Kitchen Wench

I have finally broken. I just could not do it anymore. I could not bring myself to eat another sandwich made of processed, over-salted lunch meat.

Whenever I’m working at John’s, I am welcome to eat any of the food in their house. While this seems like a nice offer, whenever I open a cabinet or refridgerator door, it’s like entering into the twilight zone of processed, pre-packaged, pre-seasoned, pre-cut “food”. I say “food” because real cheese, in my estimatation, is not bright orange and individually wrapped in plastic. Real meat doesn’t come already pre-marinated in a plastic bag. And real fruits and vegetables are not pre-cut while still unripe and then hermetically sealed in a little plastic container with accompaning dip. And let’s not even get started with the junk food… cheesy poofs… Krispy Kremes… For some reason, all things in the Fats food group cannot have grammatically or phonetically correct names.

I have to admit, powdered orange cheese can be pretty delicious, but every time I break down and eat the stuff, I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to down enough water to combat my excess salt bloat. I realize that a lot of people eat this way, which seems utterly baffling when it makes you feel so terrible afterwards. (As evidence, the house is littered with bottles of tropical fruit flavored Tums.) If you had the money to buy yourself fresh food, why wouldn’t you? My only guess is that after consuming a steady diet of sodium and creepy artificial flavor substitutes, people no longer realize what a body should feel like after a healthy meal.

In any event, I reached my breaking point today. I pulled open the cooler door only to be greeted by one slice of red pastrami squeezed into a deli ziploc, the wine-colored meat juice pooling into little pockets in the corners. I shook my head. Couldn’t do it. Hate pastrami anyway. So I tore through the rest of the kitchen, looking for something fresh, or at least not oversalted. Unidentifiable meat in unidentifiable sauce? Absolutely not. Pre-cut cantelope? Wilted salad in a bag? No, I wanted real produce, but the only thing I found were two very brown bananas hidden behind the coffeemaker, a large acorn squash, and two russet potatoes.

So, I ate a peanut butter sandwich, desperately scraped out the last dredges of hummus from a tupperware, and sucked a serving of cherry yogurt from a tube. (It’s called “Go-Gurt”… it’s for kids… you can eat it on the go? Yeeaahh, brilliant, I know.) The yogurt was a freakishly bright shade of pink, and, three hours later, I’m still thirsty from the hummus. *sigh* Mission failed. My tastebuds weep.