On Negative Pleasures and Food

Things I like:

1) Food that's good for you being good: especially in the spring, there are times when nothing will satisfy one but mixed greens well-tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette with whole-wheat bread.  There are times a person craves a lovely slab of wild salmon, grilled with no other marinade than olive oil and black pepper.  There are times the yearning for sauteed cherry tomatoes from one's garden, or massive quantities of sweet raspberries, or a nice cup of black loose-leaf tea nearly overcomes one.

At these times we get the double delight of both enjoying what we want, and being able to smugly meditate upon all the good these omega-threes and antioxidants are doing our arteries.  This is why I like it when food that is good for you is made well enough that it tastes good too.

2) Making bad foods worse:
The corollary to this is that sometimes, instead of lovely tender mixed greens, one must contend with thick, slimy, chewy slabs of cafeteria spinach.  On days like these I look at the salad bar and think, "There's no way I'm gonna be able to get those nutrients down without a slathering of full-fat Thousand Island dressing."

In these cases, I allow questions of nutrition to outweigh questions of taste.  Ingesting sufficient Vitamin A is more important than avoiding saturated fats, artificial coloring, or disgusting food.  Some days you must simply forget about taste and eat the dang salad with gobbets of silky fat drizzled judiciously on top.

3) Not Being a Hipster:
Because sometimes I try to enjoy my divinely-given ability to express myself sartorially, because my musical tastes are growing both increasingly obscure, and, I fear, correspondingly pretentious, and because I use "I enjoy it ironically" as my excuse for all of my baser preferences (eg, Lady Gaga), I have recently worried I might be in danger of accidentally becoming hipster.

Now, as Cracked.com and LATFH (both of which will probably offend some of my readers) explain, no one wants to be a hipster.  Yet there seem to be so many of them.  Surely not all are deliberate hipsters?  Surely some were just well-meaning souls who were trapped by their own self-referential individualism?

Were my worries justified?  According to this quiz, and this one, no.  I am temporarily safe.

Should I ever find myself an accidental hipster, then, I can just say that I was into hipsters before they were big, or that, yeah, sure, I'm into hipsters for the irony.