Let's stop pretending sugar free things are as good as the real thing
A rant on stevia and the 2010s and the year being halfway over
Hello lovers,
Happy end of financial year!
Writing this month’s newsletter has been hard af, as I’ve been going through my mid-year crisis. I obviously want to send out the kind of emails that make you laugh, and think and also make you love me, so I sit down and start writing, and then I read what I wrote and then I think this shit sucks, nobody wants to read this, this is why I’ve never gone viral on Twitter, and what’s the point?
But then I listen to podcasts and come across TikToks that are like it’s not your job to make people love you. It’s your job to be you. Namaste. Then I take a deep inhale and go, yes, this is the deep shit I needed to hear. People want to read this. And idk, if you’re reading this and you want to start a newsletter, just do it. I’d probably read it. So, this month I want to share this playlist I made, because I want to make playlists for a living. There’s also a May edition, and there will be a monthly playlist every month going forward.
Now that this is out of the way: Do you remember animal onesies? Sneaker heels? The dress? Do you remember the grip Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and Mumford and Sons had on us, as a collective, but especially on teenage / early 20s girls who wanted nothing more than to be thin enough so people would worry, while also posting tumblr aesthetic photos eating junk food? Are you old enough to have used the Valencia filter on Instagram thinking it was the height of photography and artiness?
I’m hoping that at least some of you remember this era of the 2010s, but hey if you’re subscribed to this newsletter chances are you were alive and had specific person in mind when Somebody that I used to Know came out. And if you remember all that, do you remember mug cakes? When mug cakes first appeared on the Internet, Buzzfeed was still a relevant website (so, maybe ca 2014/15?) I instantly fell in love with the concept. You could make a delicious one person snack in your microwave by mixing a few things you probably had in your pantry already, in a mug, and it would take no longer than 5 minutes. What’s not to love? Cake without the mess, commitment, or pre-heating an oven to 180 degrees for 30 minutes. I was also sick with a binge / purge eating disorder, so a mug sized cake I could whip up in a moment’s notice was a fucking wet dream.
So by now you’re probably wondering why I’m going on a tangent about woodsy indie folk music, flannel, eating disorders and mug cakes. It’s 2022. That shit is behind us. But then the other day my girlfriend came home with a health shop haul.
Now, something about me is that I love health food shops, and farmers markets and expensive pickles in mason jars. (I also have a Costco membership but that’s for another newsletter). My happy place is the self serve dried fruit/ nut/ chocolate covered macadamia section in a store where a woman that could be 37 or 52 asks you if you’d like to also subscribe to an alkaline water membership. I thrive in a store that has a community notice board and no plastic bags. I was excited to see this haul. And because you know the whole ass backstory now, you can imagine how excited I was when I saw that she’d got us a double choc fudge flavoured mug cake mix. The packaging featured a mug cake illustration that just sold it. It looked delicious.
The letdown was immense.
I’ve never tasted a more depressing dessert in my life, and I’ve made actual mug cakes from scratch with things from my pantry. The consistency was trash, it took more than a minute to make, it just wasn’t giving. We tried to eat it. Although my girlfriend didn’t tell me how much it cost, I knew this mug cake was expensive, because the fewer real ingredients a thing has, the more they charge for it. And I hate not finishing expensive things to get my (her) money’s worth. So I just had a flashback/ flash forward to all the pretend 2010s things that are making comebacks because trends are cyclical:
Mug cakes aren’t a type of cake, they’re a type of lie.
Sneaker heels bring out the worst in sneakers, and in heels.
The real Avril Lavigne has been replaced by a clone. (not a trend, just re-surfacing this)
Low rise jeans are not real jeans.
An Eating Disorder is not a diet.
Stevia is not a sweetener, it’s a trigger.
I’ll close this out with a slightly adjusted quote, from one of my favourite books, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing:
“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work this expensive mug cake when you know quite well you're capable of better the company could at least have used real sugar.”
Til next month my loves,
Aurelia x