Warning: FOOD PHOBIA

AFRAID OF FOOD

I know, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. As a healthy, active, yet curvaceous young woman of 28, I have never been known to miss a meal. But lately, I’ve been more and more bothered by a looming question: Will my food kill me?

In a bizarre habit I think I have in common only with my dog, I have a history of eating the same exact thing, in the same exact amount, every day:

I start with a ½ cup of Quaker oatmeal sprinkled with a tablespoon of brown sugar, which I heat up in a Tupperware in the microwave at work. I follow that with a light Yoplait flavored yogurt at 10:30 a.m. as a snack. Then for lunch, a can of tuna in water with Light Miracle Whip, French’s mustard and dill relish with six multi-grain Saltines. I complement this nastiness with a piece of seasonal fruit and wash it all down with some Crystal Light.

At around 3:30 p.m., I eat a 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn, and hold on for dear life until dinner rolls around. And the whole day, I’m sipping from my battered Nalgene bottle, drinking about 60 ounces of water during the day.

Sounds pretty healthy, right? I thought so too, until all these bastards in the media had to tell me the facts about what I was eating.  

In the past two years, I have learned that nearly every single thing in that daily diet, if consumed enough, will kill me.

The first hubbub was about tuna. OK, aside from the fact that what comes out of those 50-cent cans looks and smells a lot like catfood, I always figured I hated it, so it has to be good for you. Plus, it’s a low-fat, cheap source of fantastic lean protein.

Then I learn that the water those fishies are swimming in is polluted, so they’ve been steadily accumulating mercury in their bodies, which they store and pass along to us. 

Before this, the only thing I knew about Mercury was that it is perhaps the most awesome substance on earth. I remember breaking a thermometer once in the sink and I pushed around the stuff for about a half hour. I was enthralled.

But, apparently, it’s particularly bad for women and kids, and your body stockpiles it instead of flushing it, which is bad.

Well, I thought, it gives me another excuse to add to my anti-baby rhetoric:

“Kids? Umm, no, sorry – I have about a half pound of mercury stored in my body from 10 years of eating canned tuna every day for lunch – not exactly a baby-friendly zone anymore.”

So I never liked tuna anyway. But yogurt to me, is the perfect food. A good balance of carbs, protein, calcium, with a dollop of fruit mixed in. Perfect. Until I got the news that the milk used to make my delicious Yoplait is full of hormones they pump the cows with to make them produce more milk. Then of course there’s the fact that “light” yogurts are sweetened with aspartame, which is about as good for you as arsenic.

So by not wanting to consume as much sugar as what’s in a half-can of regular soda, I get cancer instead. Nice. By the way, this one kills two birds with one stone, since the Crystal Light that I consume by the pitcher is also sweetened with that artificial shit. But it is yummy.

Moving on, with the worst blow to my day: Microwave popcorn has a cocktail of carcinogens in every delicious bag. Apparently the materials these dipshits put on the bags to prevent the cancer-causing artificial butter from soaking through the bag rubs off onto the popcorn and can also cause cancer.

So, as I’m reading this one, (because I didn’t believe the fat jerk at my office who snidely told me my favorite 100-calorie snack would kill me as he munched on his second helping of Doritos that day) I find out that they don’t know how much rubs off on the popcorn, but it probably take a lot to make you sick, so don’t worry about it. Little do they know I eat it every day, and when I’m done with the popcorn, I take my finger and rub off all that artificial butter crap so I can be as disgusting as possible while getting the full cancer-causing effects.

The least of my worries is probably the piece of fruit. Yes, I know that it’s bathed in pesticide perfection, waxed down so it doesn’t wither and then shipped sometimes half the world away to reach me, but if a damn piece of fruit is going to be the thing that does me in, so be it.

The last thing I learned led to my new belief that everything we classify as a modern convenience is the devil. Including the plastic containers in which we store our food and drink. When they get warm or old, they like to release harmful chemicals into the food and drink, just to teach us a lesson about innovation.

So all that water I’ve drank out of my decade-old bottle? Cancer. And it’s supposed to be particularly bad if you leave it in a hot car. Which was ALWAYS for the three-and-a-half years I lived in Florida. In fact, I would even drink the hot water that had been roasting in the bottle for hours in the car. Nothing like hot, leeched chemicals to quench your thirst in 98-degree heat.

Ever hear that ignorance is bliss? I couldn’t agree more when it comes to this subject. I mean really, how are you supposed to eat anything? Everything is processed or mass-produced in a way that is most likely unhealthy. I don’t exactly have a banana tree out back with chickens and turkeys wandering around, waiting to be slaughtered. So what are we to do?

This last weekend, the health-food-that’s-bad-for-you topic came up as I chatted with my aunt, my cousin and my 92-year-old grandmother (who believes farmers and food manufacturers would never do anything that might compromise your health), and I finally reached a conclusion.

My grandmother still runs her entire farm in Nebraska by herself at 92. She has lived a long, healthy, disease-free life eating the organic vegetables she grows in her garden, raising hormone-free, antibiotic-free beef and chicken, and working every day with her hands outside in fresh air on her farm.

I, on the other hand, sit on my butt at a desk all day with a sore back, staring at a screen that will no doubt damage my eyesight over time, breathing ventilated air like an animal in captivity.

I have tried the past few months to deviate from my normal menu, but it’s not easy. I admit: my semi-obsessive food routine brings me comfort during my day. It alleviates stress – it reduces any further decisions I have to make. And it just makes me feel better.

So I decided: If the 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn that brings me 15 minutes of pure bliss every afternoon also brings me the risk of cancer somewhere down the line — I’ll take my chances. And I will not longer be afraid to enjoy every minute of it.

Keep the complaints coming

When I was the city reporter at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo., I used to feel my heart sag every time I came to my desk and found my message light blinking.

I should have been excited: The message might be from someone I had been trying to reach all day for an interview, and that blinking light might represent the key to finally wrapping up my story.

But instead, it usually triggered this reaction: “What now?”

I was conditioned by many experiences when that blinking light was a message from an upset reader, calling to complain because:

-       They didn’t like my story.

-       They felt I didn’t address something important.

-       They felt one side was underrepresented.

-       They were upset with something the city was doing in a story I wrote.

-       They felt something was inaccurate.

-       Or they just felt I should be spending my time doing something else.

 

My first reaction was always defensiveness. I would wonder why people would actually go to the lengths of calling me to leave nasty messages about these things: Didn’t they have better things to do?

Once I took a step back, I would further examine what they were saying: Did they have a point? Was I balanced? Did I leave out something important? Was something inaccurate? Should I go back to my college job of delivering pizzas?

After answering the latter question in the negative, I would work on a response. Sometimes they were confused and didn’t know what they were talking about. Sometimes they were right, and I had dropped the ball. And sometimes it was a matter of opinion.

It didn’t matter though, I never saw the true and wonderful value of complaints. I thought they were negative thoughts people should keep to themselves  — until now.

Our paper in Laramie, Wyo., is horrendous. Horrible. Like, a we-print-press-releases-verbatim type of horrible. A one-source-only type of rag. To put it mildly, I’m disgusted at what this paper calls journalism, and I’m ashamed that people here accept this paper’s low standards as OK.

If this were the paper of record in Columbia, that message light would always be blinking. People there simply would not stand for it.

Here, it ‘s representative of a larger attitude of the small town: It’s the way it’s always been. What are you going to do? Case closed.

To me, this kind of attitude inertia is what has kept Laramie without much progress other than at the university in the past decade.

And what I’ve noticed is you don’t hear complaints, like you would from people who have higher expectations. Instead, you get excuses of why things are the way they are and why they aren’t changing anytime soon.

One of my friends said it’s partially acceptance, and partially that he thinks people deep down like the fact that they’re different from other places – even if it’s not necessarily in a favorable way.

But for me, it’s hard coming from someplace where complaints are valued so much that the local paper has an answering machine for nothing but complaints, which it then prints in the paper as a column of comments. Frequent topics in this column include threads about dogs peeing on other people’s yards, bicyclists not obeying rules of the road and democrats spending too much money in Congress.

As much as I sometimes hated hearing them, it is the sort of discourse that lets people share their expectations. In my newfound appreciation for complaints, I think that’s really what a solid complaint is: a statement of disappointment about the way things are, and hopefully, an intent to change things by pointing it out.

I know there are some who, like the former me, believe that complaints are worthless whining that serve no purpose.

Of course excessive complaints can generate negativity and unhappiness — without a doubt. But the absence of complaints also represents acceptance and compliance.

Some things we must accept – especially those we cannot change. And all the complaining in the world won’t change that.

But the other kind – the kind that represents an idea of betterment, a possibility for improvement, are needed.

So keep the complaints coming.

And I’ve got one to start, or maybe it’s really more of a request: Can we please have a Target in Laramie?