Food and Writing

Of the 9 or so jobs I've had since I was of legal working age, 7 of them have been in the food industry. The other two have been office jobs. I've found that a curious thing happens when I work in the food industry. It begins to take over my non-working life: invading my dreams*, affecting my choice of reading materials**, and working its way into my creative sphere. The office jobs didn't have quite the same affect***; whether that's because these jobs were so low-stress my mind could let go of them after 8 hours of work, or whether they were just so boring I did not feel the need to pursue them in my spare time.

When I worked at Animal Tracks, I started scripting a comic book detailing A Day in the Life of a Fast-Food Cook. When I was at The Madison, I started several short stories about the conversations I had with the residents. I was at Goodies for a year, and in that time, managed to get 50 pages into a novel about sugar-based humanoid life forms that tumble through a portal into the parallel universe we call Winnipeg only to discover that the goings-on of the bakeshop that said portal was situated in directly affected Life as they Knew It in their own little world. Most of this was scrawled on the backs of discarded receipts during slow days at work****. Of course, each of these projects ended as soon as I switched jobs. I did try to keep that novel up (I had just gotten to the part where they discover that the temperatures of a Winnipeg winter makes their bodies brittle and then someone's nose falls off, and they need to sneak back into the bakery and glue it back on with melted chocolate ganache. What fun!)

Anyway, my current job has left me with the ambition to create a chap-book of cupcake poetry. So far I have one. I managed to keep it in perfect iambic pentameter, until line 14, when I decided it wasn't going to be a sonnet after all, and then it became a mishmash of different syllabic emphases. Enjoy.

In Praise of Cupcakes

I will not claim to love these cakes I sell,
nor cherish our outstanding clientele:
the shrieking children overfed, cake-high,
who wipe their noses on the glass and cry,
the deer-legged women who will quake in fear
and ask “how many calories in here?”
the place is madness, this I will admit.
I once loved cake but I got over it.
And yet I praise this one discovery:
to give away one cupcake will save me
from paying for my drinks, the plumbing bills;
my drycleaning is free, so are most meals;
I’ve learned my dentist fancies buttercream,
my hairdresser prefers chocolate praline;
my ex-wife’s lawyer loves lemon meringue,
so does her maid; she eats it all the time.
So while cupcakes may be the death of me,
while cake gums up my eyes, invades my dreams,
and though I wish I could forget about them
truthfully, I cannot leave home without them.



*When I worked at Baked Expectations, I found that no matter how late I got home, I had to unwind for an hour or so before going to bed or else I'd end up washing dishes in my dreams as well

**For instance, while sitting in the waiting room of the chiropractor's office on Wednesday, I brought along The Whimsical Bakery Book for light reading instead of the usual young adult novel.

***Alright, so I did go vegetarian after working at CFGB. But I wasn't about to write a novel about it.

****I also collaborated with the evening counter attendant to create confectionery-themed versions of pop songs. I remember redoing 'Sexy Back' by Justin Timberlake, but unfortunately can only remember one line of it now: "I'll make you bake cookies if you misbehave".