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vogue anyway, but has been replaced by MyPlate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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