The chickens were the first to go. Ed—Ed’s my husband—had read something about the hormones they’re injected with. “They’re growing breasts!” he said with great alarm. I could not see the problem here.
“They’re chickens, honey,” I said. “That’s their job.”
Ed was envisioning some sort of biotech nightmare: vamping hens in training bras and eye shadow. From now on, he decreed, we were to buy only free-range organic chickens. Ed would put them in the shopping cart. I’d look at the price and take them out. “Are we eating them or putting them through college?” I said.
Beef went next. Because I used to write for a health magazine, I had heard about Mad Cow disease back when it was known by its scientific nomenclature, bovine spongebob empopalopathy. I got the entire family worked into a frenzy. I’d hold up a slice of Swiss cheese and say, “Your brain looks just like this!” I might have overdone it. One day when Ed brought his daughter Phoebe to the office, a co-worker asked, “How are you, Phoebe?” Phoebe was eight at the time. “I have Mad Cow disease,” she said.
To avoid Mad Cow, I’m told, you should eat only organic grass-fed beef. These cows are not raised in pens or fed commercial feed. They go to the same college as the free-range chickens.
So that left fish, but not for long. Sometime last year, there was a story in the news about mercury levels in ocean-caught fish. They made it sound like you could pick up a tuna and put its tail under your tongue and a little silver bar would shoot up the side and tell you if you had a fever. (Of course you can’t do this, because a tuna tail is too big to fit under your tongue.) I started buying fish-farm fish, but Ed hadn’t recovered from his chickens-with-bosoms fright. “You don’t know what they’re feeding them,” he said.
He turned out to be right. Six months later came a report about PCBs in farm-raised salmon. Apparently they feed them fish meal made from ground-up fish that feed in polluted parts of the Atlantic. “They feed fish fish!” I said and immediately regretted it. Soon we’d be reading about piscine spongebob empopalopathy.
I was about to reprise my Swiss cheese demonstration, but then I realized I’d thrown the cheese away because it contains dairy fats. These are saturated fats that raise your bad cholesterol level. Bad cholesterol is the kind that clogs arteries, shoplifts lipsticks and lies under oath.
So Ed and I were eating a lot of vegetables. Vegetables on pasta, vegetables on rice. This was extremely healthy, until you got to the part where Ed and I are found in the kitchen at 10 p.m., feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough.
Next the Atkins diet hit, and carbohydrates became evil and fattening. So we had to abandon the rice and pasta too.
It finally happened: Everything we could afford to eat was bad for us. For dinner last week, we ate steamed vegetables and a tiny piece of Alaskan river salmon. These fish come from pristine waters where prospectors once panned for gold, until salmon became more valuable. The hunger set in while I was loading the dishwasher. We had no snack foods or breakfast cereals to appease our hunger, because they contain transfats and high-fructose corn syrup, which cause your arteries to race around the block and tie themselves in knots.
Ed rummaged through the freezer. He found some bacon in the back. It had been so long since we’d had bacon that we couldn’t recall what was bad about it, so we fried it up fast before we remembered.
Then Ed took out two beers. I told him I’d read something about breast cancer levels and alcohol.
He said he wasn’t a chicken, twisted off the cap, and raised the bottle. “To your health!”