Life In Scarborough: The Fried Pork Rinds of Scarborough

Was inside the Jian Hing market at Markham and Lawrence on Family Day, looking for Filipino  Pork Rinds.  They have about 40 different varieties at Jian Hing.  I'm not kidding, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but.  Filipino  Pork Rinds are basically deep-fried pig-skin; you can get them either  "fat on" or "fat off", which means there's chunks of deep-fried pork-fat still stuck to them, or not.  I usually buy the "fat off" kind.  I prefer  the "fat on" version, but if I eat too much my sodium level spikes and the water in my inner ear backs up and I get the bed-spins for a week.

So I'm in the cash-line behind this old Filipino guy.  He looks at my 2 big bags of Chicharron Old Fashioned Fat Off Flavor and asks.  "You like those?"

I say: "Yes.  They're good, not good for you.  I know that."

And he laughs and tells me how they eat them back home.  Apparently, they dip them in vinegar, which seems redundant to me, like stuffing an H-Bomb full of gunpowder.  And  they also dip them in some kind of red or black pepper sauce.

When we have both gone through the line  I say "take care" and he says "stay healthy" the way Stanley Tucchi says "be careful" to Zach Quinto in that scene from Margin Call.