Okay, I’m officially confused, and it’s not rocket science. It’s about my latest trip to the food store.
Here’s what happened:
I shop at Acme and Whole Foods, because I can’t buy everything I need in one place. Acme doesn’t know from wheatberry salad, and God forbid that Whole Foods sell Splenda. I even have to go to a third store for pet food, but that’s not the point.
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.