Supergirl #1 (2016)
Written by Steve Orlando
Artwork by Brian Ching
Colors by Michael Atiyeh
Chef’s Note: As a comic book food archaeologist, I have encountered a number of disquieting and unsettling things. Serious scholarship often requires intestinal fortitude. That said, in all my studies and research, I have never come across an idea as ominous and forbidding as that of a “unified global cuisine”. Even writing that phrase sends chills down my spine.
Kara’s home planet, Krypton, is often portrayed as a technologically advanced society, far ahead of any society here on Earth. This statement, though, places such a society as very much on the dystopian end of things in my book. A singular cuisine for every person?
Kara literally finds variation and diversity in food to be “strange” – poor deprived brainwashed girl! What kind of scientifical diet were they eating here? Some kind of meal replacement abomination? Thank Rao she ended up here on Earth is all I have to say.
Chef’s Note: What are we to make of Kara’s reaction to “clear pasta” as being “truly alien”? Does this mean that Kryptonian cuisine featured pasta as an option? And, more importantly, some recognizable variant of European wheat pasta? That’s a remarkably specific galactic coincidence! Especially given that even here on Earth, pasta is just a subset of the overall food group known as noodles. Rice noodles (i.e., “clear pasta“) are just as, if not more, prolific and have a much older pedigree.
Chef’s Note: I’m very much in agreement with Eliza Danvers here that “food is the best way to get to know a culture” – as such, the brief glimpse of the “List” on her phone is most intriguing.
Complaining that a salad roll is hiding anything is a strange accusation, since the wrappers are transparent enough to see through them already.