The Top 20 Foods: A Definitive Response List From AU
Where is cantaloupe?
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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Most people who know me know that I am a lifelong devotee of the list. Ever since I was in fourth grade, scribbling months' worth of MTV Top 20 Videos of the Week countdowns from memory into college-ruled notebooks meant for schoolwork, lists have delighted and enthralled me. If you asked me as a kid what I'd most want to do for a living when I grew up, I'd say "make lists" (which, luckily for me, is basically what happened).
Most frequently, my love for lists has since been filtered through my love of music, movies and/or sports. But you could have a TV special on the top 10 dish detergents of all-time and I would watch captivated for an hour. By the end I'd find a way to have strong opinions about how Palmolive was way too obvious a pick for No. 2 and how Cascade is forever underrated.
I mention all this to say that when I first approached SixersAdam's list of the Top 20 Foods two Saturdays ago, I felt like I had a pretty good handle of what I was in for. I've seen all kinds of lists over the course of my amateur and professional list-making careers, and generally know the strategies that go into them -- the transparent attempts at shock-and-awe, the over-anxious efforts to champion the obscure and unheralded, the pandering concessions to simply playing the hits. It's pretty hard to make a list that surprises me at this point.
But I had never seen a list like SixersAdam's before.
From its first entry -- which he started at one and counted up to 20, like a sociopath -- it was clear to me that this was a new beast. Cantaloupe, that pretty goodest of pretty good fruits, listed as the No. 1 food, with the absolute confidence of a man declaring Tom Brady the greatest New England Patriots quarterback of the 21st century (whilst also salting the earth for any pro-other-fruit arguments that could potentially follow). And then, of course, the kicker: "Yes, it can be hard to find, but to me that adds to the value of The Cantaloupe Experience. It's special."
From there, a snack I've literally never heard of and can only sort of picture: Cheese Whales. "Imagine this; you're eating Goldfish. But instead of the Goldfish being absolutely horrible, they taste amazing." (This is of course quite impossible for me to do, because Goldfish can only ever taste like Goldfish.) And then, No. 3: Plain Cheerios. What about Honey Nut Cheerios, you ask? SixersAdam is prepared for your inevitable retort: "All other forms of Cheerios are disgusting." Well then.
I'd say you get the idea from there, but you're actually nowhere near getting the idea from there. You could describe the twists and turns that SixersAdam's list takes over its next 17 items as a rollercoaster ride, but we all know how he feels about rollercoasters. (That one he's actually right about, btw.) It's not a good list, of course, but it's not a bad list either -- it's a list that I had no frame of reference for whatsoever. The only experience in my life that I can really compare reading it to was watching The Room for a first time, expecting a garden variety bad movie and getting a work of art so flagrantly removed from filmmaking convention, logic and taste that it felt like I was experiencing a brand-new medium. And just as I've watched and marveled at The Room more times than 99% of "good" movies ever made, I know I will continue returning to SixersAdam's Top 20 Foods list over the remainder of my life, to study its secrets and learn from its provocations.
But first, I am attempting to meet it on its own terms, with a list of my own top 20 foods of all time. Sounds like it should be simple enough, but trying to reach SixersAdam's listing plane in order to square off with him on even footing is no small task.
Butch Walker is on the Mount Rushmore of Spike's favorite musicians, and joined us to talk about his new album American Love Story, a rock opera about our divided country, how he's ended up with only superfans, the two cafes in Australia named in his honor, when he knew he made it, his dog Aldo, and producing mega-acts like Green Day and Weezer.
First, the most important question: What is food, according to SixersAdam? Again, sounds like an easy answer, but in truth it couldn't be more complex. If you asked me a month ago to make a list of my all-time favorite foods, I might mention the burrata at Trattoria L'Incontro in Astoria, or the steak at Peter Luger's (I still like it!) in Brooklyn, or hell, the Shorti Italian Hoagie at Wawa off Conshohocken State Road. But all of these specific answers would be laughable to SixersAdam, whose perspective on the best foods refuses to look further beyond the horizon of "Chicken." "Apples." "Potato Chips."
So those picks of mine are obviously out, as well as anything that could be described more as a dish than a base food item. The lone exceptions allowed by SA in this respect are for very basic, broad, universal meal dishes like pizza (No. 8 on his list), dessert varieties like black and white cookies (No. 4), or brand name snacks like Twizzlers (No. 7) or indeed, Cheese Whales. Thus -- for instance -- despite many of my favorite meals being pasta-based, no pasta is included on my list, because for inclusion here it would have to be simplified to only "pasta," or "spaghetti," or maybe just "noodles." Which, on its own, not that exciting for me.
And before I get into the top 20, I should probably get one thing out of the way -- those who care enough to read through the entirety of my list will likely be fixated the entire time on where I rank cantaloupe, that rare jewel of the fruit kingdom. I'll save you the suspense by giving you my overall fruit take straight away, which is: Fruit is fine. Fruit runs the gamut from decently refreshing to slightly underwhelming. Fruit is tangentially involved with some of my favorite dishes. To consider it any type of food to be a favorite on its own, however, would be like wasting an all-time songs list spot on Maroon 5 -- they've ably stocked pop radio with hits for 20 years, some of which have been eh and some of which have been huh, but none of which you would ever consider getting married or buried to. That's fruit: acceptable filler for when you're not paying that much attention to what you're ingesting in the first place. (Vegetables too, natch.)
So here we go: The AU-sanctioned list of the top 20 foods of all time. I must acknowledge that while my list is exponentially righter than SixersAdam's, for its innovations of the form, his list will forever be infinitely greater. I'll count down from 20 to 1, though, because I have some semblance of human decency.
20. Bagels
A wonderful start to any number of great breakfasts, and even in a worst-case scenario an assured baseline of at least "pretty good." Living in New York exposes me to countless folks whose foreheads burn red hot with very strong opinions about What a Bagel Is and Isn't, but I just stuff daisies into their shotgun barrels and encourage them to love and let love. All bagels are wonderful.
I do prefer any number of "Bagels and..."s -- and cream cheese, and lox, and lox cream cheese, etc. But that's not what this list is about.
19. Raisinets
The best movie theater candy -- followed closely by Reese's Pieces, but Raisinets are more of an all-the-way through delight. The best way to eat them is of course to let the outer core of chocolate melt in your mouth, and then to chew up the now-modestly chocolate-coated raisin afterwards. (But every so often, mix in a handful that you just eat all at once,, to keep yourself and the Raisinets honest.)
18. Vegetarian Duck
It's admittedly strange to have vegetarian duck on a list that does not include non-vegetarian duck, since if you gave me the choice of the two with an average rice or noodle dish, I would usually choose the meat version. But what the meatless version accomplishes is more impressive: a vegetarian protein that is, in most cases, a totally acceptable and delicious alternative to meat. Given how thankful I end up being for its existence every year when I spend a month and a half eating vegan while my girlfriend does Greek Orthodox Lent, it feels right to include it here.
17. Honey Nut Cheerios
Cheerios with flavor -- what a concept! My most beloved cereals are actually Cocoa Krispies and Frosted Mini-Wheats, but those are obviously treat cereals, unsustainable as regular consumption. Honey Nut Cheerios is a quality cereal that you can eat for breakfast every day for a week without coming to hate either breakfast or yourself, which is nice.
16. Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
15. Chocolate Chip Cookies
Two raisin appearances in the top 20? I'm as surprised as you are, but facts are facts here -- despite being middling even by fruit standards on their own, raisins are key to unlocking a couple magical dessert items. The sorcery of an oatmeal raisin cookie (which sounds like the kind of cookie that cruel adults would jam down poor Oliver Twist's throat) actually ending up delicious is something that's probably best not thought about too much. Chocolate chip cookies are much more simple to comprehend; it's the PB&J of desserts. (Or the AB&S&A if you're Spike I guess.)
14. Eggs
An absolute staple, somewhere between a 6 and 8 out of 10 on their own in just about any form, and a brilliant multiplier -- put eggs in or on something, the thing becomes way better; put something in or on eggs, the thing becomes way better. Plus they look cool in every stage: Whole eggs look cool, unwhisked egg whites and yolks look cool, egg wash looks so cool they bathe bread in that shit for literally no other reason, eggs while they're frying are a fucking modern art exhibit. Prefer mine scrambled, or as an omelet -- particularly in the form of a Colorado Omelet at IHOP, the second-happiest place on earth behind only Wawa.
13. Steak
Wasn't really a steak guy for a long time! Looking back I'm not sure why. It's steak. It rolls out of the pan and gives you 20 and 10.
12. Breakfast Sandwiches
Man do I miss breakfast sandwiches when I can't have them -- when you want one, nothing else will do. My nightly routine the summer after I graduated high school was staying up until 5:30 so I could get to Wawa right when they started serving their breakfast sandwiches, downing a Pork Roll Egg & Cheese breakfast bagel with a medium French Vanilla Cappuccino, then going to sleep immediately afterwards. Simpler times!
11. Salt & Vinegar Chips
I'll level with you: The real No. 11 here is Ketchup Chips, the greatest flavored potato chip in the world. Not gonna say they're as rare a delicacy as cantaloupe, but whenever I see Herr's Ketchup Chips in the wild, I grab as many bags as I can, since I never know if it's going to be weeks, months or years until the next time I see them. (One of my friends still grabs them for me whenever she sees them, too, even though she lives in another state. Love you Sonja!!)
Unfortunately, Ketchup Chips are still a little too real for most chip eaters, so I've gone with a more universally agreeable and dependable alternative in Salt & Vinegar Chips. You really can't go wrong with Salt & Vinegar chips. (At least, not until the end of the bag, when after ten minutes of chip shards cutting into the roof of your mouth, every bite of salt and vinegar feels like acid in an open wound.) Point is, despite what SixersAdam may tell you, all flavored potato chips are great. The more flavored and the weirder flavored the better. Bring back those weird-ass Lay's flavor trial competitions!
10. Beef Jerky
Beef jerky has a reputation as the greatest road trip food. This is both accurate and inaccurate. It's accurate in that there are really only a handful of eating-related sensations in the world as satisfying as cruising down a new stretch of highway, reaching to unsnap that sealed bag, and popping in a strip of lovingly flavored dried meat. (Teriyaki is my favorite, but there's no wrong pick.) It's incorrect in that a bag of beef jerky will never actually sustain for any real length of road trip -- you'll want to eat the entire thing in 15 minutes tops, and will be tortured by any attempts to stretch it out for longer by momentarily denying yourself.
In that sense, trail mix is a better road trip food: delicious and tempting, but ultimately resistible over long stretches. But who ever wants to eat trail mix when beef jerky is an option?
9. Squid
God, I love squid. I mean, most often you'll get it as calamari -- breaded and fried and lemoned and cannonballed into bloody, pulpy marinara -- and that's of course great. But all forms of squid are tight: chilled and springy in a salad, char-grilled and naked on its own, I dunno, fucking top your hot dogs with it if you want, that'll work too. That elastic, chewy texture -- it takes me like a minute to eat a piece of squid just because the process of biting into it is so much fun. Octopus too, wonderful business. Plus in any group meal of four, there's guaranteed to be one person who doesn't want their portion of squid, netting you a crucial extra 1/3 of an app. Can't beat that.
8. Pizza
At last, SixersAdam and I agree! Pizza is in fact the eighth best food. Sadly, everything else he says about it is wrong. First off, pizza is not a lunch food. In fact, when SixersAdam goes to college next year, he will discover that lunch does not actually even exist, but is rather an imaginary meal invented by teachers and parents desperate for a half-hour break from their insufferable kids in the middle of the day -- and the only true meals are breakfast (first meal) and dinner (main meal). Also I'm not even sure what "well-done pizza" consists of, or exists in opposition to. Are there people who ask for their pizza to be undercooked? News to me, but cool.
Of course, SixersAdam's gravest error comes in insisting that pizza can never have toppings. Plain pizza is fine enough, and will do in an absolute pinch, but pizza without toppings is pizza with its potential cruelly unrealized. It drives me nuts how everyone assumes a multi-pizza order has to include at least one plain pizza -- it's like insisting that every set of four downs has to include at least one telegraphed run play straight up the gut. It's not 1924 anymore, people! We can do better! (Plus, toppings guarantees you can't inhale the whole thing in one sitting, which is usually for the best. Guaranteed MJ would've only gotten four or five slices deep to that poison pie in Utah if he'd gotten the Meat Lover's.)
7. Oysters
Oysters! Slimy yet satisfying. Even better than squid, and the food I probably get most excited to go out for. (In large part because as delicious as they are, their cost remains totally unjustifiable to have more than once or twice a year.) The best part is the absurd ritual of the waiter telling you the geographical background and cultural history of all the oysters you're about to eat -- which you forget immediately once they're finished, and then eat the oysters, which taste like oysters. Which is great! Oysters are great.
6. Ham
Bacon gets all the publicity, but if you're going to prepare just one pork product -- one meat of any kind, really -- for a meal, and that's gonna be the whole meal, ham is the way to go. One day, our country will get up the nerve to do the right thing and just agree to stop the charade of pretending that turkey is the best choice for Thanksgiving meat, and we'll all have ham and instantly agree that it's the better option, and then it's Hamsgiving every November for the rest of our lives. Think of the hundreds we'll save on all the stuffing, cranberries and gravy that we usually need to try to make turkey taste as good as ham already does on its own.
5. Ramen
Tough call, because I adore all soup, but my very favorite soups all have just enough signature ingredients that I could see SixersAdam rolling his eyes by the time I end to get to the end of their names. Chicken AND noodles? Hot AND sour? Have fun choking on your self-indulgence, Caligula. But ramen has a simple name, and though it usually has a lot of stuff in it, at the end of the day it's also acceptable and wonderful just as broth and noodles -- which even by SA standards is probably mostly acceptable. When I knew it was going to be a slog of a day at the office (back when offices happened), I'd promise myself a ramen order if I could just make it to lunch (which of course was actually breakfast), and that was usually enough to get me over the hump.
BTW, the main fallacy about soup is that it's only appropriate during the colder seasons, which is just ridiculous. Order soup in the summer. Food is more important than weather. Think I'm gonna order some tomorrow, actually. I'll probably be eating a bowl of delicious ramen while you're reading this.
4. Chocolate ice cream
For whatever reason, the way I feel about pizza and potato chips -- wanting all the most and weirdest stuff possible in and on them -- is the opposite of the way I feel about ice cream. With ice cream, just gimme chocolate. No toppings requested, no cute twists needed. Further complications that just add more layers of chocolate -- chocolate chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chunk, chocolate a la chocolate, whatever -- are fine, but ultimately unnecessary. Chocolate is the best ice cream and most additions are really just distractions.
Also it remains quintessentially strange to me that vanilla is the country's most popular ice cream flavor, even though we all seem to agree that it's boring and mid. To call anything but ice cream "vanilla" is an outright insult. Yet we still can't seem to displace its top dog status, which rightfully belongs to chocolate. A total cultural failure.
3. Sandwiches (non-breakfast)
Breakfast sandwiches are great, but they have a relatively low ceiling, and can only really work for first meal. (Maybe you could have them for main meal. Maybe you could mix champagne with Dr. Pepper. Ultimately, you're better off not trying either.) Regular sandwiches though? They can be absolutely anything. You can get a pastrami on rye piled so high you have to put down a security deposit on it before you take a bite. You can get a peanut butter and jelly so small and intimate and sublime it feels like you're eating an inside joke. You can get a Subway BMT, a footlong hoagie of totally illogical name and proportions that somehow makes more sense with every inch you ingest. There's nothing sandwiches can't do. They know all the secrets.
A hot dog is not a sandwich. Shoutout hot dogs though, I had one this Memorial Day that was just dynamite.
2. Dumplings
I've often thought if I could eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be dumplings. Doesn't really matter the preparation or even the cuisine -- give me some meat wrapped in a noodly thing with some bold sauce to go with it and I'm happy. Dumplings just get you every time -- your mouth is never quite ready for all the delights they have in store for you. (And soup dumplings? Dumplings PLUS SOUP? SixersAdam would never stand for it, of course, but they'd be the food soundtrack to the revolution.)
I am going to dream of delicious pork and mushroom shumai tonight -- or at least I would, if I wasn't too busy thinking about delicious pork and mushroom shumai to fall asleep in the first place.
1. Cheese
Cheese is the best food. It is the start and end of every meal worth having. Before there was The Beatles, there was cheese.
Sometimes you eat other foods and you think "hm this is a good food." And then you eat cheese, and before your brain can even process how obviously the best food it is, your mouth reflexively lets out a big Killakow yell of "AND IT AIN'T TWO."
Cheese is the best food.