Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (34 page)

Back to Whole Foods.

We all know it sells hippie food at designer prices, but I love it for all its crazy and delicious choices. Also, the samples are incredible. Whenever you’re hungry, you should go directly to Whole Foods, walk around, and eat anything attached to a toothpick. Better yet, grab five and put them in your pocket.

The cheese cubes travel better than the chicken quesadillas.

But to stay on point, Whole Foods has every fruit possible in its produce department, where you can choose from organic or “conventional.” I always buy conventional because I am conventional. Also it’s cheaper, and I like my apples pretty. If they sold plastic apples, I’d be happier, but either way, I appreciate Whole Foods for its euphemistic “conventional.” They could have called it “for people who cheap out on their family” or “for
people who choose style over substance” or “for people who think a little DDT never hurt anybody.”

But they didn’t.

So I went to Whole Foods with my shopping list and was happily collecting mangoes and multigrains when I came upon an endcap that showed an array of mysterious plastic tubs, each larger-than-life. The labels read: whey protein powder in natural vanilla flavor and whey protein powder in natural chocolate favor.

I blinked, bewildered. The only whey I’d ever heard of came with curds and a spider.

Next to the whey powder were big vats of soy protein powder, also in chocolate and vanilla, then next to that were tubs of Green Superfood Berry Flavored Drink Powder and Green Superfood Chocolate Drink Powder, made with “organic green foods.” All of the powder tubs came with a 28-ounce “Blender-Bottle,” like a sippy cup for grown-ups.

It was dizzying. They were clearly some kind of meal replacement, so I was looking at a wallful of drinkable food. Just add water. That’s my favorite kind of cooking.

I spent the next hour squinting at the labels, comparing the nutrition facts and deciphering the language, such as “includes Free-Form Branch Chain Amino Acids.” Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want to cheat on my diet, I head straight for the amino acids. Especially if they’re from the branch and not the main office. Which is so not free-form.

There was even a big white tub of MegaFood, which immediately got my attention. If I were going to put any prefix in front of the word “food,” it would be “mega.” Except, of course, for pizza. I looked but couldn’t find any MegaPizza-Food, which would have made my day.

I bet Acme has it. Next to the Splenda.

Instead I had to settle for the DailyFoods Organic Greens Dietary Supplement, which billed itself as “revitalizing greens for women over 40.” It promised “detoxification,” but I wondered how I became toxic. Was it merely the act of turning forty and being a woman? Or maybe it was those frozen margaritas over vacation. Or that time I ate all the Snickers out of my daughter’s Halloween candy. Which happened for the entire ten years she went out for Halloween.

Amazingly, the tub of girl powder had vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin K, which I didn’t even know existed. It also had riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, and 19 mg of chlorophyll, which is the powder equivalent of eating your shrubbery.

Plus it had “Anti-Aging SuperFoods,” and I’m so there. If there’s anything I’m anti, it’s aging, especially as applied to me. I’m also anti-dying, but not even Whole Foods sells that stuff.

Or if they do, it’s really really really expensive.

Bottom line, even I could figure out that the powders were packed with more protein, vitamins, and minerals than anything I had in my shopping cart. I looked at the shiny tubs of powder, then I looked at my lame cart of old-fashioned broccoli, pears, and lettuce. Suddenly, it looked so terribly . . . conventional.

How had I come to the food store and bought all the wrong things—food?

Obviously, anything in the tubs was superior to the groceries in my cart. For starters, all the stuff in the tubs was one word, with capitals even—FoodState, SuperFood, DailyFoods. How can a lower-case banana compete? And broccoli doesn’t come with a BlenderBottle.

So I’m confused.

If you could make all food taste like chocolate, why wouldn’t you?

And why have a meal, when you can have a meal replacement? You can throw away all your silverware—and your teeth.

And who wants dumb, old-fashioned peas when you could have powder with “Cold Fusion FoodState Nutrients”? This is food that splits the atom, people. Or maybe fuses it together. I don’t know, I always forget what cold fusion is. Clearly, this food is way smarter than I am.

Maybe it is rocket science, after all.

I have a problem to solve, and I’m talking about something really hard, like programming a VCR, or marriage.

I’m talking about what to eat.

Here’s what happened.

I used to eat everything, including red meat. Hamburgers, steaks, the whole thing. I loved rare roast beef with extra Russian dressing, which I used to order at a place called the Corned Beef Academy. That’s how much of a meat eater I was. Even my restaurants were carnivorous.

But then daughter Francesca was born and we started going to a petting zoo that had the cutest calf in the world. Brown eyes like melted Hershey’s Kisses, and a spongy nose as pink as the inside of a conch shell. In no time, I’m naming the calf and visiting it way more than anyone should. Francesca lost interest, but I didn’t, and after a time, I felt too guilty to eat red meat. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t an ethical thing. I just couldn’t take the guilt.

Then years later, I saw the movie
Babe,
starring a baby piglet. I know that was only a story, but I saw that Hollywood piglet do everything the fictional piglet was supposed to do, so I started feeling too guilty to eat pork chops and bacon. You
have to be crazy to quit eating bacon. Bacon is the meth of meats.

And to be clear: If you eat meat, I don’t judge you, I envy you. I want to be you again. I don’t know what to eat anymore, because it gets worse:

As you know, I have these chicks. They need a special fence with a top to protect them from hawks and stuff, so until the fence gets built, I sit and watch over them like a chicken security guard. In other words, I get no work done and spend way too much time watching them, and you know where this is going.

Now I can’t eat chicken.

First off, they’re all cute and little, like cartoon chicks. You remember Sylvester and Tweety Bird. I Taw a Putty Tat! How can I eat Tweety Bird? Even with fresh rosemary?

Plus, they do cute things. They make adorable peeps and coos. When they drink water, they throw their heads back like they’re gargling. They run around gathering tiny twigs and running back inside the coop with them, like me after a sale at Neiman Marcus.

And each chick has a different personality; Buttercup is a show-off, Yum-Yum bosses everyone around, and Josephine never shuts up.

They’re women, remember?

The Bard Rocks, the black-and-white chicks who make up the chorus, love to be held. They’re soft as a pillow in the crook of my arm, and their little feet are warm with blood. They even stay still while I kiss them, and I’ve become a big-time chicken kisser.

I try not to touch their breasts.

That would be weird.

So now I can’t eat red meat or chicken. I even look at eggs funny. Is a yolk a future Yum-Yum? Or is it just yummy?

When does chick life begin? It’s not an existential problem. It’s an eggsistential problem.

Remember, I’m not preaching at you, because I’m not even morally consistent. My car has leather seats, and I own a leather jacket. I buy leather shoes by the boatload. As long as I don’t eat them, I don’t feel guilty.

Meantime, all I can eat is pasta, bread, and oatmeal. I went from a no-carb diet to an all-carb diet, all because of guilt. I’ve gained five pounds, and now I feel guilty about that.

And tofu isn’t the answer because I’ve done everything possible with tofu, which means drown it in something with flavor. I rotate teriyaki sauce, soy and ginger sauce, and even tomato sauce, which could cause me to forfeit my Italian-American credentials, should it come to light.

I make protein shakes like they’re going out of style, and now I’m even getting sick of chocolate.

What’s the matter with me? How can I change it? What should I do?

All I know is one thing:

I’m not getting a goldfish.

I’m making out my will, and, as you can imagine, I’m having the time of my life.