Many members of the Defector staff found themselves today in a long discussion about smoked salmon. All this talk of one of life's finest foodstuffs led me to a revelation: If I were a rich guy, not only would I keep a heavy supply of smoked salmon stocked in my house; I would routinely consume it as a snack. Just the smoked salmon. Nothing else. Raw dog.
Picture me puttering around my ornate kitchen in the morning, making coffee, and feeling a pang of hunger. Do I go for one of the bananas on the counter? An orange? No, I reach into the refrigerator and emerge with a hunk of smoked salmon clutched between my fingers. I nibble at it as I read the paper and wait for the coffee to be ready.
It's Saturday afternoon and you have arrived at my house for a barbecue. You walk into the kitchen and see me, with my back turned to you, marinating some chicken breasts for the grill. I turn around and there is a piece of smoked salmon that I have been slowly chewing dangling from the corner of my mouth, like a cigarette. I slide it into my mouth and say, "Hey, so glad you could make it!" before you have a chance to say anything.
It's a fall Sunday and I am watching an NFL game. I get hungry and head to the kitchen to get a snack. I return to the couch with a small bowl filled to the brim with smoked salmon, which I place on my belly as I lie supine on the couch. I spend the next 90 minutes slowly consuming the bowl's contents.
This of course would be a wild and irresponsible way for me to act, but not if I were rich! If I were rich, it wouldn't matter that I was spending hundreds (thousands?) of dollars every month on snacking salmon. Maybe the gout would be unpleasant, but I'd be rich! I assume rich people have access to fancy gout treatments that are administered on private planes.
Mindless snacking is one of my favorite things to do, and the only reason I eat tortilla chips, jerky, or microwave popcorn when I'm doing it is that those things are cheap and easy to eat in any setting. But it could be different. I could be a rich fuck swimming in smoked salmon.
So I ask you: If money were no object, what would be your snack?
