The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur News and Links for Tuesday, February 13

Hello, everyone!

The latest Winter Olympic event to impress me is women’s halfpipe snowboarding and the latest athlete Chloe Kim, but I will not be talking about the Olympics today. Instead, this will be about the gold medalist’s favorite topic, food.

Ramble of the Day

(I probably ramble about food about once a week in this space, so sorry if I am making you hungry or bored.)

Anyway, I was eating an apple the other day and I remembered how my older sister once shamed me, when I was much younger, about how I was eating an apple. She told me I was biting into it wrongly and that I left a lot of apple in the center when I was done, and that may have been true (I do not remember how I ate it). Nonetheless, I responded by eating apples as infrequently as possible for many years. I would only eat apples sliced, though I do now bite into apples with little fear.

Shaming me to the point where I stopped eating apples, though, is nothing compared to what my elementary school cafeteria did to me. In the early years, I ate whatever the cafeteria served every day before my mother found out that school lunches are gross and started cooking them for us. (She’s a good cook so this was definitely an improvement.) There were a lot of things that the somewhat nice ladies in the cafeteria made that traumatized me.

Baked beans were probably the first thing that I swore off of from that cafeteria, and it happened as early as age five. I did not even try them; they just looked so miserable and bland sitting on my plate. (I have yet to try baked beans.) The story is similar for ribs, though I actually tried the cafeteria’s offering. It was — you guessed it — awful. I have not had ribs since. I was also put off by cream cheese for a little while, though that was probably just because I ate too much because they did not make it.

The most traumatic event, though, was the experience of eating the cafeteria’s meatballs. Now thinking about it, I am convinced they made them in a tomato sauce that was too close to ketchup. It was so upsetting that when I went back to try them at a different establishment years later, all I could taste was those from the cafeteria. I tried meatless meatballs; same thing. Even balls made out of quinoa and bound together by cheese could not do the trick. I can never look at a meatball in a good light.

Sorry if that was a bit of a sad tale.

tl;dr: I was traumatized by my elementary school cafeteria.

Links of the Day

Mauricio Pochettino has been named an honorary citizen of Virle Piemonte, the small Italian town that his great great grandfather, Michele, was from. The town’s mayor, Daniele Pochettino, is a distant relative of the manager.

Mario Balotelli was booked over the weekend after he complained about a racist chant being sung by opposition fans.

PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor is facing criticism after it was revealed that the association spends considerably more on his salary than on operations such as researching the sport’s link to dementia.

Today’s longer read: The impact on the rest of the league when one team just keeps on winning the title.