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Monday, November 11, 2013

Musing of the Muddled Male


Discombobulated
 
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

      Things started out pretty well these past couple of weeks for your friend the Muddled Male.  Until life turned against me.  Ann, my wife, on the other hand, said that she is constantly feeling discombobulated in her self-assigned task of making certain that I eat properly and avoid ingesting questionable culinary combinations.  I admit that I may have taken advantage of the Department of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid since it allowed me to cheat a little once I learned how it could be manipulated to my advantage.  First I moved the things I didn’t like to the top of the pyramid where I got credit for having them in the pyramid at all, but since the volume of a pyramid gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the top, I was able to limit the quantity of so called healthy foods I didn’t like, but had to ingest.  Then I moved the things I did like toward the bottom of the pyramid where there is much more space, thus providing me with a host of opportunities to enjoy my favorite comfort foods. 

        Ann first suspected I was cheating when she noticed that although I did have a small sprig of broccoli at the very tippy-top of the pyramid, the bottom was filled with five servings of French-fries, three servings of pie, a glass of eggnog as my source of protein, and a large glass of chocolate milk as a source of Calcium to strengthen my bones.  She gave me minor credit for my attempt at variety since I had included mexi-fries, steak-fries, crinkle-fries, curly-fries, waffle fries, coconut cream pie, blueberry pie, and pecan pie.  But she vetoed my attempt to class French fries as a vegetable, blueberry pie as a fruit, or pecan pie as healthy nut fat.  On top of that she berated me for ingesting more than a life time’s allowance of Hydrogenated oils in the French-fries, and two years of sugar in the pies, eggnog, and chocolate milk.  Then she informed me that the Food Pyramid is no longer in vogue anyway, but has been replaced by MyPlate which is a graphic that specifies that half of one’s plate should consist of fruits and vegetables, half should consist of grains and proteins, and the tumbler symbol represents some sort of dairy product for my bones. 

        Well, I spent a few days searching though Wikipedia trying to make a case for my French-fries being vegetables, but all they said was that a potato is a “starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial nightshade Solanum tuberosum.”  But then I read that, “Potato plants are herbaceous perennials that grow about 24 inches high, depending on variety, the culms dying back after flowering.”  Well that sounded like a vegetable to me, or maybe even a vegetable and a fruit.  But before I could gloat Ann read that, Potatoes are often broadly classified as high on the glycemic index and so are often excluded from the diets of individuals (like the Muddled Male) trying to follow a low-glycemic index diet,and that was the end of my gloat. 

        But the loss of the French-fries argument was not what hurt the most.  It was when Ann told me that she was not discombobulated, she was discom-Bob-ulated.

 

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