Tony Tulathimutte’s Grub Street Diet

Among this fall’s big books, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection might be the most unusual: a collection of interconnected stories about sex, envy, and loserdom in the post-internet world that went on to be longlisted for the National Book Award. It’s also gloriously gross, reveling in the uncomfortable — much like he does in this week’s Diet, which includes pumpkin-spice Soylent, near-to-expiration hummus he finds in the back of his fridge, and several foods he bought as a “joke.” He logs it all in his trusty macro-tracker. “It might not seem like it, but I eat pretty healthy,” he says. “But I used to do a thing where I ate $20 of McDonald’s in one sitting once a year — which, especially a decade ago, went a long way. It was sort of like when Dad sits you down and makes you smoke a whole pack of cigarettes at once.”

Tuesday, October 22
Let me preface this by saying I’ve had three sinus surgeries and lifelong allergies, so my sense of smell is not keen. Like, wine just tastes sour to me. This will go some way toward accounting for the irregularities to come.

Most mornings I make what I call “green drink,” a slurry of spinach, kale, celery, apple, lemon, and soy milk, plus a frozen medley of pineapple, strawberry, mango, coconut, and chia seeds, that is just barely suckable through a metal straw. I started doing this after seeing Taron Egerton looking shredded while making a smoothie on the pilot of Apple TV’s Blackbird, which I did not finish. The idea is that having all this produce first thing in the morning licenses me to eat as bizarrely and violently as I want for the rest of the day. But today I forgot to buy greens, and the rest of the ingredients blend to the color of drywall, so it’s just “drink.” Meanwhile, my roommate makes soft-boiled eggs with a countertop contraption that has transformed my whole relationship to eggs, in the sense that I eat eggs now. I eat one over the sink with El Yucateco XXXtra Hot Habanero sauce, the only supermarket brand that tastes even remotely spicy to me.

While I get to work writing the above paragraph, I drink kopi luwak, which is coffee made from beans that an Asian palm civet shits out of its ass. This isn’t an everyday thing; I only have it because I told my nieces about civet coffee to gross them out, and they retaliated by getting some for me as a birthday gift. I abhor wasting food, so now I’m slurping cat deuce from a mug. Very smooth — you can barely taste the shit.

Lunch is the driest turkey sandwich on God’s earth. From about 2006 to 2015, I ate this same exact sandwich (wheat bread, turkey, tomato, mayo, mustard, lettuce) every day just because Googling other lunch concepts seemed tedious. The Schweppes zero-sugar ginger ale is there mostly to push this blockage, this fatberg, hydraulically down my esophagus.

I have no time for dinner between an interview with Wired and a reading I’m doing at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for a series called Lactose Intolerant. (I’m not lactose tolerant, which is like the main thing I have going for me.) There are snacks at AAWW headquarters, so I have a bag of Cheetos Puffs and three cans of yuzu-flavored Lunar Hard Seltzer, which is the only explicitly Asian American hard seltzer as far as I’m aware.

Afterwards, I get dinner with my friend Kayla, who is vegan. I get along well with vegans because I don’t care what food tastes or feels like. We go nearby to Dig, a healthy Chipotle-style fast-casual chain, and I order a plate of spicy meatballs that are not spicy, carrots, kale, and brown rice, whose health benefits I then immediately cancel out at Sid Gold’s Request Room with a whiskey-and-soda and a whiskey.

Wednesday, October 23
It is ass day. For breakfast, I drink a bottle of Soylent Complete Protein, chocolate. There are many good reasons why the overtly dystopian Soylent and its enjoyers are laughingstocks, but people who criticize Soylent are usually imagining the caprese salad or pan bagnat they might’ve been eating instead. For me, the driving (or driveless) principle around food has always been sloth. It’s either Soylent, or it’s something equally disgusting and unhealthy. So Soylent is a kind of Universal Basic Pabulum, a backstop when I don’t eat enough or forget to buy groceries. It tastes fine and is over within seconds.

On ass days, my roommate and I treat ourselves to burritos. Our favorite spot, Cielito Lindo, recently forsook us, so we’ve been trying new places, and today’s defendant is Brooklyn Taqueria. I order a carne-asada burrito with sour cream and salsa roja. It comes in a paper wrapper, auguring ill, and is accompanied by a huge underroasted poblano pepper whose weight and texture and heat and loose skin is … I’m sorry, but the only fitting word, I promise, is schlonglike. The burrito is a bit on the small side for $15.50, but nice enough — you’re spared the prologue bites of wadded tortilla, and the filling is moist without being drippy. It’s a solid B. Still: Come back, Cielito Lindo.

Ass days are also when I take pre-workout. I never bothered to look at the brand name on the label until writing this, and I’m just now discovering it’s called BUM RAW. So I’ve been taking BUM RAW on ass day. Okay. And now that I’m looking, I notice that one scoop contains 325 milligrams of caffeine, which is only 65 milligrams less than the Panera lemonade that kills you (allegedly). My problem with pre-workout is the flavoring, whose conventions are similar to vape juice, with various fruits and cocktails tasting mostly like sugary abstractions. I went with “Citrus Grapefruit,” which is redundant.

It doesn’t kill me, but it also doesn’t make me stronger. Quaking and mewling after the barbell squats, single-leg hip thrusts, front-foot elevated lunges, and Bulgarian split squats, I drink a chocolate-whey-protein shake with one teaspoon of psyllium-husk fiber supplement. Here I pause to interpolate some personal history. Back in 2001, on a visit to Thailand with my family, I had the stomach problems you’d expect after a 20-hour flight and three days of nonstop Thai food, and we were on a train headed north. The toilet was just a brushed-steel cavity in the floor, and there was nothing to hold onto, so after about ten minutes in a perilous hang-ten, I left to go consult my dad, who is a doctor. He gave me a chocolate bar that he said would help, but he didn’t tell me it was actually medicated antidiarrheal chocolate, and he also didn’t tell me not to eat the whole bar. So for the next five days I was laid up with Sisyphean constipation, listening to Amnesiac and playing Legend of Zelda: The Oracle of Seasons on my Game Boy Color. I’ll spare you the finale, but it involved a bar of hotel soap and prayer.

The protein shake affords an opportunity to wash down a bunch of other miscellaneous supplements I originally got when I was tapering off Lexapro and thought I needed something to compensate, like when Indiana Jones switches out the golden idol for a bag of sand. So down goes the citicoline, lion’s mane, Bacopa monnieri, Rhodiola rosea, ashwagandha, turmeric, L-theanine, and something called Force Factor SCORE! Hardcore Performance and Libido Intensifier, which I bought as a “joke.” There’s a callout bubble shaped like this: ♂️, which boasts a 2.3x INCREASE, but in tiny letters below it says, “in nitric oxide.” On the back, it promises to enhance sexual feedback and stimulation, “giving you and your partner mind-blowing results.” Very bold to assume a partner. I don’t know if it does anything, but I imagine it going to war in my bloodstream with the bottle of Women’s Multivitamin Gummies I got last month by accident and ate anyway.

Tonight my writing group meets at Jenny’s place. We usually get a family-style dinner, talk shit, then workshop a manuscript, and we order from a Korean place called Woori. I get jjamppong, my favorite from back when I used to work at a Korean video-game company. (I say “work,” but I mostly stole off to read in the bathroom — I got through Anna Karenina that way, but all I remember is the smell.) On top of the two orders of marinated bean sprouts that come free with the meal, Jenny orders a large thing of bean sprouts, and keeps saying “I love sprouts” in an increasingly fast demonic voice whenever someone enters the room.

While we’re eating, I make the fatal mistake of mentioning that I’m doing a Grub Street Diet, not realizing that this would mean I would have to include the discussion of the Grub Street Diet in my own Grub Street Diet — with a group of writers, including Jenny, who wrote one herself. We dissect its tropes (casual name-dropping, hints of a vibrant social calendar, implicit personality/eating disorders, lifestyle gore) and its highlights (Alissa Nutting, T-Pain, Tim Blake-Nelson), and whether or not its writers strategically choose to eat things that make them look more interesting. So the final act of ingestion today is the snake eating its own tail.

Thursday, October 24 
A while ago, I met a lady who said she loves oatmeal. I didn’t know that was possible. I am always looking for ways to be anyone besides myself, so this morning I’m having oatmeal, that most celebrated invention of Joyce Carol Oates, topped with almond slivers, four chopped dates, and maple syrup. It’s fine. I don’t have anything interesting to say about oatmeal.

When the fridge gets full, I dispose of any food on the verge or slightly beyond the verge of expiring by eating it. I started doing this as a “joke,” but it’s now more of a housekeeping errand. So lunch is leftover roasted chicken and potatoes from three days ago (unheated), the last two bites of yesterday’s burrito, and a sentient glob of hummus from antiquity, so old that the label might as well be in cuneiform.

In the evening, my roommate Alice and I go Halloween-costume shopping at Halloween Adventure near Union Square, then pick up beef gyros at Halal Guys, the best in the city by my own amateur estimation. At the front of the line is a guy with a massive sweat stain on his back, who is disputing with the guy taking his order. I can’t hear it well, but from what I can gather, he wanted to taste-test one of the meats like it’s a Baskin-Robbins or something, and the cook mistook it for an order. The only things I can hear him say clearly are “With the pita???” and “That’s exactly what I was saying!”

The louder he gets, the larger the sweat stain grows, until his maybe-girlfriend or -wife comes over and he recapitulates the entire debacle to her while the rest of us are in line aging rapidly. I don’t get why people take order mishaps personally like this; it’s like the food-service equivalent of road rage. In high school when I worked at McDonald’s, someone once yelled at me at the drive-through for not giving his dog 20 free hamburgers. If he were nicer, I would have probably caved, because I like dogs, and because everyone working there was a kleptomaniac, and I’d have also told him about the secret “Manager’s Special” shake flavors: banana and shamrock.

Anyway, this entire time I’m holding the plastic broadsword from my Halloween costume (Geralt from The Witcher), wishing it were real. On the way home, I carry my yellow plastic takeout bag dangling from the hilt of my sword, just like Geralt of Rivia would. The gyro is superb, even while we watch the new adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, which is not really dinner theater.

Friday, October 25
Again, green drink and egg for breakfast, and the last of the cat-shit coffee. And again, for lunch, I apply my body to composting ends, disposing of my roommate’s leftover short ribs from six days ago, the last gobbets of roast chicken, a roasted garlic clove, a single Brussels sprout, and some vanilla Greek yogurt. This meal, various and sundry even by my standards, reminds me of January, when I went keto as a “joke.” It wasn’t so bad, except it took 40 pounds off my deadlift and you can never eat anything properly crunchy except for pork rinds and those croutons made of cheese.

My friend Karan is visiting from Providence, and Jenny and Anthony come by to hang out. We order dinner from Trad Room, an excellent Japanese place in Bed-Stuy with the most attractive takeout containers I’ve ever seen, very Muji-esque — some are made of thin strips of wood to look like bento boxes, others are beige ovoid compostable bins. I got the tuna-salmon-avocado bowl and some karaage for the table. Fried food never excels as takeout — it steams up and loses its crispiness, but it’s still basically good. (I only know of one place, Crab Brothers Seafood Express, that ingeniously leaves the box flaps open, holding them together at their tips with a safety pin.)

I set up a karaoke room in my basement in year three of the pandemic, so we do karaoke down there, and I set out a plate of Humboldt Fog and crackers to go with the Empirical x Doritos® Nacho Cheese–flavored grain spirits I bought from an Instagram ad, also as a “joke.” It’s clear and 42 percent ABV. On the back of the bottle, the flavor is described in a triangular matrix whose axes are “Bodega,” “Evolved State,” and “Tongue Happiness,” and a caption boasts that “Doritos Nacho Cheese is the ultimate flavor.” Sure. I’m sorry to report that it does not taste like Doritos Nacho Cheese in the slightest; it tastes like musty vodka, all four shots of it. The guests all leave for bed at 11 p.m.

Saturday, October 26
Hungover from Dorito moonshine; breakfast Soylent. I have no defense for choosing the pumpkin-spice flavor other than that it seemed seasonal and fun. For lunch, I put smoked salmon and a fried egg on buttered toast, an ersatz eggs Benedict that makes good hangover food.

I spend the day playing Hades 2, reading Philip Roth’s Indignation as part of a larger oeuvre-conquering project, and making chicken stock from scratch from the bones we’ve saved in a bag in the freezer. Later, Alice and I use the stock to make J. Kenji López-Alt’s “Best Chili Ever,” a recipe that involves steps like toasting cumin seeds and star anise, powderizing them in a coffee grinder, blending that with baker’s chocolate and coffee grounds, finishing with hot sauce and bourbon, etc. It takes about two hours even using an Instant Pot. Extremely labor-intensive but incredible, even on my dull palate.

You are forgiven for assuming I’m not a good cook, but I can follow instructions, and if other people are involved, I’m happy to put in the effort. I used to cook a lot for my ex-girlfriend Molly, for instance, because she was even lazier about it than me. The one time she offered to help, I told her she could prep the potatoes, and she put a potato on the counter and just looked at it.

As it happens, tonight is Molly’s engagement party, which couldn’t be better promotion for my book. At the Crown Inn I have a whiskey-and-soda and meet Molly’s mom, who later tells Molly I’m adorable (I’m 41). While I hang around looking at the couples photos and idly watching game two of the Dodgers vs. Yankees World Series on a big screen, I eat a slice of the chocolate fudge cake topped with crème fraîche, cinnamon, and Dutch cocoa powder made by Molly’s friend Callie from a Melissa Clark one-bowl recipe whose secret ingredient is mayo. A while back, I started following a Facebook group of hoagie enthusiasts who would savagely drag anyone for using mayo; they said it stood for Man, Are You Okay?

That question, or something like it, was on my mind as I walked home. Sometimes I wonder if my habit of low-effort/ironic eating is a symptom of self-loathing, and whether this might be improved if I put more effort into things like cooking nice meals for myself. Would that make me somehow “better,” make me feel worthier? Well, that sentiment is inane and bourgeois, I tell myself. The morality of eating is bound up to a far greater extent in things like industrial agriculture and the global supply chain, and imagining that what you eat makes you a better person isn’t much different from believing that there are superior genres of music to play or dances to perform — it’s called taste for a reason. So, better, no; happier, maybe, but that’s none of my business.