Upsetting Day: Goop Kitchen (Patreon)

I don’t know what this means.

Or how “in the bag” made it past a modern copywriter. Kidding, I know there’s no copywriter. It’s a glitchy era. We’re on a loop of automation, failure, and rehires at half pay. Fine for food packaging. Nerve-wracking for flight paths.

The back’s similar.

Finally, a diet free of original sin. “Clean food” sounds like purity culture and bulimia started a tag team. If I write another fake dictionary, that’ll be the first entry.

Sadly, the contents taste clean. How do you strip pickled onions of flavor? They’re a sensory rush. The main risk should be overload, burying the meat you’re charging eighteen dollars for. Is this the final form of whiteness? The pure, deific power News Corp fights for? Perhaps they’re invincible after all.

I'm trying Goop Kitchen. The founder’s an eccentric of note.

I know, too many black guys ramble about Goop. Goop Don't Crack jokes get old. But while Gwyneth’s the secret behind our cardiac health, I offer a fresh perspective. See, I'm bonded to Gwyneth by our shared astrology face. We're star twins, down to our flowing locks, creative egg use, and ads for Herzliya condos. Clones, really. Today, I learn how my cooking is.

They say Gwyneth Paltrow makes movies. At her tier of fame, the filmography usually overshadows personal madness. Especially when your Oscars and Razzies are tied. Making it notable that Goop's my only thought when I hear "Gwyneth Paltrow." My brain pulls "bacteria delivery egg" before "Pepper Potts," and that's a development. The first draft said achievement. For precision, I'll go with development.

Goop Kitchen brings Gwyneth's eye for scripts, mental health, and genital weightlifting to food. A drowning world's cuisine. As a witness of this era, I should visit Goop Kitchen or a data center. My line has bad luck with tumors, so Goop Kitchen wins. This way, cancer's just likely instead of certain.

My bad: the website says Goop Kitchen’s seed oil-free. I might live forever.

Eighth Avenue. A prime location for making, eating, or gazing longingly at food.

Though some asphalt gets in it. Unclean food, by default.

You can walk ten feet in any direction and binge something new. Not in pure, original, or affordable form. But New York samples every society to survive the American horde, and a few that didn’t. It's a healthy exchange: they send culture, and we send Goop.

Today, I'm eating Goop Kitchen instead of everything else. It's the moral choice: I haven't earned better. I've given my life to art: entertaining myself and sleeping in.

On the other hand, do I deserve Goop Kitchen? I have zero murders to my name. Not even fanciful Frank Dux inventions. My most violent act is paying American taxes, and I've minimized that through penury and graft. Two skills you master when you give your life to art.

There’s a small risk.

FreedomLand currently enjoys a self-inflicted plague of shitworms. The diarrhea is reportedly, to use a gentle simile, like launching a bottle rocket out of your ass. And Goop Kitchen is the exact effort level of food where you get shitworms.

We persist.

There will never be a good time for Goop Kitchen. There will never be a sane time for Goop Kitchen. Eating Goop Kitchen safely is an illusion. September 2026 is, to me, the most honest possible time to eat Goop Kitchen. I could wait for Gwyneth’s inauguration, but it wouldn’t be the same. Today's game of rectal roulette won’t benefit my social credit score. Or my anything, as it should be.

We dare the worm because it's there. Because it tried to stop us. If I fall before print time, I’ll note it below.

Update: All clear. The secret to killing parasites is Steam Deck radiation.

Goop Kitchen shares a block with Hamilton.

What can I say about Hamilton that hasn't been said about Joey B's golf score? It'd be unfair to call it the cause of Freedom Fever. But it's an embarrassing symptom, and harder to explain by the day.

Goop Kitchen's even closer to Stranger Things: Scholar of the First Sin. Or whatever they call it on ice.

What can I say about Stranger Things that hasn't been said about Corinthian pillars? Two words describe living in the past: nostalgia and death.

Finally, Goop Kitchen sits a few feet from The Church of Scientology.

What can I say about Scientology, that I wouldn't say about your cult of choice? Cult fervor is the way of fandom, politics, fitness, inhaling, exhaling, pop religions, atheism, and skateboard width. The Secret Men notes that Frank Dux should be a senator by now. Apt. Good thing Hubbard died before cults went wireless, or he'd have been God Emperor. Mercifully, he liked food more than doctors.

Maybe Scientologists eat out at Goop Kitchen.

There is no Goop Kitchen.

At least, in the sense I understand a restaurant. There's nowhere to sit with and regret your food. No staff to say "Are you sure you want to eat here? You're six blocks away from K-Town. I won't tell anyone if you slip out." Not even another table to non-discreetly spy on, as they gently spit their GoopMeal into their GoopNapkin and head to K-Town.

Turns out Goop Kitchen is a virtual kitchen. E.G., a mistake you carry home. Or, if you have more money than heart, make a migrant drag through Midtown traffic for negative wages. Will real Americans line up for that character-building work, if ICE pogroms reach quota? It'd be a sight. Midtown types can barely walk in a straight line, so cycling around trucks may prove challenging.

Memphis style is dead. Long live Memphis style.

I came expecting a glorified Pret-A-Manger, covered in Shakespeare in Love posters. A Pret-A-Manger thrived cross from my old grad school studies/teachings (Columbia University is thoroughly inbred), so I'm uniquely armed to mock Pret-A-Manger. For example: don't you hate how at Pret-A-Manger, you can still hear the NYPD stomping minors? It's also pretty overpriced.

Goop Kitchen hides inside Picnic, one of many companies that produces, transports, and designs nothing.

A digital food court. That’s a to-go counter, plus ten dollars. For delivery, they’re an extra middleman and buckler against accountability. For live customers, get fucked. Calling a digital food court’s bluff is rude, and honestly passive aggressive. Carrying your own food is practically cooking, and at that point you’re competition.

Well, there’s some furniture.

Like an anti-homeless bench, but for dining. A “Get Out” sign would work, but it’s a bit too dark in Picnic to read. They need that power for 30+ fine sweatshops, like Goop Kitchen. And Addy's Bagels.

My favorite spot for a good “cooffe.”

Or bagels trading cream cheese for smallpox-shaped cum. Before criticizing, consider the range of ailments post-FDA food offers. This LLM slurry is a warning. Why hold a frog's spots against it? Thank you, Addy's Bagels. Thank you cumpox.

Another human's coming. Since Goop Kitchen doesn’t exist, I tell him to meet me at Maison Patisserie. It is, in every way that matters, a Pret-A-Manger. So I'm recycling the material.

I can buy Maison Patisserie caving first and loudest. Lord knows Maison Patisserie got to integration the way an undiagnosed child gets to the dishes. What hit me was the speed. I expected a press-friendly week of "we stand by student spines," or even a "we believe ethnic cleansing should take the moderate, digestion-friendly pace of past decades, and support a return to the status quo.” Instead, Maison Patisserie folded like Mayweather at a Spelling Bee. I'll never see a jackboot tonguebath like it again, until the next one.

The display food at Columbia University distracts me from bitching about Maison Patisserie. It's not great-looking, and likely ancient. But it's food. Solid, human looking, sweet-smelling food. I take a deep breath, rich in powdered sugar, crystal sugar, and melted sugar. Just as Dionysus intended.

Well, half of what Dionysus intended. No one turns up in a recolored Starbucks. You’d teleport to an intervention.

Three White Claws, for the price of one Goop kitchen entree. Not bad.

My ally arrives, high on morale. Fascinating.

I can't explain Leto, who’s earned that fake name. Save the fact that he’ll outlive me, unlike his namesake. Not for his choices, as you can tell by his presence. Simply a survivor's disposition.

“Where do we sit?” he asks.

“Nope.” I point at the un-chair.

“Why would they…what?”

“Well, you could sit on the Addy’s sign.”

“I should eat my eyes,” I add, balanced and sane. My sane comment gets a look from a Goop Kitchen customer. Multiple humans stand in line at the digital food court. They can’t get enough Cooffe.

“Heh. There’s a chive on top of the bagel. Like a whole chive.”

“Open offer on my eyes. I bet they’re delicious.”

“Right? Look at this. Even better food”

I squat down, squint, and regret.

“Why? Why? Why?!” Another look from Goop’s faithful. They could be there for another business, but the athleisure says Goop.

“The cream cheese reminds me,” said Leto. “There’s this meme going around, of alien-looking fake food.”

“Yeah, the chicken.”

“No, the other one.”

“Oh! The ice cream.”

“No, not that. The other horrible AI food.”

“Addy’s cum bagel?”

“Same idea. It’d be funny if real food looked like that. Hey, your bagel-shaped beads are ready.”

Unflappable. God’s last, best son.

“Let’s get our Goop, before I eat generative rat poison.”

Time to pick our Goop.

Finally, clean food. Presumably, from the same assembly line as unclean food. Gwyneth’s ways are mysterious to mortal eyes.

Picnic’s UI is perfectly modern, and thus worthless. On paper, forcing users through competing slop is good business. So is changing your name to Megatron and demanding Hasbro backpay royalties for your life’s story. You can write anything on paper and convince yourself it’s the next horse armor. But consider letting customers pay you quickly and easily.

The Goop Kitchen menu’s nice, if you have orthorexia. Everything is X-free. Seed oil-free. Processed sugar-free. Evil spirit-free. Processed sugar-free gives me pause. As if spooky processing matters more than quantity, frequency, and funnel use.

I tap Huberman’s Organic Turkey Chili, until common sense returns. To properly mock it, I’d have to try his podcast. Fuck that. Pepperoni Potts looks good, but clown bushido stops me again. A pun shouldn’t be rewarded with money, but with spittle.

“What do you think of The Goop Father Italian Chopped Salad?” I ask. “Think the Godfather, but goop. Out loud, it sounds like retro racism.”

“It all looks like Sweetgreen, but ass,” notes Leto. “More ass.”

Decent line. It could use a Necron pull, but not everyone has the gift.

“You could ask the staff,” he added.

Motherfucker. I settle for the Summer Blackened Salmon. No one can fuck up salmon. If you can’t cook it, you simply don’t. Sometimes raw fish comes with a tapeworm or four, but it still goes down great.

They fuck up the salmon.

Not violently, that’d be too interesting. Goop’s all about the placebo effect, and this has placebo flavor.

Everything tastes sterile. Perhaps, considering its origins beneath Picnic, that reflects a genius at work. A savant, turning salmon frozen for a decade into food worthy of a Carnival Cruise buffet. Good on them, I hope they chew through their bonds soon. On the surface, they’ll be ecstatic to learn that rice has flavor.

As for your anxious protein quotas, don’t get excited. There’s more fish in a cross-contaminated cup of Cooffe than this bowl. I don’t even know why it’s a bowl. We’ve agreed, as a collective, that bowls are a ritual of gluttony. Yet goop’s portions remain insulting. The only upshot of American life is ritual binging, and Goop gives you 400 calories for twenty dollars.

Maybe after Goop Kitchen, I’ll go eat.

Leto got teriyaki chicken. Sort of.

It fits the bill, if you find Benihana exotic.Though Leto put it better. To quote:

“This would be okay for six dollars at the cheapo supermarket. In fact, I’d be kind of impressed. But for twenty bucks, at Times Square, in a mob front? That sucks.”

“It’s a big improvement,” I note. “The wraps taste like pain.”

Leto lets the setup hang unanswered, and waits for the turn. This happens to me often.

“Today’s my second Goop Kitchen run this week. Gwyneth deserved a fair trial, we’re star twins.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t want to bias it, so I kept quiet. I’ll probably lie in the article too.”

“Incredible. This is a job?”

“You’re taking this way better than Cassandra.”

“This isn’t a job.”

“What is this?”

The receipt says they’re wraps. They look like astronaut food, post NASA cuts. They smell like nothing, and shouldn’t. This food’s clean the way a freshly bleached bathroom is clean. I’m not one to lick the tiles.

The tortilla is made of…something. A meld of cellulose and plastic, meant to ward off carbs and yokai. The flavor and texture are special: I imagine it’s what Protoss skin tastes and feels like. I report this to Cassandra, who hasn’t played Starcraft.

“What do you think?” I hazard. Goop romance, even as a gag, is a gamble. If it works, I’ll owe my cosmic twin a favor.

Cassandra throws out her wrap.

“Yeah, fair.”

My wrap finds joins its twin in the garbage. It’ll take at least one more run to get my head around this madness. Looking back at New York’s endless barrage of dickbrained scams, I’ll miss all of them. On to new frauds with funny voices.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: FancyShark, whose Goop Kitchen order was recalled after testing positive for flavor.

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