Why I Don’t Want to Eat Like a Gilmore

Pizza, Burger, Chinese Take-away, Donuts, Muffins, Pancakes, Pop-Tarts, Ice Cream… If I had to choose the one thing that baffles me most about the girls, it’d be the amount of fast food they stuff into themselves without gaining any weight. I remember this one weekend with my Dad years ago – I guess, I must have been 12 or 13 – when we couldn’t decide on what food we’d get. My sister wanted a McDonald’s hamburger (gross, I know), I was craving for this one particular Chinese curry dish and my Dad thought about getting Pizza. In the end, he was driving to three different places getting three different kinds of food. One of my favourite Dad-weekend memories and a true Gilmore Girls-moment.

As a big fan of Kristi Carlson’s Eat Like a Gilmore and her follow-up Daily Cravings (though by now I cook my own veganized versions of her recipes), I started to ask myself:

Would it be great to actually eat like a Gilmore?

For many reasons my answer to this question is no. Yes, I’d love to be able to eat four Thanksgiving dinners and snack some rolls on the way home. I’d love to order tons of Chinese food and try a little bit of everything. And I’d love to check out all the hot delivery guys in town by ordering from 10 different places at once.

But there is one thing that simply drives me crazy and that is the amount of food and packaging they’re throwing away. Surely, it’s only a show, but isn’t Gilmore Girls working as a mirror of the modern American society? And even worse: hasn’t it become a role model to millions of fans, to people just like me who have been growing up watching the show?

By presenting its main characters as inconsiderate consumers and contrasting them with crazy health fanatics such as Mrs. Kim and Michel, the show runners imply that wilful waste is chic. While Mrs. Kim confronts her daughter Lane with an excessive use of tofu, Michel is even counting the blueberries in his morning pancakes. Add in Coach Bennet, the only vegan in the show, who is – to say it frankly – pretty scary. Luke’s healthy lifestyle becomes inauthentic by the simple fact that he’s selling dishes he’d never touch himself. Sookie, at the same time, does not want to ‘waste’ her talent on vegetarians.

Lorelai and Rory are wasteful, not only with food, but also in their consumption of fast fashion, the countless take-away cups containing their beloved coffee or Rory’s vast number of trips between London and New England without ever considering her carbon dioxide footprint, to only mention a few.

RORY: This is just wrong!
LORELAI: What?
RORY: You washing two socks!
LORELAI: They were dirty.
RORY: That’s wasteful.
LORELAI: I really wanted to wear them tonight.
RORY: They are your dancing Santa Claus socks. You’re not gonna wear them for another ten months.

Don’t get me wrong: I love love love Gilmore Girls and I’m still binge-watching the show. However, sometimes when you grow up you begin to question even the things you love.  And just as I realised that Lorelai’s and Rory’s social behaviour isn’t flawless making it easier for me to like characters such as Dean, Christopher or Richard and Emily, it seemed necessary to question their consumer behaviour. (By the way, which single mother could afford eating out three times a day?)

We constantly want more from life and while I agree that we should constantly strive for happiness, freedom and love, I believe we have to stop trying to compensate our dissatisfaction with consumption or put love and status on a level with materialism. Emily, for example, goes shopping when she is discontent with her marriage while Logan expresses his love for Rory by buying her a £32,000 bag (unpopular opinion: a really ugly bag).

Gilmore Girls is a beautiful show with amiable characters and a lovely story, but why is there no American show with normal ecoconscious characters? Why do the Coach Bennets and Phoebes of today’s modern TV shows also have to be weird or eccentric, even childish? Why does it have to be cool and funny to go on a quest for the best burger in New York as Marshall did in How I met your mother, ignoring the fact that firstly, they’re wasting food animals had suffered and died for and secondly, that Marshall is supposed to be fighting for the environment.

Well, Marshall, start by consuming less meat!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow, it’s gonna be just like “Lady and the Tramp”

Bella notte, a small Italian restaurant, a wine bottle candle stick and the best spaghetti in town – that is what comes to my mind when I think of Spaghetti & Meatballs. And as you would expect from an almost perfect show such as Gilmore Girls, of course there’s a reference to this very iconic Lady and the Tramp-scene during Rory’s and Dean’s three-month anniversary in Season 1’s “Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers”:

Wow, it’s gonna be just like “Lady and the Tramp”. You’ll share a plate of spaghetti, but it’ll just be one long strand, but you won’t realise it until you accidentally meet in the middle. And then, he’ll push a meatball towards you with his nose, and you’ll push it back with your nose, and then you’ll bring the meatball home and you’ll save it in the refrigerator for years and …

Of course, there’s also that moment in Season 7 when Emily is actually serving the dish and accidentally turning a quite normal conversation about celebrity hair colours into an argument:

LORELAI: How can you possibly say she looked better with the dark hair?
RORY: She did, the blonde just seemed like she was trying to be her sister.
LORELAI: The dark hair makes it look like she’s trying not to look like her, plus she does not have the nose for dark hair.
RORY: What does that mean?
LORELAI: Dark hair is like a giant light-up arrow pointing to what is wrong with you. Blond hair, it all sort of blends in in a haze of beige.
RORY: Nuts, you’re nuts.
LORELAI: You’re double nuts!
EMILY: All right, that’s it. No more spaghetti and meatballs. Musepa, come get these plates.
LORELAI: Mom!
EMILY: Every time we have spaghetti and meatballs, you fight.

Anyway, my best friend’s birthday was coming up and I was flipping through some cookbooks for inspirations. You should know I’m one of these crazy people who prefer experience gifts to material purchases, mainly because I believe, it’s more meaningful but also because we all have too much stuff anyway.

Well, I was flipping through Eat Like a Gilmore and all of a sudden there was this fantastic idea in my head, and I decided to throw him a Disney-themed motto night. With 16 square meters living space and a student income there was, of course, no way it would be as perfect as Lorelai’s fake Asia vacation or Rory’s Logan-farewell/Pre-London-party, but with self-made Disney decorations à la Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Peter Pan and The Princess and the Frog, and myself dressed as Mary Poppins (I had used the outfit before for our graduation motto week “Children’s heroes”) it still promised to be a great night. I borrowed a plaid tablecloth from my grandma, lit up some candles and was quite surprised by the atmosphere I had created.

The recipe is quite time-consuming but not hard to prepare and it’s definitely worth the effort (even though you have to gut sausages instead of simply using minced meat). As a student, I have to admit, pasta is one of my three basics – coffee, pasta and cookies (yep, quoted Gilmore Girls again) – mostly in combination with tomatoes and cheese, maybe a bit of zucchini and mushrooms, or sometimes a little more fancy with salmon or prawns, so it was great to try a dish that was different and definitely more special from what I would usually have. For dessert there was Chocolate Fondue with pink and white Marshmallow mice & we ended up… no, not fighting (!!!)… watching Zootopia.

All in all, a perfect evening (which would probably make a pretty good date, too 😉) at home with a 5-stars recipe!