I don’t know anyone over the age of, say, fourteen…

…who makes a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and doesn’t take it as a personal challenge to eat the entire batch in one sitting.

Nutty as a Fruitcake

Christmas time brings many things around my house - friends, family, laughter, and, of course, copious amounts of booze. At the annual holiday party my friends and I have every year, though, we had an uninvited guest.

Fruitcake.

The tradition of eating an unappealing foodstuff started off as a joke two years ago, when one of our friends, who is an excellent baker, made a tray of cupcakes and frosted one with mayonnaise, with the expectation that someone would drunkenly eat it. Someone did, and the results were about as hilariously awful as you’d assume they would be. 

This year, the guy who ate the mayonnaise cupcake brought a fruitcake. I agreed to eat it because I wasn’t physically present during the mayonnaise cupcake incident.

The loaf of fruitcake was about 2” x 1.5” x 10”. When unwrapped, it smelled like the trash can of a donut shop. I took a bite, not knowing what to expect. Which, in retrospect, I’m kind of happy about, because if I had expected it to not be so bad, I would have punched myself for being so absolutely wrong.

This food, and I think I’m giving it too much credit by calling it that, is foul. While chewing, I detected hints of bread and an overwhelming amount of mixed nuts. My actual words were: ”It’s not the taste, it’s the texture. I’m pretty sure there multiple Scooby Doo fruit snacks in here.” The best description of taste is a combination of equal parts gin and Airheads.

Swallowing the first bite, I looked closer at the kaleidoscope of colors within the cake itself. Black, red, green, yellow, and beige were scattered through the loaf like the shrapnel from an explosion. I commented on the black spots, asking if perhaps the flavor repulsing me was, in fact, from deadly mold spores. 

For reasons I don’t understand, I took a second bite. And then immediately spit it out, disgusted at myself and at the dreadful soul who invented this vile holiday dish.

This holiday season, if you plan on giving someone you love a fruitcake, don’t.

The Vending Machine has Become Sentient

I work at what I’d basically call a large outpatient health care provider (it wasn’t my idea, trust me, but it does pay the bills well).

Of course, this means most things are centered around being healthy. Including the food. 90% of the products offered in our little cafe are some kind of organic or natural, or just healthy in general. Which is cool. I dig that as a granola-chomping suburban hippie type.

But then there’s the vending machine.

It’s fucking full of bizarre health foods. Like raw organic snack bars and some kind of almond cluster thing with whey. Here’s the thing. Maybe I’d eat those if I knew what the hell they were. But I don’t know what the hell they are, and I can’t find out without spending a wallet-crushing $3 on something that’s probably gross.

Not to mention that if I’m going to the vending machine, it’s over. I’m not trying anymore. Gimme a god damn cookie.

Van Gogh-gurt.

I got to my journalism class a bit late this morning, so I brought a cup of light blueberry yogurt to class as a substitute for the normal three-course breakfast buffet I normally have time to cook myself every morning.
I sat in class, having forgotten to throw the book in my bag before raiding the fridge for something edible, spooning the delicious bacteria-ridden milk into my mouth. Then I got distracted by the label. Then the ingredients. My professor must have noticed I was paying more attention to my yogurt than his discussion on classic beat journalists because he said,
“Katie, don’t look at that, you’ll get sick.”

Not for anything, but this is the second time a professor has caught me looking at the labels of food I probably shouldn’t be eating in class anyway. I must raise an eyebrow high enough for them to see that I’m clearly not paying attention, but rather more concerned with the amount of chemicals and high-fructose corn syrup sloshing around in my stomach.

There’s something to be said about that, I’m just not sure what quite yet.