The Fruit Post

I found a draft of a post from the other day that I'd forgotten about. It was only one sentence and it was this:

Someone tell me why I keep eating grapefruits.

If it helps take the pressure off, I can answer my own question. My eating habits have been deplorable lately and I'm trying to make myself eat fruit for a snack instead of Nutella. Nutella is great and everything, but the fact that it's great is the problem. Following my family's creed of, "If a little is good then more must be better," I could eat (and have eaten) a bowl of Nutella. Have you ever read the fat and calorie count for just a tablespoon of that stuff? It is exactly 1 billion calories and 5 football fields of fat. Football fields might not be a food measurement on the side of the jar, but is it once it's in the bowl.

So grapefruit. Why, you ask, not something sweet like grapes? Or a tangelo? For two reasons. One, because grapefruit is the only fruit that fills me up like a meal, and two, I once read a short story where a tattoo-artist-in-training practiced inking grapefruits before she tattooed people because the skin of the grapefruit is similar to human skin. This fact somehow gives me more incentive to eat it, not because I'm a cannibal, but because grapefruits can get tattoos and so they'd probably be cool to hang out with.

Notice that neither of those reasons had to with essential vitamins or cancer-preventatives. My diet reasoning is strictly tattoo-based.

Anyway, the feeling-full reason for my grapefruit consumption is just as important as the tattoo short story. Generally fruit as a snack makes me hungrier, so if I eat a handful of grapes at 2:00 then I will need to eat a whole chicken by 2:30. But after I eat a grapefruit? I don't have to eat dinner until 8:00. Which is so very hip and European of me.

So why question the consumption of such a miraculous hipster fruit? Because it's a mess. The actual peeling part is fine but once you get to the juicy part it's like trying to eat a tsunami. I simply can NOT eat this thing at my desk. I need a bib, a fork, a knife, and a roll of paper towels. I've even tried cutting it up in the morning and packing it in chucks to eat later in the day and I still end up with juice running out the corner of my mouth.

"Maybe you're just really sloppy," you're probably saying.

"Maybe you should read blogs by cleaner people," I suggest.

"Ok, I will."

"Wait, wait! I spoke out of turn. You're right, I am very, very sloppy. I'm sorry, I cranky from Nutella withdrawal."

"Oh, it's ok. I could never stop reading your blog."

"Still buds?"

"The bestest."

I love our talks. Anyway, I wonder if there's more tattooable fruits that I should be eating. Like tomatoes. (NOTE: I know what you're thinking and I don't know if they really are or not either. No one does. That's why tomatoes are allusive bitches and we should eat them for spite.)

Eating fruit for spite and tattoos is my new diet. That's why I'll eat a lot of cantaloupe because its relation to pumpkins frustrates me. I like cantaloupe and I like pumpkins, but I'm pissed off that they're cousins because it doesn't make sense to me. And so I shall eat them. The overall benefits to my body and extended lifespan is just a side-effect of my deranged small-mindedness.

It's 3:00 and I haven't had any grapefruit yet. This could explain my crankiness. I had a banana with lunch. Eating a banana means that an hour later I will eat three whole chickens and a can of potato soup. Bananas are infinitely worse than grapes in that way, and I'm pretty sure you can't practice tattooing on their skin without completely mashing what's inside.

I am now going to test this theory by pulling the banana peel out of the trash and drawing a heart on it with a ballpoint pen....

Ok, that was a bad idea.

But I think I proved my point. I eat grapefruit for good reasons. Whacked out as those reasons may be, they are still beneficial, and also I may now consider a career as a tattoo artist. It doesn't matter that I can't draw, what matters is that I will only tattoo fruit. Because if they complain about the work I have done, I can eat them. If I have not already eaten a football field of Nutella.

Daily Recommendations

When the US Health Department recommended a daily allowance of 8 fruit and vegetables a day, do you think they were talking about coffee? Maybe in some veiled way? Because if so, I'm covered.

Today, I think I did a damn good job of staying as healthy as possible. A banana/peanut butter sandwich for breakfast and a tuna salad for lunch WITH low fat yogurt for dessert! I can say with all certainty that am the poster child for some kind of health network that uses posters! And that network would be called, "The Department of People Who Eat Well One Day and Use it as an Excuse to Eat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups For Breakfast The Next Morning." I would be all over that poster.

The kids have been asking for fruit gummies as snacks lately. I don't usually keep them in the house because it's one of those foods that if left around, the children will refuse to eat anything else. It reminds me of that experiment they did on an innocent, fluffy creature, it was either a mouse or a rat (the authoress hopes that no steady reading mice or rats are offended by me not knowing the difference between them and hopes not to receive angry letters) where scientists put food pellets in one dispenser and heroin in the other, and the rat/mouse would always go for the heroin, and the real food came second. Further into the experiment, the heroin was taken away and the rat/mouse refused to eat the food. It only wanted the heroin.

I know what you're thinking. Scientists serve heroin in a dispenser? In tiny nibblet forms? Am I sure this wasn't cocaine they were talking about or maybe crack? Well no, I'm not sure. It was some addictive drug served up to an experimental rodent. So does my comparison hold water? Yes, because the point still stands that if my children were in a scientist's lab and there were only three dispensers, the first one containing healthy food, the second one heroin and the third fruit gummies, they would hit the fruit gummy button until it broke. And once it was broken, they would not serve themselves fruits, vegetables, or heroin, they would just whine until the scientist finally broke down and drove to the store to get gummies shaped like Spongebob Squarepants.

So yesterday I thought I would fool my children. [a note to those here without children: this can not be done] Ha, ha! I bought "healthy" gummies. "Healthy" gummies aren't really healthy, they're just not as bad. These things are evil because they seduce parents with all sorts of empty promises. They whisper things like, "No gluten!" "No artificial flavors!" "No transfats which we all know will turn a child into a transvestite upon adulthood!" What this box really seemed to say to me when I read it was, "Buy me. I am not as bad a real gummies, your kids won't know the difference, and my dye contains 3% of the daily recommended amount of riboflavin." I bought it and felt pretty good about myself.

Until Claire bit into one. She made this face I can't exactly describe. It didn't seem to say, "This is gross," so much as, "What have you done to me?" Then followed this stupid conversation:
"These aren't gummies," she said, chasing the snack with a glass of water to drown out the unbearable taste. Perhaps it was the riboflavin.
"Yes they are," I told her. "It says so on the box."
"No. It's healthy food," she explained.
"No, it's not!" I argued.
"Yes it is, Mom. If these were real gummies they would be shaped like fruit. But they're just little squares."
"Hey, you know what else is shaped like fruit that you can have?" I asked her.
"What?"
"FRUIT!"
"OOOOH!"
"That's right!"
"MOOOOOOM!" she moaned, like a lab rat denied heroin.
"What? What's so wrong with real fruit? It's shaped like those gummies you like so much."
"Why can't we just have real gummies?"
"Because you are a hyper psychopath when you eat them."

I made up that last line. I didn't REALLY say that. But I REALLY wanted to.

Earlier today I brought the gummies to work with me. I figured that I might as well take a stab at them rather then let them go to waste. And yeah, they're horrible. they have the most bizarre aftertaste, and I can't compare it to anything else, but I can tell you that I think it's what phoniness tastes like.

Sigh. A snack ruined. That's ok. There are other fruit shaped objects around here, ones with stems and seeds and everything...I sound like I'm talking about marijuana. No, really, there are apples, oranges, and bananas in the cafeteria. Kiwi too! And when I've had my fill of those, there's always my own version of heroin. It's not a pellet, it's a hot liquid but it IS also served in a dispenser and when I am denied a regular dosage of it I squeak in pain.