Living in an empty house while one’s belongings are in transit produces many challenges, one of which is the search for sustenance.

A two week fast sounds appealing, but I fear irrevocable frailty that would follow. It is doubtful I would survive given my already waifish figure, the result of high functioning non-exercise activity thermogenesis. If I were to survive, I might need to spend time in an incubator or refeeding operation, undergoing orogastric gavage. Unfortunately my jaw has been left atrophied and dull through mass Soylent and Bean Jamboree consumption; it may shatter under the pressure of accommodating a feeding tube for too long. Boring a feeding stoma into my abdomen circumvents that risk.

Restaurants and cafes provide non-optimized food (for everyday fare dimensions — the most important of which is calories per dollar) and wreak emotional havoc on my financial graphs. My Chase Freedom Flex credit card tempts me with 7% and ThePointsGuy values Chase points at 2.05 for a whopping estimated 14.35% back. I will not bow. Even if the Bay’s CPI was not second highest in the country, restaurants scrimp on the most delightful component of a meal: long grain white rice.

The most important foodstuff in the entire meal possibility space.

Groceries it is. We have no car and there would be far too much to carry. Instacart. A perfect opportunity to put a free Instacart membership from my Chase Sapphire Reserve to good use. Yolany faithfully delivers the payload of rice, beans, and soyrizo. This bounty earns me 6% (or 12% again based on TPG’s point valuation) from my Amex Blue Cash Preferred). Just the night before I deployed next-day delivery on an emergency rice cooker for $20 (er, $19 if you factor in the 5% from my Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature).

Time to cook.

We bought a cast iron grill pan from the grocery store that I hastily rinse before use. Tal remarks that it might need seasoning and I veto him, having learned from a prior incident in which noxious fumes drove me from my home. I stand before the altar of the stove like it’s a false idol. I twirl the knob and for some reason blue fire follows a few bouts of clicking and notes of natural gas. Fire seems like a bizarre way to cook things, but then again I am not sentimental about my ancestor’s culinary practices. How does one even know where to settle the dial? Vague adjectives like “low”, “medium”, and “high” circumscribe it. An “on” button would be much more convenient, but it’s possible the landlord couldn’t afford such bleeding-edge technology. Little did I know I had already made my first mistake.

First ingredient: canola oil, to taste. How silly of me to forget that this pan is not a member state of the Chemical Warfare Convention. The small beads of water in the pan collide with the oil and I am forced to take shelter from the canola. My father’s cousin got her left eye blown out by a firework when she was young. Am I next? Betrayal sets in as canola has never wronged me before. Maybe it is trying to tell me something. In exercise science they say that “acute pain is your body’s way of conveying you should stop doing what you are doing” but I am in too far. All my years in bible study may have made me more willing to turn the other cheek. I stand up to face the chemical maelstrom.

Second ingredient: soyrizo. I cut it in half with a plastic knife, which for now is doubling as a spatula. I squeeze the innards out of the faux-entrails like some sort of inverse circumcision. Another chemical barrage ensues. I attempt to stir with my spatula, but it is too short to keep my digits out of range of the ground-to-air shelling. It is unclear to me why the Pan Architect did not make the walls taller, for instance, by six inches (or just enclose it altogether), in order to at least prevent lateral attacks. Maybe pan enthusiasts have longer spatulas than I.

The beans and bok choy go in without much fanfare. Mixing the ingredients is inconvenient due to the grill pan’s topology. Rivulets of slurry seep into the tiny troughs such that one has to excavate the contents from each. Do they peddle complementary spatulas with little tendrils that extend into the grooves and scoop out what’s inside? Probably. The Architect sure is a cunning businessman.

The food is “done” (?). There is no way to know as it will just cook forever if no one turns off the fire. I reach for the pan handle, which is plausibly for handling. Apparently the pan is one giant block of extremely thick metal so the food part is equally as hot as the rest. The thickness means the heat will take an extremely long time to dissipate. Even more accessories are needed to handle the pan. Well played, Architect. I outsmart him with a dexterously folded piece of cardboard.

A surprisingly sumptuous result.

I dump the resulting mash into a trusty glass tupperware. The Humangear Uno Spork with which I dine is ergonomic, multi-functional, and quiet.

Given the elegant final product, even an observant onlooker would struggle to find evidence of a skirmish between cook and cuisine.

At a typical cinema, there are ten films playing, eight of which look unbearably stupid and two of which look good. All the other patrons feel the same way but about differing subsets of the films. The pan company is in business, so does that mean that I am just part of the 80% and the Architect is in the 20%? I feel kinship with the Spork Architect. Has he too wrestled with pans? Has he too wrestled with metal cutlery? It must be a pretty small cohort that have these experiences, and an even smaller subset that sets out to remedy the situation by taking on the responsibility to start a spork company, and succeeds doing so. As with any capital enterprise, there must have been a lot of sweat, anguish, and most importantly, love, that went into the Architecture of not only this beloved spork, but also the hostile pan.