Beige: and The Attack of the 28,000rpm Dentures

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Poor old beige.  It tends to get a bit of a bum wrap even if it is a 'hot tone right now' for the upcoming Paris fashion season.  Apparently.  It does not help that it is now a colloquialism for something that is dull or boring.

As you might have worked out by now, I believe that we are all one.  We are all the one colour.  And that colour is beige.  Some comedian once opined that after so many generations of mixed marriages we will all eventually be beige.  It's deeper than that though.  Be patient, I'll get there.

This is my Vitamix 5000 series blender.  It is one of the best machines - of any type - that I have ever encountered.  It is heavy, with a milled steel baseplate on heavy duty rubber feet.  It is simple, with two speed range settings ('Variable' and OMFG!), an on/off switch and an analog dial for the slower speeds.  It has a 2 litre jug which is probably bulletproof for all I know.  The blades can spin so fast (28,000rpm, meaning the tips can do over 240mph - nearly 390kph) that it actually cooks food by friction.  No fooling, you can tip some raw veges in there (don't bother peeling or even cutting them up), a few herbs, some stock-type stuff and, say, cold water, ramp up the motor (oh please do remember to secure the lid) and in 3 minutes or so steam is coming out the top.  A few minutes after that you have soup, perfectly smooth.  It will blend a mobile phone - to dust -, although this does void the warranty on both the blender and the phone.  Its 2.2 peak horsepower motor is very nearly as powerful as my old Vespa scooter.

And my scooter was red like the one in this picture, so it was a really powerful one.

Seriously, if the kitchen appliances were to suddenly wake up and look for evidence of the divine walking among them, they would proclaim the Vitamix a deity.  Even the power tools in the shed would give obeisance.  It is designed with all this power to not just puree food, but to smash apart cell walls, and make more available to the body all the wonderful nutrients in food that we so often do not digest. 

As I cannot eat, it is my teeth.  In the same way that as I cannot swallow, my PEG tube is my oesophagous.

I put all manner of stuff in there - it doesn't matter what it tastes like after all.  Each blend is different, but a recent sample blend would be:

A medium sweet potato (raw, everything is raw), a couple of small homegrown paprikas, bunch of basil from the garden, handfuls of sunflower seeds, walnuts, almonds, a bit of wakame seaweed, a small lebanese cucumber, a handful of mung bean sprouts, garlic, a very big splash of olive oil, a bit of flaxseed meal, cumin, dill, and topped up with oat milk.  I have used allsorts of juices and stuff for the liquid.  Blend on high for a few minutes only, I don't like my ingredients getting too warm.

Here's the thing.  It always turns out beige.  It takes an awful lot of beetroot to change that, and even then it is just a pinkish beige.  I have to do a nearly pure concoction of leafy vegetables to get it to go green at all if there is any sort of carbohydrate in there.  Basically, all food turns out beige.  Think of what your food turns to.  Just a very dark beige, is all.

 

In 2002 a bunch of astronomers measured all of the visible stuff in the universe, and averaged out its colour.  Can you guess what colour the universe is?  Yep, beige.  I don't know if you know this, but colours are actually pretty well defined as a place on the RGB map or as a "Hex triplet."  True beige is known as  #F5F5DC while the universe is just slightly different at #FFF8E7. It was eventually labelled

Cosmic Latte.

Although I do like some of the other names suggested - Primordial Clam Chowder, Big Bang Buff, Univeige, and my personal favourite, Skyvory.

We are all stardust.  If you subscribe to the theory involving the conservation of mass and energy, then it is obvious that everything material is made of the same stuff, including our good selves.  And as it seems that life's tendency mirrors that of the universe; a dance of movements into complexity and back again into new forms of homogeneity, with entropy pulling towards sameness just a little more each time around, then beiger and beiger is our fate.  Back to the great Beigeness.  Perhaps beige is the colour of divine connectedness?  Is beige God?

I am now wondering what we might look like run through a Vitamix.  If this were Mythbusters we'd just blend a whole pig.  I'm not going to do that, especially as my blender is a vegetarian.

So next time someone tells you that something (apart from maybe your interior decor) is "so beige", you might want to consider that they are also talking about themselves.  Beige is not a valid judgement, it is the stuff of life as seen through a telescope.  Or a very high-powered blender.  Or perhaps they are referring unwittingly to a very highly advanced instance of life - something or someone who has already travelled far into the ultimate beigeness.

Still, I find it very hard to think of this.....

 .........as beige, don't you?

Our other dog, Lola the Tibetan Spaniel X Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Nope, not beige at all.  Just lovely.