds of whale meat (the black stuff and the pinky substance in the dish in the middle), dried fish, and sliced potatoes that look (and might be) uncooked. In spite of (or perhaps because of) my revulsion of whaling, I've developed a morbid fascination for the black meat. It looks extraordinary in its darkness, like polished obsidian dipped in a barrel of crude oil. Something that looks like that really doesn't have the right to be meat, and superficially, it has a lot more in common with the aubergine I posted before (though it didn't awaken the same bizarre sexual feelings in me) that most meats.

For fuck's sake, please don't eat whale meat even though it looks incredible.

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Apparently, this is a sausage. A Devon sausage to be exact (whatever the hell that is).

Somebody obviously made a mistake. It's just a flat, fleshy expanse of compacted, amalgamated, reprocessed nothing, condensed into a pink polony mess made out of a child's Play-Doh. Unlike the traditional 'finger' method (used to create such Play-Doh confections as Michael Portillo's putty fingered face) this Play-Doh was bought wholesale from the factory. The psychopath responsible for this monstrosity (perhaps the same person or animal who created Portillo's face) dumped the Play-Doh on the floor in an enormous, sterilised warehouse, and rolled it over with a huge steamroller. They took this photo and then had a huge wank.