2005-03-03 - 8:35 a.m.
Breakfast Barfs
You know of ambrosia? The Food of the Gods? I think I have found its infernal opposite. Now, operation AwakeLaura[tm] has me eating some sad, sad, things - sugar-free meringue cookies, for example, because I can't go without something at least sweet-tasting, as I've been mainlining sugar for years - but this new thing is... words fail me. No, no they don't - this thing is truly the Food of Satan. I went out to Whole Foods yesterday to see if they had things I could eat as breakfast bars, because I am a victim of Dr. Kellogg's legacy of cereal-for-breakfast, and while humans have been eating meat for breakfast for thousands of years, I have a hard time doing it unless it's sausages and bacon with scrambled eggs and lots of cheese, and sausage, bacon, and cheese are off the menu. Eggs on their own are kind of hard to fix in the microwave at work (not to mention if they decided to do a random search on my car at the gate, I'd have some explaining to do), plus anything cooked in there tends to take on the flavour of a thousand ancient Lean Cusines, as no-one *ever* cleans the damned thing except me. Call me crazy if you will, but I really don't like my re-heated tea to taste like "eau-de-vegetable-lasagna". You'll have to excuse me, I'm a little light-headed this morning. After all, it's not every day you have a brush with Satan. (Admittedly, I have more brushes than most, but I'm working on that. It's hard to stop meeting someone for lunch when you both have so much in common.) (We went to the same high school.) His Hell-spawned food doesn't taste of sulphur or brimstone, by the way, it smells *exactly* like Lemon Pledge. Like many of the Dark Lord's gifts, I should have known it was too good to be true. A breakfast bar - sugar-free, wheat-free, and gluten-free, and says "great tasting" on the wrapper. Too often, the gifts that tempt us on the road to perdition come in pretty wrappings that sweet-talk us and promise things they can't possibly deliver. By the time you realize you've bitten into eternal damnation, it's too late. Who knew that whey protein isolate, calcium caseinate, soy protein isolate, glycerin, maltitol, cocoa butter, sodium caseinate, dairy oil, natural flavours, soya lecithin, soybean oil, mixed tocopherols, maltitol syrup, water, more cocoa butter, lemon juice concentrate, more soya lecithin, more natural flavours, tricalcium phosphate, citric acid, salt, and assorted minerals could taste so bad? Okay, maybe I should have known (the presence of glycerin was a dead giveaway). But I was desperate! I can't eat beef jerky and pork rinds for breakfast! I need something that at least *remotely* resembles a breakfast bar! I'm assuming it was this desperation that caught the ear of the Lord of the Flies. Knowing he had an easy target, all he had to do was place the "lemon meringue" bars in front of me, and he knew that I would buy three of them (at $1.99 a pop) even though I had no idea how they tasted. I was swayed by the "suggested use: Enjoy one bar in place of a meal or snack as part of a healthy diet", not understanding that this is precisely the ad copy that allowed the Prince of Lies to strike a deal with Dr. Faustus for his soul in exchange for worldly riches (he was really just looking for a diet that allows you to eat all you want, and still lose weight). Beelzebub likes impulse buyers. The canned bananas in syrup should have taught me my lesson, but noooooooo. I can think of many other instances over the years - the tamarind juice, the mint-chocolate chip meringues, the anchovies in a can, the tomato-sardine paste... (No, wait Bob got me that last one. Is he in league with the Devil? If so, the Devil is in real trouble. If all the Bibles suddenly start reading "BeelzeBob, Prince of Fucking Darkness", I guess we'll have our answer.) ...but once again, I was seduced by a pretty face, and a promise that couldn't possibly deliver anything but endless pain and torture. So, I have one lemon bar with a bite taken out of it (and you know, the strong smell when I opened the wrapper should *really* have alerted me to its infernal origins, but I was sleepy), and the remains of that bite spit out into a napkin (now in the trash), but I still have two completely unopened bars lurking in my office. I am considering putting them in my emergency car kit (because I'd eat anything if hungry enough, and they're *technically* not poisonous), or putting them out in the break room (because my co-workers will eat *anything*, as evidenced by the incident with the Dollar Store Valentine's candy), but if anyone without a nose or a sense of taste wants them, I'll gladly send them your way. I imagine they have uses beyond the obvious ones (scaring church youth groups into rejecting Satan, non-biodegradable house insulation, etc.), and perhaps they might make a nice display in a museum somewhere, or something. The Museum of Questionable Taste, perhaps. Or the Museum of American History - a shameful exhibit on our insane dieting practices. Or maybe the Hirschorn - I bet you could make a killer sculpture out of those suckers. Just don't take a bite. There's enough misery in the world.
Dorsal - Ventral
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